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.

Comments

Lasers are easy to stop

[KiloByte]

How is that fancy laser going to work when the enemy uses a smoke screen? Or a mirror?

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[jellomizer]

I am figuring your comment is in jest.
A laser powerful enough to bring down an airplane would burn thru a mist and probably melt a mirror instantly before the can use a reflection to aim it back.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[Karmashock]

Lasers are used against aircraft or missiles. The railguns are for naval targets. Smoke is hilariously ineffective against a railgun strike. And it is hard to maintain a smoke screen around a missile or an aircraft.

Keep in mind, anything you could hit with a navel gun is even easier to hit with a rail gun. Currently the velocity of railguns is roughly equivalent to navel guns. However, that speed will climb.

Eventually this speed should surpass escape velocity which means railguns will eventually be able to tag satellites or even launch small hunter-killer kill vehicles to destroy/disable/subvert enemy orbital infrastructure.

The weapons are quite effective. The question in the new era is how to defend against such things so that a battle group is survivable. Between all this and hypersonic missiles carrier groups might be a thing of the past. Large surface fleets might also just be too vulnerable to be useful.

High endurance aircraft that can strike from extreme range and attack submarines with surface strike capability might be the order of the day. A submersible destroyer for example could get in close with heavy weaponry, fire a salvo, and then dive before enemy systems could target and strike it. Such a thing would be vulnerable to enemy attack submarines but then you could just escort it with a flotilla of attack submarines to act as defense. You could even add some drone carriers. Submersible aircraft carriers were built by the Japanese in WW2. Consider what you could do if you gave such a design a nuclear power plant, expanded the size to Nimitz proportions, and replaced the planes entirely with more compact drones.

That is a possible vision of the future.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[f3rret]

Erm? Care to explain how a railgun would cause an EMP?

Because there is a huge electromagnetic discharge?
It's kinda how railguns work.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[CrimsonAvenger]

Keep in mind, anything you could hit with a navel gun is even easier to hit with a rail gun.

Apart from targets over the horizon.

Well, no. Railguns, like conventional cannon, fire a projectile that obeys the law of gravity. Which means the trajectory is parabolic for those who are exceptionally dense.

So, yes, railguns can hit targets over the horizon.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[Thanshin]

For steel walls 5km away you've got railguns.

The laser is for 1/2" of aluminum flying at mach 3 in your general direction..

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[PopeRatzo]

How is that fancy laser going to work when the enemy uses a smoke screen? Or a mirror?

Plus every cat on the battlefield is going to be chasing it.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[Nidi62]

What plane has 11 inches of steel?

Ships are killed by planes and subs, by missiles and torpedoes. Big ship to big ship combat just doesn't happen much anymore. Missiles take care of that.

Ships can launch surface to surface missiles and torpedoes as well. Ships are still perfectly capable of killing other ships. They just don't line up and broadside each other with 15 inchers anymore.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you read what a railgun is and how EMPs are generated?

And EMP is generated by having a very high electrical current somewhere. The better that current couples to the far field, the faster that current happens, and the larger the current is all contribute to the magnitude of the EMP. Railguns involve a very larger current, and require it to be applied over a loop with some amount of area to it, so it covers the first and third point well, and just only partially covers the speed one because they are kind of slow compared to other high current devices.

I've worked with small railguns before on plasma experiments. While pulsed plasma experiments already create EMI nightmares if you make any mistake in shielding or groundloops, the railgun has destroyed electronics in diagnostics near by that needed to be rebuilt and better designed. While not on the spatial scale of an EMP by a nuclear bomb (or even a well designed Marx generator...) it does require hardening and careful design of electronics in the vicinity. A lot of military equipment is already hardened anyway, but just making parts of a railgun functional and surviving itself already go a long ways there anyway.

Not that there is that much sensitive electronics needed to make it work, most of it is simple, robust high power electronics, and the sensitive stuff is just there to report on its performance. I don't know what types of switches, etc., they use on the large scale railguns, but if they use things like ignitrons, the basic parts of the railgun will be large capacitors and vacuum electronics, which are very robust against voltage spikes unlike silicon stuff.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[Karmashock]

Compared to what? How is the current paradigm any better? The only advantage of the current paradigm is that we're well adapted for it. We have the largest surface carrier fleet in the world.

However, the British had the largest battleship fleet in the world and what did that get them when the airplane came around?

Call it what you will... the law of this world is adapt or die. If we wish to maintain our military edge then it is in our interest to be realistic about the long term viability of our fleets and adapt strategies as required.

