161–170 of 277 posts
Get the projectile up to mach 33 and it can shoot satellites out of orbit from the ground.
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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…
It isn't only that, with a powder charge you are pushing the projectile with an explosion. That explosion will also cause a disturbance on a ship, until you get to a pretty enormous size, you have to calculate that into your trajectories. With a railgun, you have a series of magnets pulling a projectile forward incrementally faster. It's a lot less energy wasted into the environment, meaning a lot less energy put bac…
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Does a coilgun have any advantages over a railgun?
Amateur railgun builders comment about the projectiles welding themselves to the rails; that certainly doesn’t happen in a coilgun. I think there’s also a big problem with supplying extremely high currents, which you can circumvent a bit in a coilgun by having more turns of wire.
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…
The UK projected and fought a conventional blue-water naval war in the 80s.
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There's no way other than weapons engineering to make those discoveries?
In the same vein, as an industry, pornography really improved computer storage density and video codecs whereas electronic trading really improved the tech to reduce networking latency. Virtually all engineering benefits from other engineering that came before it. There are plenty of other ways, but this is how it is. Most all of what NASA does or has ever done has directly benefited the Department of Defense. Does t…
People often overstate this. For instance, when pointing out that the Mercury and Gemini programs used ICBM boosters, people sometimes insinuate that NASA was in fact developing those rockets for the military and all the manned spaceflight stuff was just a nice cover story to make the rockets seem benign. In fact, the rockets were already in military use by the time NASA got their hands on them. Those IBCMs were not created using NASA as a PR cover-story. They were weapons from day one which were later repurposed for civilian use.
Another big example is the Saturn V. Unlike it's predecessors, it was never an ICBM. NASA designed that one from the ground up for lifting people. Of course there are more military applications for rockets than implementing ICBMs. Satellites have obvious military applications, so any sort of space launch technology will have military applications and anybody who advances the state of the art for launching satellites will be, in that sense, contributing to the advance of military technology.
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…
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.
Sadly, news these days involves a lot of "we've invented , to kill people that disagree with us". Often the word "disagree" is replaced with "undermine" or "threaten". It's all the same human-life-ending bullshit. I don't feel at home in this world any more. When I was 18, I enlisted in the armed services and "did my part" as people often say. What a fucking mistake, I'm humiliated and embarrassed every single day to…
?? Sadly, news these days involves a lot of "we've invented , to kill people that disagree with us".....The modern-day me wishes I could go back to the 18-year-old me and
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I am not foolish enough to predict the future, nor what said future will demand of us. Two nuclear weapons ended World War 2. Seconded guessing hard decisions is a privilege of existing in the future after those decisions were made, a privilege that one might not otherwise have had. Do you feel better about using a nuclear weapon over a chemical weapon? Why or why not? Once death is assured, we’re just arguing time a…
> Seconded guessing hard decisions is a privilege of existing in the future after those decisions were made, a privilege that one might not otherwise have had I dunno... I think a very small percentage of people alive at the time of using nuclear weapons on Japan would have actually done so. My own opinion is that the same percentage today would advocate for using nuclear weapons on another populace. The problem is t…
Ever talked to any older Asians from nations who were occupied by the Japanese before and during the war? They would have happily used as many as the United States was willing to provide.
It's amazing how many people forget the immense scale of the atrocities that the Japanese committed before and during WWII, eclipsing even that of the Germans.