Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Navy to Deploy Rail Guns by 2011
Walter Francis writes "The U.S. Navy has apparently been busy. They have been focusing heavily on the next generation of weapons and propulsion systems, including Microwave, Laser, and Electromagnetic-Kinetic weapons, more commonly known as railguns. What specifically surprised me was the fact that the Navy plans to deploy these systems as early as 2011, on their DD(X) frigates. The range of these rail guns is estimated to be over 250 miles."
gee, let's go back to the hand to hand combat, because the enemy wouldn't dare to use guns.
--- d'oh
Ok, so range - 250 miles? What happens if they miss the target... some random object/person gets blasted 250 miles down the road? Yeah, that sounds like a great idea...
The 250 mile range is the ballistic range: a miss means something near the target gets pulped. The direct-fire range, where a miss could hit something well past the target, is probably only around 30 miles.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Interesting, yet so Cold War oriented. This will stop terrorists, how?
I was created a few years ago, but it seems to apply more and more. America is leaving the classification of "superpower" behind and moving towards what can be defined as a "hyperpower".
Many new weapon systems currently deployed or being staged for deployment are many years advanced, even decades, compared to other nations that it begs to question.
Will the US be perceived more as a threat to the world or will the world be perceived as less of a threat to the US. There is a distiction there that might escape people.
The NAVY is moving their big obvious targets further out of range of land based weaponary while also developing non-interceptable technologies (as in very fast projectiles ala a RG). The Air Force is set to deploy the F22 which is literally can fight a squadron of previous generation fighters on its own. With GPS guided everything it puts a big stand off range.
The only wrench in the scenarios, is how do you protect your populace versus terrorist who don't play by normal rules? Will it come down to holding "terrorist" countries hostage to the actions of a few of their people or the groups they support?
Scary times.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Well, considering that we have precision wesapons NOW that are as accurate, and with much greater range (The Tomahawk cruise missile, for one), it's easy to imagine.
What makes this gun so revolutionary is a) safety for the user. No gunpowder to go boom at inconvienent times and b) cost per round. Rather than spend the million+ to fire a Harpoon or SLAM at a target, we can now lob a few shells from this baby at it, at much lower cost.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Obviously, we can't predict the future of conflict, but I can't help but think that the biggest danger that is faced by the United States comes from small groups of individuals using terrorist tactics in protest at US Foreign Policy
;-p
The attack on the USS Cole in Aden, on 12th October 2000, is a typical example. A small speedboat loaded with explosives was navigated to a position against the destroyer's hull and exploded, 17 sailors were killed. A friend of mine was a medical orderly on a Royal Navy anti-submarine cruiser which rendered assistance and described it as a scene of devastation.
A rail-gun is a formidable weapon, but its only really of use for attacking a rival navy, or a military establishment on a coastal shore. No nation nowadays has that sort of power. The USSR's navy is largely laid up in shipyards and few ships are still serviceable. China has a warm-water navy and has shown little interest in Ocean-going ships for over a millennium. N.Korea, Libya, Iran aren't naval powers in any real sense at all.
Which leads me to the conclusion that the USA sees Britain or France as the biggest threat to its current security! A rail-gun won't defend against a zodiac full of nitrate explosive, or a saboteur with a limpet mine.
It seems to be thinking grounded in the 1980s when the *enemy* had Aircraft-carriers, destroyers, cruisers and subs. That just doesn't seem to be the case now
Bet someone's said this in shorter form now and I get modded redundant
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Cheaper than missiles. The ammo is smaller, so more can be carried. And since it's a kinetic, non-incendiary (non explosive) weapon, there's less to worry about as far as storing them:
"Captain! They've hit our ammo storage!"
"Not to worry, it may be damaged, but at least the rest of the ship won't be destroyed."
A missile has the *disadvantage* that it is slower--it can be shot down. A missile has the *disadvantage* that is self-guided--so the enemy can spoof that guidance and decoy the missile off target. This is easier than spoofing the firing ship because the ship has a lot more room for countermeasures. You mention battleships--battleships are big, and *very* expensive and nobody wants to use the big guns on battleships because they're too big to put on anything but those big, expensive battleships. The problem was never the guns, it was the fact that you had to have a battleship to use them. But a railgun you can put on a frigate--that changes things.
Chris Mattern
Last month's Popular Science. Supposedly you've got two satellites working in conjunction, a targeting bird that handles communication and targeting and a payload bird that handles the 'darts', 10 or 12 to a pack.. The impression I got from the article was that when the satellites were over the target the payload bird drops a dart, which accelerates through the atmosphere until it reaches the target. [BOOM] The thing they didn't adequately explain is how come the darts start accelerating. They made no mention of rockets to get it started, but if the satellite just 'let go' of the dart in a zero G environment, wouldn't it just hang there in its original position?
Never give any object more potential energy than you want it to have.
I did.
