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The US Navy Wants More Railguns and Lasers, Less Gunpowder
coondoggie writes Speaking before nearly 3,000 attendees at the Naval Future Force Science and Technology EXPO in Washington, D.C., Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert charged his audience to reduce reliance on gunpowder in a wide-ranging speech on the future technological needs of the Navy. "Number one, you've got to get us off gunpowder," said Greenert, noting that Office of Naval Research-supported weapon programs like Laser Weapon System (LaWS) and the electromagnetic railgun are vital to the future force. “Probably the biggest vulnerability of a ship is its magazine—because that’s where all the explosives are." Weapons like LaWS have a virtually unlimited magazine, only constrained by power and cooling capabilities aboard the vessel carrying them. In addition, Greenert noted the added safety for Sailors and Marines that will come from reducing dependency on gunpowder-based munitions.
How is that fancy laser going to work when the enemy uses a smoke screen? Or a mirror?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
They are not eliminating all "gunpowder". They may be able to eliminate the propellant used to launch projectiles but many of those projectiles will still have explosive warheads. Its an improvement, but there will still be armored magazines for such projectiles.
Projectiles need energy to launch. Energy that needs to be highly concentrated in order to be carried around. Gunpowder actually is not all that bad regarding its efficiency of transferring chemical energy to the projectile. I don't see railguns getting there anytime soon. So the chemistry for your batteries is going to be at least as fun to blow up as the gunpowder is right now.
For sure.
In that sure you remove gun powder... but you still need to get the energy from somewhere to power those lasers/railguns. Unless your ship has a nuclear reactor on board won't this generally mean having to carry a whole load of additional fuel? Granted some fuels have higher energy densities. But doesn't this just transfer risk away from ship magazines to the fuel tanks instead?
Laser are line of sight only, they can't do indirect fire. A ship would also need rail guns to launch projectiles. Its an improvement, but there will still be ammunition limits.
The first step is to eliminate gunpowder.
Then they should get rid of the railguns and lasers so we can all live in peace.
Why not work on the diplomacy? No country in the world has so much trouble talking to others like the US. Always resorting to violence when someone do not follow their orders. Wars going on directly or by proxy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Africa and South America and it is just a matter of time until wars are instigated in Asia. Lighting the world on fire sure are a good way of seeing to it that you have to burn gunpowder like there is no tomorrow.
HTTP/1.1 400
I though they abandoned gunpowder for their main armament before the first world war. gun powder is for small arms ammunition where anything else is too expensive.
This is the kind of stuff the Military industrial complex comes up with when they need to give congress a set of cheap buzzword to defend wasting more money on equipment that will never be used to make a real difference anyway,
The US stategic doctrine is flawed and have been since the Vietnam but just like the cavalry survived almost a century after it was proven inefficient the Pentagon is not interested in abandoning it's old legends and myths and adopt new doctrines. So we got more hi-tech and less correct trained ground troops, which is exactly the opposite of what you need for efficient COIN operations.
However successive UK governments have seen "improving" the navy as meaning strip it of as many ships as it can. Soon it'll consist of 2 men and a rowing boat. Oh, and one overpriced aircraft carrier with no planes that can fly from it.
The Navy doesn't need fusion. They have fission.
Speaking of which: I hope the federal government rapes Nevada in the ass with a cactus for the stunt they pulled Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository.
Tax their grand-children, and while you're at it: make them fight to the death in a televised game of starvation survival of the fittest.
Have they tried cordite?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We have yet to see some real advances in torpedo design. Weapons that could, hang around in a particular region and then select the target and seek to destroy it. Catch with a navy much like the airforce it can be subject to very effective area denial weapon systems. For example aircraft attacks can be readily disrupted by simply targeting them with attack radar, which has a significantly different signature to search radar. The pilot can either take evasive action foiling the attack or ignore the onboard warning of an incoming missile and pray his systems are just being spoofed and of course fake attack radar transmission could be very effectively combined with real ones and catch pilots out. Real area denial weapons have yet to be designed to target attacking warships beyond dumb mines. For countries with limited navies this makes much more sense.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I want new toys, not more of the same old crap you used to give me.
And a pony. With railguns on its head..
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It seems like a lot of electrical power is needed. If so, does that come from nuclear reactors aboard the ships? How vulnerable are those reactors to being damaged?
how exactly do you aim it without it burning out the prisms/mirrors that are utilised to aim it?
