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The US Navy's Railgun Program

Posted by samzenpus on from the shoot-em-if-you-got-em dept.

RougeFive writes "Imagine a warship weapon that can launch projectiles at Mach 10 without explosives (more than three times the muzzle speed of an M16 rifle), that has a range of 220 miles and that uses the enormous speed to destroy the target by causing as much damage as a Tomahawk missile. Meet the U.S. Navy's electromagnetic railgun program."

4 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. Is this news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why is the summary written like we haven't heard about this before.

    http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/12/11/046205/navy-tests-mach-8-electromagnetic-railgun
    http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/02/08/152224/us-navy-receives-first-industry-built-railgun-prototype

  2. Old news... by Valor958 · · Score: 5, Informative

    In and of itself.. this article is very lacking and at face value is old news. We have been developing railguns for a long time. We have the principles down, but the problem comes with the energy needed to really run a weapons effective version.
    Even the linked article just referrences an overview of the technology and it's goals. Why not an update... did they make a breakthrough? SOMETHING...

    1. Re:Old news... by EvolutionInAction · · Score: 5, Informative

      Unfortunately you're dead wrong. We can power them. Maybe not easily, but we can do it. The problem is that you get something like three shots before the rails have eroded to the point of uselessness. Too much friction, too much electrical arcing.

  3. Re:How high can it shoot? by Deadstick · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can't put anything in orbit with any gun, acting by itself. You must apply some thrust after the projectile reaches the desired height. If you don't do that, no matter how powerful the gun is, no matter how high the muzzle velocity is, no matter where you point it, one of two things will happen: it will hit the earth before completing one orbit, or it will fly away and never come back.

    If you want to launch to orbit from a gun, you have to provide a rocket motor on the projectile that starts up at the appropriate point in the trajectory.

    Here's another way to express it: you cannot achieve a repeating orbit whose low point (perigee) is higher than the last point at which thrust was applied. For a simple gun, that point is the muzzle.