The issue with our current weapons systems is that they are very vulnerable to modern weapons. You could drop a whole carrier fleet fairly easily with a barrage of hypersonic missiles fired from a small number of disposable re-purposed fishing boats. Just strap on the launchers, sync them with orbital spy sat targeting and geo location... and fire. Those things come screaming in faster then bullets... and even the Aegis defense system is reported to be unable to really stop them.

Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit.

And the carrier group is slag heading to the bottom of the ocean. Don't blame me. I'm not the one that invented the machine gun and made infantry charges obsolete. That's just progress.

You have to know the carrier will be obsolete eventually. And when that happens what will take its place?

I gave two options of what I thought was more survivable. The first is just high endurance aircraft capable of traveling very long distances without refueling. That means the carriers if they exist could stay well out of hypersonic missile range. However, the problem with that idea is that carriers would be incapable of traveling within hundreds of miles of the enemy coast simply because it would be too easy to fire a hidden shore battery that destroyed the carrier. The current range of hypersonic missiles is about 50 miles. That is the current critical range. You have to kill from beyond 50 miles. Or more then 5 times the maximum range of WW2 battleship guns. And note, those guns were not accurate at that range. That is how far the range has opened up. It was not long ago that ships had to see each other to engage each other. Today, if you can see the enemy then one side or the other has committed suicide.

Submersible ships are another option. It sounds exotic but it was successfully done during WW2. The only trick would be to give it enough mass to carry enough weaponry to be effective and then to give it a power plant with enough power to give the ship freedom of the seas. If a carrier fleet can submerge and stay submerged for months at a time like our ballistic fleet then they can cruise right within the critical range of these weapons systems, surface, deploy their weaponry, and then submerge before they can be stopped or retaliated against.

This gives such a fleet freedom of the seas as well as the ability to counter the worst enemy weapons so long as the ships can dive fast enough to avoid a strike.

A counter might be cruise torpedoes. We have missiles that fly to a specific destination, then break off the tip which lands in the water... that tip is a self guided homing torpedo. It homes in on enemy sonar and acoustic signatures and attempts to destroy them. These weapons are quite effective against submarines and it allows US destroyers to launch a few of these in various directions. They all splash into the water and seek enemy targets. It is quite difficult to evade all them. And subs really have very few options against enemy torpedoes.

Simply affix that torpedo to a cruise missile giving it a 500 or so mile range.

In addition, you can setup a web of passive listening stations throughout the ocean floor that listen for even the smallest sound anywhere in the sea. If they're all networked then you should be able to passively echo locate any fleet that gets near the net.

Such are arms races.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[Karmashock]

Then how does a man in a fox hole lob a grenade into another fox hole without even poking his head above his own fox hole?

Naval guns don't point directly at their targets. They account for range by pointing UP. This gives the trajectory a curve which more then compensates for the curvature of the Earth. They also account for wind by pointing the guns slightly into the wind to counter the effect of the wind. And then they account for heading by leading the target a bit such that they're aiming for where the enemy will be when the shell arrives rather then where the enemy is right now. Other things are factored... humidity, air pressure, temperature, etc. Factor it all accurately and in real time with a computer and you have a good chance of hitting your target unless it is jinking all over the place.

Currently railguns have about the same muzzle velocity as a WW2 battleship cannon. Which is only because no one has ever gotten a shell to travel faster then that with chemical propellant. There might be some exceptions. I think some of the giant land guns might have had higher muzzle velocities. The germans had a big gun they used against the French and I think there was another one built in the middle east somewhere but it escapes me. Regardless, the weapons were too large to really be practical. They were big white elephants that accomplished very little compared to their cost.

Railguns have the potential to achieve far higher muzzle velocities. Again, you could potentially fire a shot from a destroyer straight up and slap a satellite out of the sky if you got the muzzle velocity up about four or five times what a WW2 battleship could manage. That is a long way to go but it is technically possible. Where as with a chemical propellant you'd need an absurdly long barrel to even try such a thing.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[Neil Boekend]

A rail gun works by creating a massive magnetic field with a huge current. That same current induces massive Lorenz forces. Those Lorenz forces accelerate the projectile.
To accelerate effectively the current ramp needs to be steep.

That combination of a massive magnetic field with steep ramps is an ElectroMagnetic Pulse, or EMP.
The railguns the Navy develops are big and thus they have big electromagnetic pulses. Any not EMP hardened electronics near them just die.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[Optali]

Ships can launch surface to surface missiles and torpedoes as well. Ships are still perfectly capable of killing other ships. They just don't line up and broadside each other with 15 inchers anymore.

Is it only me or does this really sound utterly gay?

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[Anonymous Coward]

Plasma is opaque.

