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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."

5 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

    2. Re:Old news... by Phanatic1a · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "They won't be willing to wait and it's not exactly a simple thing to change the power output of a Rankine cycle nuclear power plant at a whim."

      Actually, it is, it's called a throttle. When you're in a nuclear submarine puttering along at 5 knots and someone drops a torpedo on you, and you want to get up to 30+ knots as fast as you can, you do it. You take more heat out of the coolant, which cools down the water in the reactor, which increases the reaction rate, which produces more power, this relationship is very tight and the changes can happen very rapidly. Way more rapidly than shoveling in more coal.

      The power source is a non-issue. Gas turbine, nuclear, whatever, there's plenty of available power. A single destroyer carries 4 gas turbine engines that are each capable of 40,000+ shaft horsepower. It's generation capacity that's more of an issue, but even that just means "wait for a longer period of time between shots."

      The means of delivering electrical power to the projectile without arcing destroying the rails is an issue. Ideally you want all the current in the world at as low a voltage as you can manage it, so capacitors aren't as good as a magnetohomopolar generator. But getting the power to put into the capacitors of MHG is not a complex problem.

  2. Re:Is this news? by rahvin112 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Anti-Ship missiles are a bunch of hooey. Yes they are fast and damn hard to shoot down, but if you are are within range of one those with your navy you are doing it wrong. Oh yes, there are people in the USN that think we could engage in Littoral combat, but they are in the extreme minority.

    No naval officer ever wants to bring his ship so close to shore that one of those missiles could hit it. And if you are out of range of ground fire the only way to fire is ship based, that exposes the firing ship to submarines which are damn near impossible to detect. The other option is submarine launch, which again on launch exposes the asset and anti-submarine warfare is very well understood at this point. And why launch an anti-ship missile from a submarine when a torpedo can be far more damaging.

    The navy is working on a platform for the rail guns that uses current working technology. The systems they are developing will run on top of standard carrier nuclear generation systems. Just like the carriers you have two small nuclear reactors, put them in a large cruiser class ship. There aren't big guns like the old battleships so the ships become multi-role, able to host not only rail gun rounds but missile and radar emplacements. The best part about the rail guns is you do away with explosive munitions, your ammo and firing system are a bunch of wiring, capacitors and a hunk of tungsten for a projectile and you can spread the systems around the ship in a damage control technique (unlike current powder based systems that are a single weak point).

    I actually believe the Navy's future plans are more sustainable and build-able than even the air-force's F-35 program. And their time line is even more believable with the first ship construction around 2016.

  3. Re:Is this news? by rahvin112 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I shouldn't need to point this out as it's a critical aspect of US naval policy since WWII. The point of a US navy carrier grouping is to sit well outside ground fire range and use AIR power. This means planes with ranges that far exceed a missile, and cruise missiles that are nothing more than preprogrammed Kamikaze drones.

    Maybe at some point the SunFire's and other supersonic Anti-Ship missiles will have a range equivalent to air power but the further they have to go the easier they are to shoot down.

    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. Railguns will revolutionize warfare, probably in a very bad way.