Picture a Gatling gun
Instead of bullets pumping out of the pipes, it's lasers
And the prisms/mirrors? They are cast off from the backend, just like the empty bullet casings that came out of a machine gun
Why Gatling gun configuration? Because lasers are powerful and generate a lot of heat. You gotta let it cool down a bit before fire another found, and the multi-pipe configuration allows the lasers to be fired in sequence, from one pipe at a time
Historically most certainly.
How much energy is needed to shoot down an incoming missile with a laser? A 50kW-laser can kill a drone or a boat but what about a missile approaching in a range of 0.6-2 Mach?
Some people did the math in a forum and the estimates where somewhere in the mega watts range. Energy is not something you have in vast abundance on a ship , most of it is used for propulsion. Despite that you get into serious problems with cooling and charging.
Yes, you might have on shot but against several missiles approaching a vessel lasers might be less useful than one imagines.
Not all humans are created alike
Not all humans are reasonable
Not all humans are sane
Diplomacy works on humans who are (at least) sane. On the other hand, savages such as the Jihadists who recently burnt a Jordanian pilot to death are not interested in diplomacy
I understand that passifists / peace loving / tree hugging / hippie wannabe like you want peace, but let me tell you this one thing - you will only get your peace if others are afraid to mess with you
American politicians should work on using Diplomacy. The Navy's job is to blow shit up when diplomacy fails or frequently isn't even attempted.
Yes, there are plenty of examples of ships being suck or disabled by a hit to a magazine.
There are also others of ships being disabled, and then sunk or abandoned, when they lost power.
Finally, there are many, many examples of ships disabled and on fire which continued fighting, sometimes with just one gun left firing.
Please explain to them your concept of diplomacy.
If you want railguns and lasers, you'll still have to carry the energy required to fire them aboard the ship.
are they protected against Retroreflector ?
Unless the projectile store all its energy in form of momentum instead of explosive To do that, you just need to shoot your projectile at ridiculous speeds.
Kinetic energy projectiles have limitations with respect to indirect fire, to avoid redundancy see an earlier response: http://slashdot.org/comments.p....
So... How long before we build BattleMechs to carry these things for land based attacks?
The application of railgun-type weaponry has always fascinated me in the amount of destruction that can be accomplished with deceptively simple applications, it only depends on the tradeoff that is acceptable between the amount of money and tech one wants to pour into the system and the mitigation that needs or wants to be exercised on the focus or level of annihilation that is wanted out of the weapons. The proposed weapon systems that come to mind are (I'm not totally sure on the titles or wording of these) the "rods from god" and "brilliant teardrop" kinetic bombing satellites that merely use tremendous heights instead of complex magnetic fields, the Earth's gravity, and extremely massive metal projectiles that can survive burnup passing through the atmosphere at speed. While not really related to railgun tech, the concept is the same but with less reliance on complex technology that may or may not be perfected or understood. Also without the dangers of ionizing radiation.
that ISIL rebrand itself as Cobra and that all grunt soldiers be sent to the Star Wars Trooper School of Shooting. Lasers should be colored in accordance with affiliation.
America can't be trusted to have armed forces. They invariably use them to destabilise other countries, in the name of imperial American interests. We should do what we did with Japan and Germany after the war, and prevent America from having any military capability. The US regime wouldn't go to war with the rest of the world, particularly given that they never actually seem to have won any of the wars they have started.
Raise the Yamamoto from the ocean floor and make it into what mankind needs to survive....
http://starblazers.com/
Everything you need is right there on that website...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Rail guns fire slugs; they aren't about to put an exploding shell in a rail gun with that much electrical and magnetic energy around.
Then railguns will be of limited use for targets on land. When the trajectory needs to be more ballistic for indirect fire you won't have the speed necessary for kinetic weapons.
I understand that passifists / peace loving / tree hugging / hippie wannabe like you want peace, but let me tell you this one thing - you will only get your peace if others are afraid to mess with you
Pacifism works. When the pacifists have non-pacifists who are willing to protect them.
Human history shows again and again that pacifists are vulnerable, even to blood relatives who share the same ancestry, history and culture. The book Guns, Germs and Steel had a pretty clear example. Some warlike pacific islanders got lost and colonized a new island and became pacifists in their isolation. When discovered by islanders from their original home a couple of generations later they were enslaved.
Becasue every 2 days one of our ships totally blows itself up because it is carrying gunpowder and it is time to stop!
What do we need a large navy for now?