What do you mean plasma is opaque? As long as the electromagnetic wave is above the cut-off, higher than the plasma frequency which depends on density for colder plasmas, then electromagnetic wave will propagate through plasma. Plasma at the same density as air is still has a cutoff in IR above the wavelength of something like a Nd:YAG laser.

But regardless, still depends on the situation, because for pulsed lasers, the time scale of energy absorption is way faster than the timescale that ablated material can move away from the surface being hit. Even without using pulsed lasers, the intended targets are fast moving airborne targets, where there would be no accumulation of plasma or obstructions in the air in front of what is being hit anyway.

And any ambient scatter (and there will be a lot) will be enough to cause permanent blindness for very long distances in all directions

Diffuse scatter of a 1 MW laser would be safe at a distance on the order of 100 m. Even with a much larger safety factor, and disregarding that specular reflections would happen on a much shorter timescale with higher safe power density limits, there is usually not much that close to an aircraft or missile, especially one being shot at.

so you run the risk of having your weapon classified as prohibited under the rules of warfare.

That laws are poorly written in the sense that a weapon that is not intended for such uses is ok, even if they do happen to cause the same effects. If the laser is not intended for blinding and is not used for the purpose of blinding, it doesn't matter if someone gets blinded in the process. A lot of weapons intended for use on equipment only ends up hurting personnel anyway...

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[jafiwam]

Ships can launch surface to surface missiles and torpedoes as well. Ships are still perfectly capable of killing other ships. They just don't line up and broadside each other with 15 inchers anymore.

Is it only me or does this really sound utterly gay?

To be fair, those ships are already full of seamen.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[nukenerd]

Currently railguns have about the same muzzle velocity as a WW2 battleship cannon. ... There might be some exceptions. I think some of the giant land guns might have had higher muzzle velocities.

WW2 battleship "cannon" (actually "guns" as they had rifling), up to 18" bore, were the longest range conventional guns ever, although the accuracy deteriorated beyond about 20 miles. Anti-aircraft guns had a higher muzzle velocity, but being smaller bore did not have such range (air resistance had greater influence). There have been higher velocity and greater range unconventional guns such as with additional firing chambers up the barrel, and the experimental German WW2 "Arrow gun" which fired a long thin shell with tail fins out of a larger bore barrel by means of a segmented wooden jacket (a "sabot") which fell away after leaving the barrel.

The germans had a big gun they used against the French and I think there was another one built in the middle east somewhere but it escapes me. Regardless, the weapons were too large to really be practical. They were big white elephants that accomplished very little compared to their cost.

In their day they were not white elephants. The Western Front in WW1 was static so those big guns, usually railway mounted (not to be confused with "rail guns"!), were useful for hitting things like enemy railway junctions miles behind the front, even though it took days to set one up and about an hour to fire each shot. A specially modified one was even used to hit Paris 70 miles away, more as a terror weapon because its shells dropped with no warning from the stratosphere like a modern ICBM. In WW2 two were used very effectively to hammer the Americans at the Anzio landings. The Germans also had massive seige guns which went for explosive power rather than range such as the "Big Berthas" of WW1, technically howitzers, which were very effective at destroying fortifications at short-ish range such as at Liege in 1914.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[CrimsonAvenger]

You do know that the 16" guns on the battleships could fire 15-25 miles (38km max range)?

And that their projectiles were unpowered, right?

And that they still hit the ground/water at the end of their flight, right?

And that the math required to hit a target out of sight of the gun has been well known since before World War-ONE, right?

It was more of a tongue in cheek statement rather than saying it's impossible but cheers anyway.

It's not just not impossible, it's something that's been in use (hitting targets beyond the horizon) for more than a century.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[Anonymous Coward]

Except if the other ship has lasers...

When did the US Navy last fight a proper ship vs ship battle with big guns? This is just a solution in search of a problem/budget .

The most recent US ship-to-ship battle was in 1988 against the Iranians. That's only 26 years ago.
Details from the 'pedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis

However, the whole point is to STAY ahead of the other naval powers. Most every country today has helicopters, submarines, battle tanks, etc. The pertinent detail here is that the quality of the US's arsenal is often a generation (and sometimes quite a bit more!) ahead of its opponents. This is a major reason as to why the US has lost so comparatively few soldiers in combat since Viet Nam. Being able to dominate the battlefield by technology has been necessary since Og used a rock against Mog instead of a his bare hands, and history is full of examples of countries that didn't keep up with the curve. This is just another wrung on the never-ending technology ladder.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[CrimsonAvenger]

Conventional ships guns...and they have about as much range now as they are ever going to get, everyone is agreed there.

Note the Paris Gun. Used in WW1, effective range 130km (80+ miles), muzzle velocity 1640 m/s (comparable to modern DS rounds).

