World's Most Powerful Rail Gun Delivered to US Navy

An anonymous reader writes "The world's most powerful functional rail gun capable of accelerating projectiles up to Mach 8 has been delivered to the Navy. The new rail gun is a 32-megajoule Electro-Magnetic Laboratory Rail Gun. The Navy eventually hopes to have 64-megajoule ship mounted rail guns. 'The lab version doesn't look particularly menacing -- more like a long, belt-fed airport screening device than like a futuristic cannon -- but the system will fire rounds at up to Mach 8, drawing on tremendous amounts of electricity to generate the current for each test shot. That, of course, is the problem with rail guns: Like lasers, they're out of step with modern-day generators and capacitors. Eight and 9-megajoule rail guns have been fired before, but providing 3 million amps of power per shot has been a limitation.'"

Comments

Fusion Power...here we come

[clonan]

The REAL reason Fusion power will be perfected...so the Generals can fire their fancy guns more than a few times an hour.

Hmm, my SI is fuzzy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Amps of power?

I miss the days of gunpowder

[INeededALogin]

Seriously, how much energy does it take to kill someone.

whatcouldpossiblygowrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed that almost every story today has this tag on it. What could possibly go wrong if you stop using this tag for every article?

Re:whatcouldpossiblygowrong

[stephencrane]

Seriously. This tag is being used way too much. A rail gun is, for all its complexity, a relatively straightforward concept. A story about, oh, releasing genetically-manipulated mosquitoes into the wild really should set the benchmark. Standards, people, standards. We're -geeks-, fer crissakes.

Einstein on rail guns

[sakdoctor]

I don't know if World War III will be fought with railguns or belt-fed airport screening devices, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Hey, don't knock it

[Sycraft-fu]

We get a lot of cool technologies because the military wants new toys. You can argue about if it should be that way or not, but it is how things go. GPS is a great example. No civilian organization would invest in something that big. Are you crazy? Who would want that? However the cost wasn't a problem for the military and hence we got one of the most amazing navigational aids ever. Even now that the technology has been proven feasible and useful, or rather essential, the military run systems remains the only one. The European civilian governmental version remains snarled up in political battles.

So while you jest, there could be truth in the statement. Fusion is all well and fine, but there's only so much money going to be thrown at it. We have other cheap power sources in terms of commercial use, so not a lot of commercial dollars, and it just isn't sexy or pressing enough to get much government research dollars... However if there's a major military application, well that could get billions easily.

That's one reason I'm not always opposed to defense spending. Though it is very often wasteful and it seems there are better things to do with the money, it does seem to be one way for getting projects that just don't get built otherwise. A great many things come directly from defense research.

How long will the barrel be?

[jollyreaper]

Are these things going to be turret-mounted like with battleships or will the rail have to be as long as the ship, requiring the whole vessel to turn to align the weapon?

Watts!

[Roger W Moore]

Eight and 9-megajoule rail guns have been fired before, but providing 3 million amps of power per shot has been a limitation.

I agree. This would be extremely hard to achieve since amp is a unit of current. The problem is not that but rather that in combination with the voltage required to drive it.

Re:uh, wrong. please check your math.

[Shakrai]

I think this will be a bit like a naval sniper, aiming to destroy major vessels command center before its even detected, and then leave the area quickly and let the big ships take over.

Uhh, wouldn't that require a line of sight to the intended target? Naval combat within visual range went out of style after Coral Sea. If you don't need a LOS then it would seem to be that this is a guided projectile and you don't exactly need a railgun for that (see harpoon, exocet, etc, etc).

I would suspect that the Naval interest in rail-gun technology is probably aimed at point-defense (i.e: shooting down incoming anti-ship missiles) more then anything else.