Because you are an island that was nearly starved into submission twice in the last 100 years. Having a large navy saved you.
Or is the UK self-sufficient now?
Lasers are great for taking down incoming missiles, drones or small aircraft. But the current system, at only 30kW, is of no use against larger or hardened targets. Stepping up to a megawatt class laser is either going to require supercooled magnet arrays and large generation facilities for a free electron laser (and you will need liquid helium or possibly liquid nitrogen to keep them functional), or storage for chlorine and iodine as well as hydrogen and potassium hydroxides for a COIL laser (the hazardous nature of those substances adds even more issues).
Rail guns have their own issues. They need massive capacitor banks that can be very dangerous at full charge, or homopolar generators which would need to be massive for a naval sized rail gun. The high temperatures and EM fields at firing would cause any fuses to go off in HE rounds, so they would be limited to kinetic rounds only. That drastically reduces their usefulness. On top of that, each time the gun is fired, the rails are subjected to buckling forces, intense heat and part of the rails are blasted away as plasma. Each shot, your accuracy decreases, as well as your effective range and the kinetic hitting power. It is fine to have 'virtually unlimited' ammunition, but what use is that when you have a gun that you can only fire a few times before you have to change the barrel?
Sure, 'futuristic' weapons such as these look good on paper, when an Admiral is convincing politicians for a few hundred billion dollars, but I doubt they really will be replacing naval weapons for the forseeable future.
Got to get them off petroleum ...and salt water. Salt water is bad for ships. Future ships need to levitate above the water using some new space-age anti-gravity technology. And we don't want sailors to operate them. We need hyper-intelligent robots. And the US Navy needs teleportation technology. Now. Urgent need. Get cracking, DARPA.
But that whole being a witch thing cost him the south.
I will make a big wager with ANYONE that within the next 10 years that there will be a method of putting these devices out-of-commission by using a small device that costs less then $100 to make. Also, that the device will be no more difficult to operate then to be near the weapons, or be pointed at the weapon. Thus, leaving a large hung of floating steel with water pouring in from all sides within minutes. That, and a lot of dead people.
Combat lasers don't operate in the visible spectrum. For a smoke screen to be effective it would require knowing the band the laser is operating in and combat lasers are tunable, i.e. they can change bands.
Yeah 'cause talking to ISIS would so much help the peopel who they are killing right now.
Watch "Gravity" to see why.
Hit a satellite with a projectile, it breaks up in orbit into many significant size pieces that have uncontrolled orbits that then impact other satellites that ...
The biggest army on our planet wants more guns so they could rain destruction to any country that the elite do not like, just great! not!
I enjoyed your description of the shells going through and just leaving holes. That indicates one builds ships larger than necessary with lots more empty space. This makes it harder to hit something important. Possibly one might even build empty hulls with propulsion systems, just to give the enemy more targets. All depends on the value of the empty hulls versus the value of completing the mission.
The trade off, is to achieve the power required for these lasers and railguns to be effective the ship would require a nuclear power plant.
I'm not sure the hitting of a nuclear power plant would be any less disastrous than hitting a power magazine.
Naval armor hasn't been useful in a long time. So you are down to either A) Counter Measures, B) Maneuverability to not getting hit, C) Detection
A) might work for missiles, however the new ones everyone is trying to build are super fast, making them pretty hard to shoot down. B) likely isn't going to help much unless you are just at the edge of someone range envelope. C) You are either talking about Submarines, or like modern air fighters, you have a longer detection range, and the ability to hit from that range, so you are never in any danger.
Lasers might be able to be used as defense for the defense of the faster missiles, however at that point it is probably as much about detection and target acquisition and tracking than it is about how powerful the laser is. Also you'll probably be playing cat and mouse with stealth missiles, heat resistant coatings, etc...
A railgun however should be able to hit over the horizon, which is what you would need for first detection and strike. However again, half the battle will be as much detection and targeting. However they are likely much more of an offensive weapon than lasers. That said, like old battleships, it has been shown that air is what wins so there is that. Perhaps lasers of sufficient power might serve also as air deterrent. That would be the big change, which might bring back the era of big battleships again...
Most jets are made with 11 inches of steel. Rail guns are against harden targets. Lasers are to shoot down aircraft. (Lasers kinda need a line of site to work)
ZOMG WTF? Either you are joking, this is a typo, or you simply don't know WTF you are talking about? Name one jet, or airplane, or anything that goes up with propulsion containing something with 11 inches of steel. I seriously doubt even something like an Atlas rocket would have something like that.
