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The US Navy's Railgun Program
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."
With a range of 220 miles, they'd better be damn sure they don't miss their target.
You can take people out of the stone age, but you can't take the stone age out of the people.
You missed one MAJOR feature: cost.
New warfare is going to be all about cost. Nations/organizations battling on a ROI factor.
Case in point - Al Qu--whatever. They got a lot of dipshits who will die for Allah or whatever and they're giving the US a run for their money in those shitholes they're fighting in.
The US has all this high tech hardware that's been proven almost useless - the DRONES are being proven USEFULL.
You got a $190,000,000 aircraft? I got a 10 $10,000,000 aircraft that has a BETTER chance of shooting down the entire squadron of the $190M aircraft. You got ONE F-22 and a bunch of F-15s? So? I got 20+ Migs with assholes who'll die at any means to take YOU out.
And live to see another day.
President Eisenhower wasn't so far off (military industrial complex stuff), but he missed the fact of many many very poor people pissed off at the US for various reasons - and they'll die to hurt us.
People don't get it. They don't. Mitt RMoney is a moron. Obama sort of gets it.
Yeah - but can you replace the rails while underway?
Here's something for you - a DDG carries 56 Tomahawks, but can load up to 96 if they carry nothing but Tomahawks in their VLS. Rate of fire - 1 missile per second.
The real question is, what are you going to shoot at that's only 200mi aways? 200mi might sound "far" but reality is that modern anti ship missiles have range 500-1000 miles.
No DDG is going to sail up to 200mi of a hostile to shoot it with a railgun when then can launch a Tomahawk with it's 800mi range for a Block III or 1500 for Block IIs.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
No reflection at all about the deep problems that our obsession with inflicting violence on other people has got us into.
If all-holy technology is used to build a bigger, faster something - even if it's a terrifying weapon in the hands of a murderous empire like the US - then slaver over it on Slashdot. Because its about technology, and its about the gunz, and it has to be cool.
Not sure if GP was serious or not, but looks to me like the modern US Army and other armed forces go to an unbelievable and completely unprecedented amount of effort to avoid collateral damage compared to every other military force that has ever existed. Those who seriously complain about it either have no idea what they're talking about, or are pursuing an anti-American agenda and don't have the courage to be straightforward about it.
I don't reply to ACs
... they are, after all, just a bunch of weirdly drawn cartoons... I know the white man-toddlers... like to call it "anime"... they are cartoons. For kids.
You do know that it is the Japanese who call it anime and that anime is short for animation so yes... by definition of the word "anime" they are cartoons. Good attempt to try and attribute the anime term to white fanboys.
Oh, I don't even watch anime, but people enjoy it so why be a douche about it.
The first rail guns will be small systems with short ranges of 200 some odd miles, but the future intent is to bring these up to 2 Ton 10,000 mile systems. They will have the ability to throw a hunk of tungsten so fast and so far that it's explosive force will be in the 30K ton of TNT range and it will be capable of penetrating almost a hundred feet of solid rock or reinforced concrete. They will be capable of putting a rod on target within 5 minutes of order.
Well.... If you can do it from orbit. That would be the only sure way.
Doing it from a ship or land based gun will give you problems because the Earth has this curvature, and your hypersonic dart is pretty much going to travel in a straight line. So things that are over the horizon are pretty much out of reach since drilling straight through the Earth is not really practical. You could use the thing as The BIGGEST MORTAR EVUH and get around the curvature problem, but the time between pulling the trigger and impact is then pretty long. A ship based railgun would be able to take out shore installations very effectively, but its range is pretty much limited to what you can see from the boat's highest crows nest.
Where railguns shine is in taking out things that are in the air. Hypervelocity, yes, but also precision targeting at very long ranges. So a railgun boat would be able to shield bombers from fighter planes or ground based missiles for a considerable distance, or work as an anti missile defense system. A few patrolling the waters off Israel would probably be very comforting to the Israelis right now.
Railguns will revolutionize warfare, probably in a very bad way.
Quite possibly so. It seems humans are most often at peace with each other when everyone has the same kind of club.
Will
Not to mention the latest reports at places like defense tech have the new Chinese missiles being designed as "skimmers" which is literally a few feet off the top of the water when it gets within visual range of its target. All our missile defense is designed for the classic arc of a Scud style missile using a terminal trajectory hit the target NOT a skimmer. With the height of your average carrier they would be hard pressed to even point the weapons low enough to fire over the head of a Mach 2 skimmer, much less point low enough to hit it.
So I don't see how the "big blue blanket" we've used since WWII, with large groups of cruisers and destroyers surrounding the carrier, is supposed to work if the enemy can just fire off 40 to 50 skimmers and call it a day. At the cost of the cruisers and destroyers per unit even if they don't hit the carriers you're dealing with horrific loss of life and billions sent to the bottom, and if they launch 30 or more at a time I doubt a big blue blanket would have a prayer of stopping the carriers from getting hit as they are just too large a target and too slow to turn.
I have a feeling the cruise skimmer is gonna do to large carrier groups what air power did to the battleship, make it an obsolete sitting duck. All I can think of is the IJN sending Yamato to fight the USN without air cover and how the planes were able to just slam into it in waves, bomb after bomb and torpedo after torpedo until it went to the bottom. With the cruise skimmer it won't cost the enemy a single soldier or sailor and they can just send waves from different directions and overwhelm the task force, doing to the USN what the USN did to Yamato.
Ironically I see the USA making the same mistakes the Axis did in WWII, like Germany we are building insanely expensive and hard to build and maintain aircraft while the enemy builds cheap, reliable, and easy to maintain aircraft. As we saw in WWII having a few quality planes really doesn't help when your enemy can put 8 to 1 odds against and unlike WWII the F-22 and F-35 really aren't that much better than the MiG 29 and SU 35, not 8 to 1 better, and like the IJN we are relying on old tactics like the big blue blanket that with modern tech is REALLY outdated. We've basically gotten a free pass so far as we've only gone against technologically inferior enemies, but if we face a modern high tech military we would probably be in serious trouble.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.