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

[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

[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

[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

[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: 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.