U.S. Navy Receives First Industry Built Railgun Prototype

Zothecula writes "Two years after BAE Systems was awarded a US$21 million contract from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to develop an advanced Electromagnetic Railgun for the U.S. Navy, the company has delivered the first industry-built prototype demonstrator to the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Dahlgren. The prototype launcher is now being prepared for testing which is scheduled to take place in the coming weeks."

Comments

Wow

[koan]

Can you imagine the sound this weapon makes when a projectile exits at 5000 MPH, that alone would terrify the enemy.

Re:Wow

[vlm]

At mach one zillion and hundreds of KM away, they won't hear it until long after the dust settles from impact.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The enemy would be terrified by the noise, but I suspect wouldn't risk much from the gun, as a projectile exiting the barrel (or whatever passes for a barrel in a railgun) at 5000 mph instantly vaporizes when it hits the atmosphere.

You're thinking of Santa.

Re:Wow

[mdsolar]

Actually no. The projectile survives. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BfU-wMwL2U

Re:Wow

[Tim C]

Perhaps, but not the enemy that it was aimed at - the projectile will get there before the sound does.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at the facility in question. The sound is comparable (but louder) to a 5 inch shell being fired on the range.

It is quite capable of startling someone not expecting it from about a km away.

Re:Wow

[Baloroth]

Well, TFA says the projectile travels at around 5,000mph leaving the barrel, and has ~32 megajoules of energy, so using KE=1/2mv^2 and some conversion, you get about 13kg (5000mph=2235m/s, [32e6]*2/[2235^2]=m=12.8)

Re:Wow

[PPH]

If you've heard it, it means you've survived.

The projectile will arrive before the sound.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

You're assuming 33mJ is the energy making it to the projectile, while it could be the raw power dumped into the system which needs heat losses removed ;-)

Re:Wow

[Captain Hook]

I'm still unclear on how the rail gun is supposed to take accurate aim on a mobile target (another ship).

Assuming you are shooting at 80 miles, the projectile is moving at 5000 mph. Flight time is about 58 seconds. Not many large ships can radically alter course in that time to avoid the shot.

Also, bear in mind that line of sight at sea level +30 meters is about 13 miles. So a target ship without the ability to see beyond the horizon (either Airborne Radar or Satellite) only has 9 seconds from when the slugs appears above the horizon to impact, and thats assuming the radar picks it up the moment it's above the horizon.

The US already has missile technology which does a very good job.

Missiles can be shot down or guidance interfered with.

There is also an issue with missiles and shells being filled with explosives which if detonated within your ship at the very least significantly damages if not out right sinks it.

Railguns are shooting a solid slug of metal. There is no propellant to be ignited, it's intrinsically safe for the firing ship to handle. The slugs are also far more compact than the missiles or shells because of the lack of propellant so a warship can leave port carrying far more ammo which means less resupply at sea is needed.

Re:Wow

[Paracelcus]

The projectile will be made of a material with enough heat tolerance to survive (in fact the heat is part of the effect). And the enemy will be dead before the sound get's to them!

I want a hand carried version (BFG9000)!

Re:Wow

[clampolo]

Hi. I live a km away from the facility in question. Please stop conducting your tests at 3am

WTF submitter?!

[Thud457]

gizmag, really?!!
Couldn't you have at least found the story at Janes?!!

Re:WTF submitter?!

[Mashiki]

Sadly most people these days don't know what Janes is. Probably because most people don't follow either the military or gun culture on /. sad but true. Anyway, I keep wondering whether or not railgun tech will be what brings the battleship back into use. I can see scaled down versions of this on cruisers. But if you want to hammer something down from way off shore and cheaply, I don't think anything else beside a large chunk of floating iron will do.

Re:WTF submitter?!

[BisexualPuppy]

Probably because most people don't follow either the military or gun culture on /. sad but true.

There are so many things I can learn with passion, and killing people is not one of them. Is that sad ?

Re:WTF submitter?!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are so many things I can learn with passion, and killing people is not one of them. Is that sad ?

Remember that the next time you're commenting on "assault" rifles and the rest of military or gun culture. You actively chose not to learn based on your own narrow minded belief system.

Re:WTF submitter?!

[x0]

There are so many things I can learn with passion, and killing people is not one of them. Is that sad ?

What is sad is that you equate gun ownership with killing people. I have quite a few guns, and not once have I threatened anyone. I have, however, made plenty of holes in paper and made steel targets 'ding'.

How about taking that passion and learning the difference between lawful gun ownership and violent criminal activities.

I suspect that your passion for leaning stops when your worldview is threatened...

m

Re:WTF submitter?!

[couchslug]

No. You can delegate it and pretend the world runs on rainbows and unicorns.

Re:WTF submitter?!

