Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
With the reactors on board most ships they got the power, without the need for large shells with/or gun power taking up space. They can have much more ammo on board since they only need the shell part not a ton of gun powder to get shell from A to B. On top of much more power behind a rail gun shot makes armor of another ship well worthless.
Err, the batteries or super capacitors are probably charged up before each shot then discharge during it, so most of the time they'll do very little if you hit them with a shell.
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
Historically most certainly.
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.
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
Amazing! You have described exactly how these things don't work!
I couldn't have done it better myself!
With the reactors on board most ships they got the power, without the need for large shells with/or gun power taking up space. They can have much more ammo on board since they only need the shell part not a ton of gun powder to get shell from A to B. On top of much more power behind a rail gun shot makes armor of another ship well worthless.
What reactors? Most naval vessels use diesel, reactors are reserved for the unseen gunless submarines and the equally gunless aircraft carriers, since it just dont make sense on run off the mill surface ships like destroyers and frigates.
Is this merely an attempt to bringe the expensive white elephants that the battleship proved to be back into active service?
There's actually a few tradeoffs here. Unless it's a nuclear powered ship, then efficiency does matter. Fuel is much more energy dense, due to not having its own oxidiser, but railguns are fearfully inefficient. Unless they get the efficiency up then the fuel might take up more space. That said, being liquid, it fits into awkward spaces more easily.
As for power, that's an interesting one. If you look at the proposed railgun specs, the slugs have about the same kinetic energy as a WWII battleship round from at 16" gun. While the velocity of a railgun round is much higher, it doesn't weigh well over a ton. Plus, the battleship round also has about the same energy again as an explosive payload. So in practice the railgun will have about half the energy delivery capacity of a single round from a WWII battleship.
Of course, the railgun has a much longer range, a much higher speed, is much smaller and doesn't requite an unstable mix of fuel and oxidiser to be carried so that is a win.
In terms of armor, that's more or less gone from ships. The reason being that modern torpedos and some missiles which dive shortly before impact essentially make explode under the ship not against it, lifting it partly out of the water and creating a bubble which the ship falls into breaking its back. Armor is more or less worthless against that sort of attack. So if you're in a war with the USSR, there's no point in having any.
Excpet the only naval engagements from western nations in vaguely recent times have been things like the exocet missile strikes frmo the Falklands war (again less energy than a battleship round, and armor would have helped), a boat packed with explosives (again armor would have helped) and a few others. So ship armor is already more or less worthless against a modern well equipped navy, but it's probably worth having for when one isn't engaging one of those.
But back to the railgun.
There's an interesting thing that hitting a target with a high energy inert round often doesn't do a whole lot of damage. There was a case in WWII of some armed merchant cruisers (i.e. cargo ships with a couple of obsolete guns welded on) were mistaken for cruisers by some German raiders. The raiders engaged at long range with AP rounds and scored some direct hits. The AP rounds went all the way through the unarmored ships and out the other side without detonating (they were designed to penetrate a bit into armor and then detonate: the lack of armor caused the warhead to not trigger). The end result was that the ships wound up with some perfectly survivable 15" holes in them and managed to escape.
Likewise, the British army still like their HESH rounds, because the APFDS rounds (basically a long, thin very high speed slug designed to penetrate thick tank armour) have the annoying habit of going right through more lightly armoured vehicles without doing significant damage except for two small holes, where as the HESH rounds tear them open.
The cause of this is that very high energy rounds are hard to stop. Even the target has trouble stopping them, and if it fails to, then they leave with most of their energy and deliver it elsewhere.
In fact come to think of it, back when muskets were becoming obsolete, some armies found that although the modern high speed, high accuracy bullets made it much easier to hit the target, they tended to go right through people. The result being that again, the round not only had to hit a person but unlike a musket ball, had to hit something important, so there was a much higher survivability rate from people who were shot.
So, what I wonder is how the railguns fit into this. It seems that they'd be prone to very effectively making a couple of small holes in whatever they hit and delivering most of the energy into the sea or ground. Unless you actually hit the engines or some other critical piece, a ship, especially a warship can survive a surprisingly large number of holes before it is put out of action.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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?
Explosives and liquid oxygen are very dangerous, but the real issue is with the humans.
Get rid of all the humans and then we'll have peace...
