131–140 of 277 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you hit a railgun with a railgun? Why wouldn't countries build massive anti-ship railguns to prevent any such ship from getting even close to their naval facilities?
> Could you hit a railgun with a railgun? "Smaller than a missile". You could, but it's harder.
As usual, I find the music in all of the linked videos delusional, as if this high-tech killing machine was created to astonish patriotic five-year-olds. For the sake of analogy, someone should overlay the same music to the engineering of a-bombs and gas chambers.
I agree on at least the first half of your statement. Although I'm not sure I'd say 'delusional' as much as - I don't know? - Jingoistic? Bombastic? I feel like I should be playing Command and Conquer to that sound track. At the end of the day, these are killing machines that are being designed to take human lives, and it does feel more than a bit inappropriate. I think that's what you're getting at with the latter h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean like going to space? There's some research but after everyone figured it that all humans inside would be instantly squished they started researching other avenues. The g forces are pretty large and would damage a lot of cargo too.
> would be instantly squished Not so. That's only for a very short launch. You would actually have a track a few miles long (probably up the side of a mountain) and launch using that. The g-forces would be very mild.
I did the math once, and a track from the Galapagos Islands to the peak of Chimborazo on the continent in Ecuador would do it.
I've never quite understood why we need to change technologies so completely to get the projectile moving faster. As in, why couldn't we do the same thing by just making a bigger explosion in the barrel? I assume there's some point of diminishing returns or inefficiency that makes it impractical, but I haven't been able to find a source that gives the math to explain it.
To make a bigger explosion you need a bigger barrel and more powder charges. Eventually you hit a limit where you simply can’t create enough pressure to propel the projectile faster and not turn the barrel into a pipe bomb. For the most part many guns have already hit their practical limit in this regard. There is a good reason why battleships fell out of favor other than the US being the only blue water navy after W…
I find the physics of rail guns pretty fascinating. For something nominally invented in world war 1 (1918) which is now "only a few years" away from possible deployment. We are talking literally a 100 years later. We went from powered flight to flying in orbit in less time, think about that. Is it a compelling weapons concept? Of course it is, you don't need explosives to shoot things that is pretty huge. Are wars ba…
Bow and arrow? Stored energy in the bow turned into kinetic energy in the arrow. Handgun/cannon/musket? Stored chemical energy in some compound, quickly converted into kinetic energy in the bullet via exploding.
A rail gun isn't much different- it's just a different means to store the energy (in electrical storage) and a different means to apply the energy to the projectile (magnets). The real problem is that these two changes require a lot of overhead in terms of gear to make it work. It's only worthwhile to do it if you intend to really, really add a lot of kinetic energy to something.
It's the same reason the electric car has taken 100 years to finally be worthwhile- chemical energy is much more dense and easy to convert into kinetic energy. Battery tech is only now catching up to the point that it's worth doing.
1) " The system charges for two minutes... " One shot per two minutes is pretty bad; the current 5" gun shoots 16-20 rounds per minute. 2) "...at speeds up to Mach 6." One of the issues with old school, large caliber naval guns was that the blast from the guns would damage or destroy equipment near the muzzle. (I was just reading Pursuit by Ludovic Kennedy, about the British pursuit of the Bismark, and (IIRC) one shi…
I'm positive that at the very least they've got plans for making the version fire faster than one shot ever 2 min in a production model, even if that means throwing 16 times the hardware / capacity at the charging and cooling components.
1) " The system charges for two minutes... " One shot per two minutes is pretty bad; the current 5" gun shoots 16-20 rounds per minute. 2) "...at speeds up to Mach 6." One of the issues with old school, large caliber naval guns was that the blast from the guns would damage or destroy equipment near the muzzle. (I was just reading Pursuit by Ludovic Kennedy, about the British pursuit of the Bismark, and (IIRC) one shi…
No, beyond the initial propellant. The projectile accelerates constantly (hand waving here) so it's a constant force on the origin (relative mass should make this a wash), whereas the projectile enjoys exponential velocity. Two minutes is pretty short, I'm actually blown away. If only we could all charge our electric vehicles that quickly.
I've never quite understood why we need to change technologies so completely to get the projectile moving faster. As in, why couldn't we do the same thing by just making a bigger explosion in the barrel? I assume there's some point of diminishing returns or inefficiency that makes it impractical, but I haven't been able to find a source that gives the math to explain it.
Explosives are really dangerous to carry around. Go looking through the fates of ships lost in WWI and II (last time there was a fair amount of ship combat going on) and there's an awful lot of "several rounds hit but everything was basically fine, except then one hit the magazine, blowing the ship in two and sinking her", or a fire starting and doing something similar, or a smaller cache of explosives readied for im…
In the Battle of Jutland (The largest naval battle of WWI), the Royal Navy lost three capital ships (Two battlecruisers and a heavy cruiser) to single shells that struck their gun turrets, detonating their ammo magazines.
The gun turrets were, in theory, supposed to be sealed off, by blast doors, from their magazines - but in order to increase fire rates, it was standard practice to leave those doors open in combat.
The Germans, not being suicidal lunatics, kept equivalent blast doors closed, which is why none of their capital ships went up in flames, despite taking a lot more damage.
Does anyone know why there is a flash of light and a puff of smoke when the gun fires? Since it's electromagnetic, you'd think you wouldn't see anything.