[x0]

I'm guessing the US Navy isn't funding railgun research in order to make steel targets go "ding".

Try reading the thread you're replying to before raging at your keyboard.

RIF, the comment was directed at:

Probably because most people don't follow either the military or gun culture on /. sad but true.

There are so many things I can learn with passion, and killing people is not one of them. Is that sad ?

Regarding rage, what rage? Defend your argument, or the post I was replying to. I neither attacked or denigrated the commenter I was replying to. So, who's raging?

m

Re:WTF submitter?!

[Mashiki]

There are so many things I can learn with passion, and killing people is not one of them. Is that sad ?

Military and gun culture equate killing people. Well... If I have a gun, I don't need it to kill people or even need to use it to kill people. I can use it as a hobby, for enjoyment, for survival and providing for myself. As for military culture. Janes in itself, is probably one of the best resources on military tech and culture, current and past. Myself I study historical battles and the technology of the day. Both are central to understanding the know-how and the why-how of why things happen in the field of even the near past.

I really guess that people on /. are out of touch with reality, yourself included. I'm not sure if I should feel pity over the fact that you believe that both of those things equal killing, or that you were modded up for it.

Re:WTF submitter?!

[shutdown -p now]

Choose not to learn what, how to kill people?

No, how to properly identify things that kill people.

Why should the poster remember that when commenting on assault rifles etc?

Because most people commenting on assault rifles (or "assault weapons" in general) have no idea what the term actually means. Or whether that even means anything.

Re:Where's Gordon Freeman when you need him?

[BergZ]

Wasn't he supposed to be in the Test Chamber half an hour ago?

Re:Where's Gordon Freeman when you need him?

[jeffmeden]

No, it's powered by zero point energy. Until now, there has been no practical application for the technology, but manipulating gravity for the purposes of propelling objects at high rates of speed at your enemies sounds like a winner. Hence, we will need Gordon since he is the only one crazy enough to put one in his hand for testing purposes.

Got Depleted Uranium Slugs?

[InsertCleverUsername]

Those Strogg mofos are going to be sorry now!

And it looks bad ass too.

Re:Pop Up

[osu-neko]

There is an annoying popup on TFA. Reload to temporarily defeat it.

Hmm, I don't see any popup. I suspect your NoScript settings are set to something insane, like "not installed"...

Comments at TFA

[mdsolar]

Some wish that we would put efforts into more peaceful technology. It is worth remembering that the German V2 research became the basis for manned space exploration both in the US and in the Soviet Union. Eventual space cooperation led to better arms reduction treaties. The rail gun may also have eventual launch applications and promote cooperation and peace as well.

Re:Comments at TFA

[iamgnat]

Just the minor little inconvenience of those squishy things we call bodies not really caring for the G force generated by such acceleration...

I do agree with you though as I too think there will be practical applications for sending non-compressible items into orbit (or beyond) until we can address the limitations with our squishiness. I'd be interested to see a comparison of the energy requirements of such a launch compared to the current means, from the basics I understand these things take a crap ton of energy to drive them.

Re:Comments at TFA

[Anrego]

I've envisioned a very long rail-gun style launch system .. where the acceleration is gradual enough that you don't end up with liquid organs, but still end up at enough speed to get into orbit.

Disclaimer: I haven't done any math on this, or looked at any practical elements .. it's just a quick thought.

Re:Comments at TFA

[Mysticalfruit]

How many miles long? Consider the fact that run way for the shuttle land on is actually 15,000 feet long (4572m)

Re:Comments at TFA

[careysub]

I did the math. Sufficiently slow acceleration of 3Gs would require a distance of several miles (going from memory here) to achieve 17,000 miles per hour. As much as it sucks, it's still better to put the propulsion system on the vehicle.

Regards, Jason C. Wells

It is not possible to put something into orbit using a ground launcher alone. An on-board motor is essential at the very least to circularize the trajectory so that the "orbit" does not intersect the surface of the Earth before completing one revolution. And you lost way to much energy in the lower atmosphere (and create incredible heat loads) trying to ram through it at super-orbital speeds (in fact the G-loading from this deceleration alone will probably be prohibitive for humans).

For Earth-surface launches it could provide a replacement for the first stage - get you above 95%-99% of the atmosphere where rocket engines are most efficient and no longer have to fight lower atmosphere air resistance. This might make a single (rocket) stage to orbit system practical.

What's this?

[dpilot]

Sounds like another government rail subsidy to me. Or is it really "TSA meets Amtrak"?

(I'm preparing to get strafed.)

light gas gun

[vlm]

I always thought a nuclear steam powered light gas gun filled with electrolyzed hydrogen would be cool. light gas guns never get the love they deserve.

Re:light gas gun

[EdZ]

Maybe they need a sexier name than "nuclear steam powered light gas gun filled with electrolyzed hydrogen".

