241–250 of 277 posts
Get the projectile up to mach 33 and it can shoot satellites out of orbit from the ground.
It's going to be interesting to see non-state actors get their hands on a railgun. Possibly handed by a state actor, of course.
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…
The concept is the same for any projectile weapon: I'm going to convert stored energy into kinetic energy. 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 stora…
Rail guns can be powered by IC engines saving you carrying oxidizer around which is really heavy and dangerous. Many ships where destroyed when their gunpowder magazines detonated, sometimes outside of battle.
Rail guns can also be powered by Nuclear which is extremely compelling of your ship is already going to have a Nuclear Reactor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...huge battleship guns ... were slow to fire ... I was curious about how fast battleships could actually fire, so I googled around and found a couple stats. On an Iowa class battleship: - Armed with nine 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 guns [1] - Each 16" gun is quoted as having a firing rate of 2 rounds per minute [2] - Each shell weighed between 1900lbs / 865kg and 2700lbs / 1225kg pounds [3] So math says 2 rounds/minute…
Interesting but I don't think that's sustained fire. You see crazy him rpm for firearms. The rate of fire is restricted by the magazine size (ship guns do have magazines) and how fast the gun can cool. The US Army changed the barrel of the M4 Carbine (automatic rifle) after some troops during a sustained defense of some hill had barrels failing after glowing white hot. Machine guns often have barrels that can be repl…
Barrel heating is indeed a problem.
Some forgotten limitations of railguns: There is a maximum speed for projectiles in naval warfare. Earth is round. So anything moving too fast (~8000m/s) simply cannot hit distant targets. If fired horizontally, the shell will climb up as the earth curves away. This causes all sorts of difficulties if trying to attack another ship. At best, your shells will hit horizontally, far above the waterline. You would need a…
This loss of velocity applies to all rounds costing long rang shots significant energy. However, a larger issue in anti ship combat is travel time. A WWII round fired at 820m/s at a target 24 miles away spent almost 90 seconds in flight. Higher velocity means flatter trajectories and vastly less time in flight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You put it well. The problem of of putting energy into projectiles caused a move from kenetic to chemical weapons (missiles). But delivering chemicals to a target is expensive and at some point scaling it up becomes politically dangerous (you cannot just lauch even a conventional icbm without all sorts of risks). Scaling up kenetic weapons ended up with huge battleship guns that did almost as much damage to the ship…
Point of order in the definitions here: an explosive projectile is still a kinetic weapon and is not NOT a chemical weapon. A chemical weapon causes chemistry to happen in/on the target: mustard gas, VX nerve gas, etc. This is not my opinion. This is widely accepted and a matter of many international treaties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theoretically you could have a projectile with downforce. This would allow you to break that limit. I imagine it's highly impractical though. I hadn't thought of that limit though, good comment!
Then it needs to fly, which means it cannot be spinning. And it probably needs some internal mechanisms to control that flying. Now it is more a hypervelocity drone than a inert kinetic impactor.
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…
The concept is the same for any projectile weapon: I'm going to convert stored energy into kinetic energy. 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 stora…
no kidding, and that's understating it. Look at the kilojoules (or watt-hours) per kilogram in one litre of diesel versus one kilogram of lithium ion batteries, or one volumetric litre of li ion batteries. It's significantly greater.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This has been discussed before but to summarize, it doesn't work that way. I realize you didn't say "into orbit" but it is a reasonable place to start. The disadvantage of 'gun' type launch systems are that they only get one shot at putting energy into the system and they have to do that at low altitude where the air is thickest (the biggest impediment to going fast) as a result your space craft leaves the gun and go…
Some forgotten limitations of railguns: There is a maximum speed for projectiles in naval warfare. Earth is round. So anything moving too fast (~8000m/s) simply cannot hit distant targets. If fired horizontally, the shell will climb up as the earth curves away. This causes all sorts of difficulties if trying to attack another ship. At best, your shells will hit horizontally, far above the waterline. You would need a…
Article references a goal of achieving a 100 mile range? How do they plan on doing that then?
[1]https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.military.com/defensetech/20...
No mention of China. I wonder if the revival of this is due to China's railgun developments.
I find this invention will solve our problems. Just point at China, fire the gun, and all problems solved. Just kidding, seriously what do we point it at? And what problem will it solve after it's been fired? Also why are we not competing on high speed rail technology? Why do we always have to beat a country with military technology given how completely useless most of it is.
The US competes at the top in dozens of other categories, from aerospace to biotech to software to agriculture to semiconductors to spacetech to medtech. Why should we need to compete in high-speed rail technology?
It's the last problem the US has. There's no need to dominate everything - as no nation practically can anyway - just buy Japan's excellent high-speed rail tech. If the US were going to build a national high-speed rail network, it would be best served to buy that tech elsewhere rather than reinventing the wheel, so as to save money and time. The high-speed rail that gets built in Texas for example should probably use Japanese tech:
June 2019: "Japan's 'supreme' bullet train aims to impress Texas with speed"
"The real audience for the demonstration, however, was the stakeholders of a privately constructed high-speed rail line in the U.S. state of Texas connecting the cities of Dallas and Houston."
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Japan-s-supreme-b...