To see how it'll go see The Animatrix (Full Movie) - YouTube starting at around 4:53, The Second Renaissance...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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.
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.
> Of course, the railgun has a much longer range, a much higher speed,
The railgun range today is effectively _zero_. High velocity rounds have been launched from test guns, but none have actually successfully hit a moving target without a pre-plotted course for the target, nor have any significantly sized railguns been successfully tested from a portable platform. They also wear out so fast that the mass and resources saved on ammunition are effectively taken up by the necessary spare parts for the railgun itself. I'm afraid they're much like dotcom business plans. The drawing on the back of the napkin looks fabulous, but the actual engineering has turned out to have real limits.
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.
From what I can tell main attack weapon on sea is right now the cruise missile. Extremely long range and ability to correct targeting errors in flight. There's no way railguns or lasers can compete with that. There could be other niche for them though. Like point defense.
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.
but railguns are fearfully inefficient.
Compared to chemical propellants? I don't think so.
Unless they get the efficiency up then the fuel might take up more space. That said, being liquid,
I'm fairly certain the nuclear reactor that powers the guns and the ship won't be that big of a problem. They don't do it on diesel.
Armor is more or less worthless against that sort of attack.
Thats why the strengthen the keel ... 40 years ago.
I'd keep going, but I'm just blown away by how you got to +5 on this. You don't seem to know anything at all about you're talking about. You're mixing and matching things in ways that makes them all simply completely false statements.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
But that whole being a witch thing cost him the south.
Do you think navy ships are still powered by sails or something? FFS.
Which if you ask me, a large bank of charged super capacitors or batteries is as dangerous as the gunpowder.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Compared to chemical propellants? I don't think so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
According to that firearm efficiency is not incomparable to piston engines, which is not all that surprising as the conversion of heat to motion is not dissimilar. In that case, a .300 rifle achieves about 32% efficiency.
For a fuel powered railgun, you have to first convert the fuel to heat then to motion then to electricity. The top marine diesles give about 51% efficiency, when you're preppared to sacrafice almost anything on the altar of efficiency. The likely efficiency of a naval marine engine is probably more like 40%, in which case you're already quite close to the gun efficiency and you haven't even generated electricity yet.
You've then got the capacitor bank charging, switching losses and finally the conversion of the insane current into motion.
So my guess would be that a rail gun is substantially less efficient than a conventional firearm.
I'm fairly certain the nuclear reactor that powers the guns and the ship won't be that big of a problem. They don't do it on diesel.
Well, that removes a lot of the advantages: nuclear reactors are vastly more expensive, so you've just put the price way up.
Thats why the strengthen the keel ... 40 years ago.
So why are modern torpedos designed to work that way?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
I'd keep going, but I'm just blown away by how you got to +5 on this. You don't seem to know anything at all about you're talking about. You're mixing and matching things in ways that makes them all simply completely false statements.
Touche, my man.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
There's an interesting thing that hitting a target with a high energy inert round often doesn't do a whole lot of damage. There was a case in WWII of some armed merchant cruisers (i.e. cargo ships with a couple of obsolete guns welded on) were mistaken for cruisers by some German raiders. The raiders engaged at long range with AP rounds and scored some direct hits. The AP rounds went all the way through the unarmored ships and out the other side without detonating (they were designed to penetrate a bit into armor and then detonate: the lack of armor caused the warhead to not trigger). The end result was that the ships wound up with some perfectly survivable 15" holes in them and managed to escape.
Good stuff here. I just have to add that this effect is seen throughout the age of gunpowder: unless gunnery hit the enemy magazine, all they were doing was making pinpricks in the opposing fleet. Keegan's Price of Admiralty describes Lord Nelson's fleet and the HMS Dreadnought being involved in these kinds of battles.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
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/
I'm fairly certain the nuclear reactor that powers the guns and the ship won't be that big of a problem. They don't do it on diesel.
Right now they do. The only USN ships that have nuclear reactors today are aircraft carriers and subs. Some cruisers used to have them too, but they have all been retired.
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!!!
