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US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

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Re: US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend overlaid an EDM track (Flux Pavilion if I recall) on the original test fire videos from several years ago when the prototype was located at the Virginia test site. I enjoyed the short piece of creative they remixed in the same way I enjoyed the Iron Man franchise. It’s a killing machine, but the engineer in me still deeply appreciates the advanced technology these systems are based on (energy/thermal managem…

> "SpaceX vehicles are a firmware update away from being high precision ICBMs" While strictly speaking true, as an ICBM booster the Falcon 9 would be going on 6 decades obsolete. Cryogenic propellants for ICBMs have been obsolete since the early 60s.

Can you reach close to the payload of a falcon 9 with dry rockets though?

Re: US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

#182
post #88
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but missiles have to propel themselves, are very large compared to railgun projectiles, and are easier to break apart by putting a heavy wall of lead in the air. Railgun projectiles have none of these disadvantages. They don't need propellant (or a warhead; the energy delivered upon impact is more than sufficient to break things without needing to explode), they're a solid projectile (and as such can't be as ea…

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?

You could hit a rail with a rail ... it would need to be a great shot though.

Re: US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you hit a railgun with a railgun? "Smaller than a missile". You could, but it's harder.

Indeed, we don't typically resort to shooting bullets at bullets to defend incoming gunfire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure)

(Granted, it's more anti-missile than anti-bullet)

Re: US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

#184
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the hardest. Bit less than Tungsten so pretty hard but far from hardest. It is used because it is really really dense and hard enough. Perfect for piercing armor.

So perfect for a railgun projectile? :) What is the hardest man-made substance?

Artificial diamond? But it doesn't matter - you don't actually want something hard because you don't actually want it to go all the way through and out the other side. You want it to dump all that lovely kinetic energy into whatever it's hit.

Re: US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

#185

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…

Reminds me of the electric car tech, in a way. I remember reading somewhere on HN that when the cars were initially gaining traction, electric engines were an option already, even with some prototypes. The issue was that the battery tech wasn't quite there to make it efficient and have any mileage compared to gas powered cars. So we went the gas route. And only within the past 5 years, we got a sign of electric cars…

Yes, similar and it was more than batteries, it was also magnets and car materials Etc. Batteries are an important part of that (and still the weak link given relatively long charge times) but it would be a disservice to a Model 3 to say that if you had LiIon batteries in the 70's you could have built one then.

Re: US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

#186
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "SpaceX vehicles are a firmware update away from being high precision ICBMs" While strictly speaking true, as an ICBM booster the Falcon 9 would be going on 6 decades obsolete. Cryogenic propellants for ICBMs have been obsolete since the early 60s.

Can you reach close to the payload of a falcon 9 with dry rockets though?

[deleted]

Re: US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

#187
post #170
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"shoot satellites out of orbit", not "into orbit"

Same fundamental problem.

Not really. Orbit isn't just about getting up there. It's about moving fast enough when you are up there.

To destroy something in orbit, you just need to get the projectile up there. You don't also have to get it up to escape velocity.

Re: US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

#188
post #170
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"shoot satellites out of orbit", not "into orbit"

Same fundamental problem.

No. If your projectile reaches altitude of target satellite with 0 velocity, hangs for a moment and starts to fall down, but then is impacted at relative velocity of kilometers per second by a satellite, your weapon (or Kessler syndrome trigger) works. It doesn't need orbital velocity at altitude, only the altitude. That is a lot lower energy!

Re: US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

#189
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "SpaceX vehicles are a firmware update away from being high precision ICBMs" While strictly speaking true, as an ICBM booster the Falcon 9 would be going on 6 decades obsolete. Cryogenic propellants for ICBMs have been obsolete since the early 60s.

Can you reach close to the payload of a falcon 9 with dry rockets though?

An ICBM doesn't need to. An ICBM does not need to be that large. Being reliable and on demand is much more important than payload capacity. A Minuteman-III can launch with minutes of notice; you don't need to fool around with fueling it on the launchpad for a hour or more before launching it, or any of that nonsense. Because it requires less launch infrastructure, you can launch it from a greater range of locations. Being small also aids in this since it's a lot easier to move around the country. What's more, a Minuteman-III is $7 million a pop, which is a fraction of the going rate for a Falcon 9 launch.

So if your aim is to chuck nukes, a Minuteman-III is plainly superior to a Falcon 9 in every respect save payload. What about payload then? A Minuteman-III can carry up to three warheads with hundreds of kilotons of power each. That's a lot of damage. The Peacekeeper missile, removed from service in 2005, could deliver up to 10 warheads. Of course that cost more, a little more than a Falcon 9 launch, but still had the advantages of being a solid fuel rocket. Still in service, the submarine launched Trident-II can carry as many as 8-14 reentry vehicles, but in practice is limited by various treaties to a fraction of that. If there was the political willpower to violate those treaties and have an ICBM carrying more warheads than either the Minuteman-III or Trident-II currently carry, they would simply put more warheads onto the Trident-II. That'd be a lot simpler than re-purposing the Falcon 9, and a lot more useful.

Something else to consider though is range. Minuteman-III has enough range to hit Russia from the North, but not from the South. That might seem like a pretty severe limitation, but that's actually the way people want things to remain. Back in the 60s the Soviets designed something called the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS). Basically, it was an ICBM capable of putting the warhead into orbit, giving it unlimited range. So, in essence, Russia could nuke America over the South Pole, instead of the North Pole, thereby bypassing all of the early warning systems that were looking North. Because this system was seen as a way of bypassing early warning systems, it was seen as a first strike weapon and therefore a destabilizing force. These sort of systems are now prohibited by treaty, and Falcon 9 would be in violation if it were an ICBM. But as a first strike weapon, a Falcon 9 is pretty shit. They take a long time to load and fuel, and their launch sites are high profile. A first strike is all about having the element of surprise; in an Falcon 9 FOBS/ICBM scenario, there are too many opportunities for detection. Particularly when you remember that SSBNs exist.

(There is another option though. The first ICBMs (as well as the Falcon 9) used cryogenic liquid propellants, and modern ICBMs use solid propellant, but in between these two technologies was a third: storable liquid propellants. The Titan II ICBM for instance burned aerozine and n204, both of which are liquids at room temperature, therefore the Titan II can be stored in a fueled state, ready to fly. These missiles could fly on very short notice, but they're also pretty dangerous to be around.)

Re: US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

#190

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…

I think the interesting use case would be to put things into space for a lot less money. Imagine putting one or many of those new Space X internet satellites into a rail gun that goes straight up. It doesn't need to go all the way into space, it just needs to get pretty high, then the cost to break into orbit can require a lot less fuel and make it a lot more cost effective to do space stuff.

Two problems with that: going up is only 3% of the energy that is required. The other 97% is "going fast enough sideways to stay up". The other problem, even if you angle your shot, is that you need to raise the perigee so that your orbit doesn't intersect the launch site anymore. These two things combined mean that you would have to railgun a rocket that is still about half the size of a rocket that takes of normally. And liquid filled rocket would NOT like or withstand a rail gun launch. But you have should bought yourself TWO major technological problems: rocketry and rail guns. That is not economical at all. Much easier to make the rocket a bit larger (you need to develop a rocket anyway) and get rid of the complexity introduced by the rail gun.
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