In other words, everyone doesn't agree. Yes, railguns are better for the purpose, for a lot of reasons. But it's not impossible to build conventional cannon that outrange anything currently in use - it can be done with WW1 technology, after all....

By the by, do you know what the primary advantage of a railgun is? No, it's not super-high muzzle velocity. it's elimination of the powder charge. Since the powder charge for a modern (defined as post-WW1) artillery piece is larger than the projectile, that more than doubles (more than triples for most artillery) your ammo capacity. And that's not even counting the space taken up by the fire-suppression system and armor protecting the powder magazines.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[dywolf]

Currently railguns have about the same muzzle velocity as a WW2 battleship cannon

Not even close to true.

The typical muzzle velocity of a typical 16 or 18in gun was around 2500 ft/s.
The Navy's railgun has already surpassed Mach 6, or >6600 ft/s.

No, the railguns the Navy is developing are quite definitely hypersonic and have been for some time.
Not "at some point the in future", but right now.

Re:Lasers are easy to stop

[swillden]

How is that fancy laser going to work when the enemy uses a smoke screen? Or a mirror?

Plus every cat on the battlefield is going to be chasing it.

Not after they catch it.

If only the UK navy could follow suit

[Viol8]

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.

Re:If only the UK navy could follow suit

[stealth_finger]

What do we need a large navy for now?

That is what they were saying after WW1 then look what happened. I'm not saying there's a big war round the corner or anything but we need a large decent navy for when we need a large decent navy.

Re:If only the UK navy could follow suit

[Xest]

I used to think they were overpriced too, but apparently a couple of HS2 trains will cost as much as one of those aircraft carriers.

Now I can't figure out if the aircraft carriers are a fantastic bargain or the HS2 rolling stock is one of the biggest government orchestrated thefts from the public purse to private business in history.

Re:If only the UK navy could follow suit

[Xest]

Yep, the exact same arguments were being made about the F-22 and Eurofighter. "Why do we need these high tech planes when all we're doing is bombing mud huts in Afghanistan?".

Those planes look like kind of a good idea now we have Russia flying within miles and sometimes literally outright breaching sovereign NATO airspace again with it's probing patrols in the Baltic, the North Sea, and English channel and with transponders off and no response to communications. We're also finding those mud huts are right in the middle of a high tech Syrian air defence network too.

So it's kind of a good thing we didn't listen to the naysayers and did decide to keep up with our 4.5th gen and 5th gen fighter programs after all.

Some people don't understand that you have a military that's prepared for what might happen, not what is happening or has happened in the past.

Re:Not eliminating all "gunpowder"

[jabuzz]

Yes they are, an aluminium slug impacting the ground at say Mach 15 does not need any gunpowder to create a large hole in the ground or destroy a building, the kinetic energy of the projectile will do that all by itself.

Re:Or you could try more Diplomacy?

[Black Parrot]

They need to update gunboat diplomacy to railgunboat diplomacy.

Have you tried diplomacy with the Jihadists?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Or you could try more Diplomacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

You do not understand diplomacy. It is not about winning it is about balance of power. A trade agreement which is favor of, lets say, the US and the other side must pay, then this will result sooner or later in less respect for the US. In the end they hate the US for being rude and brutal even without weapons. However, this is the diplomacy the US normally does. And often it is not only not in the interest of the other nation, it is also not in the interest of the general population in the US.

All would be much better when the US would be able to learn to be less imperial. And yes, the Chinese try to be the same. That will also not help to have stable world politics.

Re:Laser on Gatling gun configuration

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing! You have described exactly how these things don't work!

I couldn't have done it better myself!

Re:Or you could try more Diplomacy?

[Neil Boekend]

War is diplomacy by crude means.

Re:Beating physics

[serviscope_minor]

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.

ISIS just burned a man alive

[Crashmarik]

Please explain to them your concept of diplomacy.

Re:Or you could try more Diplomacy?

[Crashmarik]

I am sure he actually understood. He just wanted to take the chance to make an idiotic comment about the U.S. to what he hoped would be a receptive audience. I mean it takes a truly special person not to notice just how much the U.S. engages with all the other nations of the world.

Re: Not eliminating all "gunpowder"

[Anonymous Coward]

Naval gun propellant charges now use LOVA propellants (originally developed for tank and SPA munitions). These are RDX, and later, HMX-based formulations. Nitrocellulose is old-school; it went out with the last battleships. I know. I worked at NSWCIH on the project. You fail current knowledge forever.

Re:Beating physics

[BitZtream]

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.

Re:Beating physics

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:Beating physics

[mujadaddy]

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.