Not to mention that historically the most dangerous duty in the Navy has been the ammo supply ships. Delivery of ammunition is also one of the most expensive things that Navies have to deal with as well.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
There are two other, very large factors - the cost (energy, fuel, time, human and other resources) of getting the ammunition and the propellant to the battle, and the safety. The fuel to drive the ammo supply ships has to be taken into account. A given ship is expected to be able to carry four times as many rounds of railgun ammunition vs. standard ammunition, eliminating two or three supply runs, and possibly dangerous deliveries between ships in the middle of the ocean. Ammo ships are notoriously bad duty in real wars, and if you look through WWII naval battles it is quite common for the killing blow to a ship having been penetration and detonation of one or more magazines.
From a _systems_ point of view (which is the Navy's POV on this), the cost of railguns will be much less. While at present manufacturing cost of the projectiles is high, it's already competitive with equivalent damage-producing shells. And passive solid tungsten projectiles could become quite cheap once the high precision high volume manufacturing gets in gear.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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.
So, what I wonder is how the railguns fit into this. It seems that they'd be prone to very effectively making a couple of small holes in whatever they hit and delivering most of the energy into the sea or ground. Unless you actually hit the engines or some other critical piece, a ship, especially a warship can survive a surprisingly large number of holes before it is put out of action.
I believe the primary potential advantage of railguns is that they allow for a higher number of rounds to be carried and potentially fired at a higher rate, and have the defensive aspect of removing a critical vulnerability aboard ship. Its a significant advantage if, as you imply, the enemy will have a hard time sinking you because you don't have a magazine to detonate.
On the subject of ammunition, railguns are probably less efficient in general, but its probably a lot easier to store more fuel and less intrinsically explosive ordinance. Its not just that your ammunition is smaller because it doesn't need propellant, its likely the lower safety requirements would allow you to store your rounds at a higher space density over all. Naval vessels that are already nuclear don't need to even worry about higher fuel requirements, but even diesel ships are probably easier to design as carrying more fuel than more ammunition.
Thinking about efficiency, I wonder how much conventional ammunition is destroyed when it is not used for a significant length of time? I would imagine naval artillery shells have a "best used by" date of some kind, and their propellant and/or warheads don't have infinite shelf stable lifetimes. A railgun bullet could last a lot longer without degrading, and if your propellant is fundamentally diesel fuel (indirectly converted to electricity) then your diesel fuel remains constantly refreshed whether you fire your weapons or not. In terms of energy density cordite might be more efficient than railgun power, but the actual logistics of having a single fuel and using electricity might be in the long run cheaper than building and periodically recycling old ammunition.
If you're fighting a war, then why exactly is that going to be a concern? Are you going to allow enemy orbital infrastructure to go unchallenged?
An alternative option rather then simply punching a hole in a sat would be to propel a hunter killer into orbit by rail gun... around the orbit of the sat it uses an on board propulsion system to coast very gently over to the target. Then when it arrives it can either short out the sat or hack it through direct hardware to hardware links. I'm pretty sure that most of our sats can be overridden with minimal security codes if you can link into diagnostic ports. Either way... the point is that the gun can do some unconventional thinks if it has enough power. About 5 times the power it has now and it can hit orbital targets.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
And of course the power source of the laser now becomes the primary target. I'm sure the nuclear reactor will make a lovely cloud of steam.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
Modern naval ships are starting to use gas turbine engines (including the test ship for the US navy's railgun, I believe). Generators based on gas turbines can be up to 80% efficient at making electricity. But you're right, I believe the plan is to put the rail guns in nuclear powered cruisers.
Generators based on gas turbines can be up to 80% efficient at making electricity.
End to end? If so, that doesn't sound right. The city scale combined cycle ones reach about 65% at the best and that's with a gas turbine combined with a Rankine bottoming cycle. You can't fit that sort of thing on a ship.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You're right. I was misremembering that figure, or it was for a combined heat and power plant. The newer turbine driven warships are more efficient than the diesel ones though.
The real drive behind rail guns isn't for efficiency or getting rid of magazines though. It's for range with weapons that are more cost effective than cruise missiles.
The newer turbine driven warships are more efficient than the diesel ones though.
More efficient than diesel warships, I suspect, not diesel engines overall. For very large cargo carriers, it's a choice between the more efficient diesels and less efficient, but much more space efficient turboelectric drives. I believe the huge marine diesels hold the efficiency record, but the more or less run at exactly one very slow speed and are vast and incredibly heavy.
Holy crap I just looked it up. The engine on the Emma Maersk weighs 23,000 tons. 3 the weight of a Type 45 destroyer!
SJW n. One who posts facts.