I'm not sure you're on the correct website if "nuclear steam powered light gas gun filled with electrolyzed hydrogen" is not near the apex of sexy names.

Re:light gas gun

[rahvin112]

The beauty of the railgun and why the Navy is so aggressively pursing them is that explosive based weapons are very dangerous at sea under counter attack. The most secure portion of the ship is often the munitions storage area for this reason as a properly placed round can blow the bottom out of the ship by igniting the munitions stored.

The railgun does away with the whole bit, the munitions are rods of metal and the propellant is electricity. Without all the powder storage you can either dramatically reduce the size of ship and crew or dramatically increase the number of rounds deliverable before restocking. Finally the restocking ships aren't going to be carrying combustible munitions. A round 1/4 the size of the largest battleship guns fired from a railgun will do nearly 100 times the damage.

The goal of the Navy DDX program is ships with 1/4 the crew size, 10 times the firepower and a significant reduction in profile (stealth). Imagine being able to field twice the number of ships for half the cost and a single ship has more firepower than 10 current models.

Re:Where's Gordon Freeman when you need him?

[somersault]

Pfft. Quake Guy did it first.

Obsoleting their own fleet?

[Shivetya]

Truly, if nothing makes a carrier more obsolete is a weapon that can hit one where there will likely be no practical defense. Is any surface ship safe from such a weapon? Yes I know you can definitely pilot an evasive course but you have to know your being attacked before you can do that.

So how many years before a surface fleet is rendered obsolete? All the quotes in the article about giving sailors more options and precision are too easily reversed.

Re:Obsoleting their own fleet?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Truly, if nothing makes a carrier more obsolete is a weapon that can hit one where there will likely be no practical defense. Is any surface ship safe from such a weapon? Yes I know you can definitely pilot an evasive course but you have to know your being attacked before you can do that.

Not sure I see how this will make a carrier obsolete, really.

It's not like a carrier is really worried about 5" shellfire, even at extended ranges - the big missiles with 450+ kg warheads are much more of a problem, really.

However, as to evading fire from such a weapon. At 200 km, and 2500 m/s muzzle speeds, we're talking pretty near two minutes (yes, it loses speed the whole way, so it won't be anywhere near as quick as 200/2.5 travel time) between shot and landing. And our radars can detect a shell-sized object now (that's what counterbattery radar is for, after all), so you have a minute or more to change your projected position by 200 meters - you can manage that without even turning, just speed up/down as needed.

This ignoring the detail that you won't even be able to see the carrier at 200 km without aerial surveillance, and the carrier air group will be doing its best to make sure your aerial surveillance quickly becomes sub-surface surveillance....

Re:Obsoleting their own fleet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Worth considering that Mortar teams based in Kandahar airport during the Afghanistan campaign were able to detect incoming mortars on radar, calculate where they'd been launched from based on their arc, and return fire at the launch site before the mortars had landed.

With a railgun you've got much less time to react, but if you can detect them you should be able to either evade or at the very least return fire. There's also the consideration that a projectile moving at Mach 5 isn't going to do a huge amount of damage; it'll punch a nice clean hole through your ship, but won't damage much outside its own movement corridor unless it hits something like an ammunition locker. You can mitigate that kind of damage the same way you would on an aircraft; fly-by-wire design and massive redundancies.

It'd obsolete most current designs if used as a ship to ship weapon, but that's the point. Not many nations could handle the redesign and development of their ships needed, which reduces your opposition to a handful of relatively rich nations.

That said, this is all predicated on it being used as a ship to ship weapon; it strikes me as being more useful to shoot down incoming artillery and missiles.

Re:Obsoleting their own fleet?

[demonbug]

When you consider supercavitating torpedoes that are approaching or surpassing the speed of sound in water (and have active homing)...

Interesting, I wasn't aware of any torpedoes moving at close to 3,500 mph (speed of sound in seawater is ~1560 m/s). Or did you mean the torpedoes exceed the speed of sound in air at sea level? Even that I find hard to believe, as everything I have seen indicates top speeds in the realm of 200-350 mph.

Great, got sidetracked thinking about detecting supersonic jets acoustically - if an F-22 is headed straight at you over the ocean flat out, assuming you have a sensitive enough microphone in the water, you should be able to hear it coming before it gets to you if you are more than ~22 miles away. So, uh, there's that.

Re:Obsoleting their own fleet?

[dmgxmichael]

Not sure I see how this will make a carrier obsolete, really.

It's not like a carrier is really worried about 5" shellfire, even at extended ranges - the big missiles with 450+ kg warheads are much more of a problem, really.