The advantages of railguns have little to do with their effectiveness. As far as I can tell, they're not remarkably more effective than the guns mounted on naval warships now -- you know, the ones that fire explosive shells. The damage done by a railgun projectile is from the kinetic energy alone. That translates to much safer handling aboard ship. It's most certainly not a WMD, a weapon designed to massacre whole populations. Neither are any of the beam weapons mentioned -- pretty much by definition: beam weapons can only be trained on a single target at a time. And probably not people; that would be a huge waste of energy.
Consider this from the article:
So what's this? You favor the weapons in the current arsenal, where it's extremely difficult to avoid collateral damage and huge losses of life? And you disparage new weapons that allows the Navy to achieve its objectives while avoiding these things as much as possible?So yes, you're a troll.
And the brethren went away edified.
super-sonic muzzle velocity is really common, so that needed be a bigger problem than, say, for an assault rifle. In any event, ear protection would probably be advisable.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
The US is no more of a "hyperpower" now than it was 30 years ago. The only difference between then and now is that there is no one to currently oppose them, but that will change quickly
Give it 50 years and the US will have competition on two fronts - China and the EU. The EU becomes more and more unified every year, and as it does so, the economic and military power of the area comes closer and closer to that of the US (the EU as a whole already surpasses the US in terms of GDP). So on one hand, you have the "friendly" EU competition. On the other hand, you have China - growing incredibly rapidly both technologically and militarily. Plus, they have the population to back up the technology on the ground if it ever came to that.
If you project out, by 2050 you have three huge global superpowers. All nuclear, all space-capable. And who knows what the global political scene will be like - tensions between the US and Europe have never been higher in recent memory, and the true goals of China in areas like Space are yet to be seen.
It's going to be an interesting 50 years for all of us, and rest assured, the US will not remain the "sole superpower" for very long in a historical sense. I mean, just 150 years ago ( a small blip on the global timeline ) the UK was the worlds superpower. 100 years ago the US was in such a depression people wondered if the whole nation was going to collapse. 50 years ago half the western world was under the control of Hitler.
The point is that in historical terms, the length of time the US has been dominant is miniscule. Let me know when the US has been the dominant global superpower for a thousand years ( see: Rome ) then we can start talking about "hyperpower".
The projectiles are neither biological nor chemical in nature. They are not made of radioactive materials. They are, in effect, big crowbars.
They will likely be more precise than current artillery shells and even any bomb short of one which is laser guided. In spite of being ballistic projectiles, they are relatively small and have very limited frontal drag, meaning they will tend to stay on course. This means they are less likely to cause collateral damage.
In other words, these things are weapons of war, and not weapons of completely laying waste to a country.
By the way, we've been doing research on stuff like this at ordinary universities all over the country, and the technology is not exactly new, it's just new that the power requirements can reasonably be met. UT Austin has had an incredibly powerful small-projectile (about the size of your hand, but still pretty nasty when fired at about mach 4) railgun for quite some time now, and it can't be the only one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
battleships are big, and *very* expensive and nobody wants to use the big guns on battleships because they're too big to put on anything but those big, expensive battleships
:-)
Actually Marines with 20 miles of the shore want them.
At least not in its present form. Too many countries making exceptions to the rules for themselves. Hell their idea of a Constitution is the worst abomination seen yet. They are trying to form a government of unequals which will never work.
China will become less of a threat the freerer its people become. Capitalism will lead them that way. The Chinese government knows this but is smart enough to NOT follow Russia's footsteps.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Terrorism, state-sponsored or otherwise, isn't the only military issue in the world. The Cold War is long over--but in its place have appeared a number of smaller-scale regional conflicts. Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq are three that spring to mind. North Korea is certainly another potential threat that any responsible military commander will consider.
Do you have a world atlas handy? No? Click this link, it will take you to a small map showing North Korea--with a handy map scale in the lower left hand corner. You'll note that the entire Korean peninsula is less than 200 miles wide--meaning that a small handful of U.S. Navy destroyers armed with these railguns could effectively put incredible firepower onto practically any spot in either country. In practice (because there is a range of high mountains running like a spine down the eastern side of the peninsula) you'd have to position 2-3 destroyers on either side, and you'd have 100% fire cover.
That changes all sorts of equations. It lessens aviation requirements in the Korean theater, it lessens troop requirements in theater, and it is a technology that is easy to demonstrate--but well beyond the technological reach of the North Koreans (first because they have limited metalurgical assets to develop the guns, and second because they have very limited ability to find and thus target a ship far out at sea).
The effect may indeed impact anti-terrorism
The ability to inexpensively drop heavy-duty firepower onto the Korean peninsula raises the very real prospect that the U.S. would not need to keep 35,000 combat troops, and thousands of Air Force troops, not to mention planes, ships, and other equipment, focused on North Korea. Some of those forces could be put to better use--such as tracking, identifying, and killing terrorists.