We are talking about something almost a full feet thick of relatively heavy metal, not aluminum or titanium or high-strength ceramics or polymers, but steel. Other than an engine block or thrusters (which are not solid pieces of metal), what the hell in a jet is made out of a piece of steel 11 inches thick?
The bullet in this case is just a massive piece of metal. It is accelerated to a ridiculous speed (a Navy weapon capable of hurling 40-pound projectiles at speeds of 4,500 mph to 5,600 mph over 50 to 100 miles (7,240 to 9,010 kilometers per hour over 80 to 161 kilometers). This is the advantage of railguns, very high bullet speeds. This gives the bullet a massive amount of energy.
The weapon works by basically smashing into something else, transferring most of that kinetic energy into whatever it hits which ultimately ends up as heat. This is the same reason brake pads on cars get hot, transfer of kinetic energy into heat.
When the projectile hits something and stops, the bullet and whatever it hits will get very hot. The projectile is probably made of metal which is in fact very flammable if you get enough oxygen to it. So there is a fireball, either because whatever it hits is flammable or because the projectile/whatever it hits is burning.
When you hit something that fast the behavior of metals changes. The speed of sound (see * below) in metal is high but if you hit something fast enough, then you can actually exceed the speed of sound in a metal and the rear of the projectile will carry on moving as though it hasn't hit anything when the front has hit something. This is the same idea of a shock-wave in air but it's in metal. Heres a good youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Well needless to say this tends to result in some funky stuff, like the metal bullet tearing it's self apart into lots of small pieces. This is a big driver in some anti-tank weaponry. If you hit the armour just right then you can actually get the inside of the tank to shatter, basically turning the inside of the tank into a shrapnel grenade, killing the operators.
If the projectile shatters then it's going to be hot and have a large surface area and you can get lots of oxygen to it which will result in a fireball, potentially it will burn about as hot as 1000 K. This to me seems like a good thing to design for because the added heat is going to do things like start fires and ignite conventional bullets/warheads and burn through armour.
* The speed of sound refers to the maximum speed at which a mechanical vibration (much like the pressure changes that cause sound. Not like light, RF, or electricity) can travel through a medium. Mach1 refers to that maximum speed of those wave's permeation through air, however different media such as water, metal, and glass will have different values for that maximum speed.
So, as the projectile hits some theoretical immovable object, the front will stop, but the rest will continue collapsing in on the front, faster than the pulse created on initial impact (a mechanical vibration that would otherwise influence the rear of the projectile to slow down) can travel to the rear of the projectile.
A bad, but visual representation of this is if you had a long line off cars driving down the freeway bumper to bumper. The first crashed and was brought to a halt instantaneously. In a normal crash each car behind would generally apply brakes and slow down before impact. However, for this example, everyone is driving faster than their own reaction time, so they are part of the pileup before they have registered an accident happened in the first place.
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/22iqo3/why_does_the_us_navy_rail_gun_round_explode_into/
But lasers and rail gun will eventually replace all the artillery style weapons that ships used to have. The lasers take out the fast moving airborne stuff, kinetic weapons take out the rest.
No, consider indirect fire. To hit a target in the "shadow" of terrain you need a highly ballistic trajectory. That mean a much slower launch for shorter range targets. And for more difficult shots, say a target on a reverse slope, you need a trajectory where the projectile will be coming down somewhat close to the vertical and its speed will be its gravitational terminal velocity. Explosive warheads will still be needed.
In other words kinetic weapons need relatively "flat" trajectories, works well for targets at sea but not so well for many targets on land.
I'm too old now, but I'd love to re-enlist just and re-train in this technology! Love the NAVY!!!! Go Navy!!!
Anything Obama does with the stroke of a pen can be undone by his replacement.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I don't think lasers can, so by the time you are close enough to use them, you a probably dead.
How about not putting them into any more phony baloney wars. I'm guessing that commands from their superiors, including emphasizing both recent Commander's in Chief...have killed way more sailors and marines than any accidents with gunpowder.
Those big guns actually were called RAIL GUNS and still are properly called so.
And Civil-War era guns that mounted on the hand-rails of steamships were also called RAIL GUNS, again properly so.
A well educated person could refer to the current generation of rail guns (get it?) as "electromagnetic linear accelerators" or "homopolar cannon" but the former is inexact and the latter contains the syllables "homo" which is already overused on slashdot.