However, as to evading fire from such a weapon. At 200 km, and 2500 m/s muzzle speeds, we're talking pretty near two minutes (yes, it loses speed the whole way, so it won't be anywhere near as quick as 200/2.5 travel time) between shot and landing. And our radars can detect a shell-sized object now (that's what counterbattery radar is for, after all), so you have a minute or more to change your projected position by 200 meters - you can manage that without even turning, just speed up/down as needed.

This ignoring the detail that you won't even be able to see the carrier at 200 km without aerial surveillance, and the carrier air group will be doing its best to make sure your aerial surveillance quickly becomes sub-surface surveillance....

The obsolescence threat to the carrier does not come in the form of a direct threat to the ship's survivability. That is part of it, but not the whole or even the largest of it, and you are ignoring that largest part. What is the carrier's role?

Projection of Force.

Carrier aircraft allow it to hit targets up 600 to 1000 km away, or more with refueling tankers. Rail guns however can also hit targets at these ranges, or even further, and even harder.

And don't kid yourself about being able to dodge the shot either. Not even 2 weeks ago another slashdot article was going on about a steerable bullet that could be fired from a sniper rifle. There is no reason to believe the shells of a rail gun might not also one day be likewise steerable. If we can build a steering system in a 30 gram bullet we can build one in a 5Kg shell. It doesn't take much steering to hit a moving carrier, which can only move 200 meters at most during the entire flight of your bullet.

And you don't need an explosive in the warhead at all if you have a 2,500 m/s velocity. The kinetic energy from a 5kg slug travelling at that velocity will punch through the hull of a carrier like butter and the impact will be quite explosive without any actual explosive chemicals. After all, F = MV. 2,500 m/s is a LOT of velocity, and you don't need much mass to impart a lot of force on a very small area of the armor to punch through. That's what makes hyper-velocity projectiles so appealing. Their threat is entirely from their velocity - not a dangerous explosive that might go off in storage.

Anyone who thinks the carrier can survive the appearance of the rail gun on the scene of naval warfare is still fighting the last war, not the next war. The carrier is a big relatively easy to hit target for guns. WWI Battleships can't get close enough to them to sink them because of the planes. A railgun equipped battleship however will be able to not only get in range of the carrier, but outrange the carrier. The shell makes the trip in 2 minutes. That's a long lag time, but nowhere near as much as the hour it takes to launch a plane out to and bomb the attacker. Even if the planes are in the air at the start its still 20 minutes before they can be on site. And yeah, you might shoot down or dodge a rail gun projectile, but what about one every minute? Every 15 seconds? A gun may only have a 1 / 15 minutes firing rate, but multiple ships with these can mass their fire on the large target.

Carriers are awesome, but so where battleships, so where Ships of the Line. Their days are numbered, and this gun is writing on the wall for them just as surely as the USS Monitor was the writing on the wall for the whole British fleet that fateful day 150 years ago next month at Hampton Roads.

Re:In Mother Russia....

[Nadaka]

"When all you have is a railgun, everything starts to look like a smoking crater."

Gauss Cannon anyone?

[gentryx]

Or am I the only one remembering this from the good old BattleTech times? BTW: I want my Warhammer equipped with dual Gauss cannons, please. ^^

Huh?

[assertation]

What does it do, shoot Ruby developers off of ships?

Re:Huh?

[BitZtream]

As a former ruby fan ...

Finally, something useful to do with Rails developers!

The future is happening now

[assertation]

Ray guns on ships, putty that can heal broken bones in days, robotic military planes, hand held computers.

I have to say these are interesting times. The "future" ( a sci-fi like world ) is happening right now

Re:"Velocitas eradico"?

[PatPending]

"velocitas eradico" translates to "get rid of speed" (according to Google). Get rid of speed? How about "victoria ad velox" instead? ("For a swift victory" or "Victory through Speed")

Re:Male Pattern Baldness

[Phrogman]

That's because they had recognized that some of us out there had *perfect* heads, and thus were bald, while the rest of you had to cover up your imperfect heads with a layer of fur. Some of us just haven't recognized the truth of this yet, and thus still view MPB as a problem :)

Or so I keep telling myself :P

Enemy will not Hear It

[Roger W Moore]

The enemy would be terrified by the noise

Since the speed of sound in air is ~330m/s which is ~750 mph the enemy will not hear it until after it hits at which point it is not the sound which they will be concerned about.

Re:"Velocitas eradico"?

[ChrisMaple]

Velocitas is the nominative or vocative form of the noun (not an adjective, adverb, or verb), and in this context it has to be nominative. Essentially, that means it's the subject of the sentence. Eradico is the first person singular indicative of eradicare. So "speed kills" looks like the best translation.

It's been 45 years since high school Latin, but I think the grammar of "Velocitas eradico" is wrong and cannot be a proper sentence or phrase. I believe it should be "Eradicat velocitas", third person singular, verb first. Anybody out there really know?