It's fairly normal for English to have more than one thing carry the same name; homonymy is why the semantic web has never actually worked. Unfortunately online conversation around modern rail gun technology has been dominated by arrogant putzes who don't read first-person histories, and said arrogant putzes are more than willing to edit wikipedia and spread their ignorance, so it's not really surprising you didn't know the period nomenclature for WWII rail guns.
That assumes a dumb projectile. I'm sure they're working on stuff that has enough guidance in it to take a curving path.
Even with dumb projectiles, there's the option of shooting it at a higher arc or tweaking the muzzle-velocity, presuming the target isn't moving too fast and the terminal velocity of your round isn't too low.
You mated with Goatse????????? The zombie apoocalypse is HERE!
Do you even parabola, bra?
Bruh. Parabolas. Learn them. Love them.
Everybody just shut the fuck up! The four-digit is speaking!
Chemical explosives and fuels can be remotely detonated, even when they are in shielded containers, by energy weapons that see steel as partially transparent, so replacing old school weapons is definitely the way to go, furthermore achieving the transition will bankrupt many other competitors if they try the same. This has always been an important part of the long term game. Plus the transition to energy weapons dovetails nicely with the move to off world operations, which will happen eventually regardless of treaties, so it pays to be ready and ahead of the pack.
d@3-e.net
I love cool technology as much as next guy. The videos of railgun trials are very cool. But, the Pentagon has lots of cool technology projects that have turned into expensive junk. The F35 is the latest example, billions of dollars over budget, and it still doesn't work.
I am very much in favor of a strong defense and strong US military capabilities, but, I am very concerned by the Pentagon's seeming inability to make tech work on time and on budget.
I read the following in National Review (a very conservative pro defense pro military magazine), and I think that everyone who is interested in railguns and Naval Technology should read it as well:
Railguns: The Next Big Pentagon Boondoggle?
The Navy's replacement for traditional artillery may be an expensive fantasy.
By Mike Fredenburg on December 18, 2014
Mr. Fredenburg's claims include: railguns are nowhere durable enough; railguns will have serious trouble engaging mid-range targets; large-explosive rounds are better than the railgunâ(TM)s small, inert ones; railguns will cost a lot more to operate than more conventional artillery, and less extreme technology could produce results as good as railguns at a fraction of the cost.
I cannot vouch for the correctness of Mr. Fredenbug's claims, but given the Pentagon's poor record on new technology, I think they should be taken seriously.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I am ashamed this question would be asked
this is designed for taking on China, whose military is on the fastest growth ever seen in history. They currently make the NAZI build-up look like a slow walk.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A Naval vessel has limited storage capability. You cannot count on timely resupply at will in a wartime scenario. Given this; it makes huge amounts of sense to go with rail guns and laser close in defenses.
Taking the propellant for large guns with use of rail guns drops the space needed for munitions by about 2/3s (based on a battleship cannon or 5 inch gun shell for the smaller ships) Laser firing close in defenses for incoming missiles or craft does away with maintaining massive armament lockers for the 20mm ammunition used in the Phalanx system. (The tech from when I was active duty. about 2000 rounds per second with liquid cooled multiple barreled cannon with radar targeting)
It comes down to a trade off. Ability to haul more munitions vs needing EMF hardening and an extremely robust electric power generating capability.
As to nuclear; nuclear allows for much longer times between needed refueling. Nuclear ships are limited not by how much fuel they can carry but the amount of groceries they can carry to feed the crew.
As to the hazards of nuclear ships. Having worked in Naval Nuclear Propulsion as well as commercial nuclear power generation I'll just say that the design criteria of nuclear propulsion plants is so radically more hardened from damage and possibility of release of radioactive material to the environment that a danger to the general public can be called "extremely farfetched". The old USSR designs are a different story. (shuddering at the thought of being on a BWR submarine)
Ex Navy Nuclear, Current radiation protection tech.
NRRPT/RCT
Lack of a powder magazine does not a safe ship make.
Whatever powers those lasers and railguns has to pack the equivalent energy. Nukes, jet fuel or anti-matter converters all have containment issues. You can't pack all that power in a small space safely.
Then there are torpedoes. Every navy needs them. They carry explosives.
The Navy is working on lasers and railguns. That's so yesterday, you know?
Where are the trained sharks? The ones with the lasers? And let's get innovative, what about the sharks with railguns? Who's working on that, DARPA??