Friday, February 01, 2008
Railgun prototype
It looks like the prototype for the Navy's rail-gun is operational. Once ship designs allow for the power-diversion necessary, this will put the concept naval bombardment back on the map, but without that "yeah, but they only carry x Tomahawks" problem! If it can be made fast-firing, at that speed it might feasibly even be useful for point defense!
22 comments:
Do you remember the board game "Leviathan", set in the very far future where the railguns were so large that they fired very dense metal slugs the size of boats at near relativisitic speeds? They called these rail guns "crowbars" because they literally opened up the ship that got hit by them.
These large guns produced for the Navy are far too big to be used in turrets right now, which means they make great bow weapons. Surface warfare with these will return to the opposite of old warfare. Instead of "crossing the T" to broadside a ship, you want to be crossed to you can cut the opponents ship in half.
Right now the only thing preventing this from being installed now is the power requirements, and eventually even this will be solved and once again we'll have a new weapon that completely changes tactics and strategy as we know it, much like robots and UAVs are doing it now. Really cool stuff!
I don't think so... the real advantage this gives isn't just power, but real range. With the errors inherent to that (azimuth, range), it's just as likely to be a potentially-murderous bow-to-bow engagement, with point defense, air power, etcetera, providing all the equalizers.
Power is no big deal if you have the banks of high-power caps; the only problem is designing the ship to be able to serve the cap-bank.
Russ's right: the big deal is that any frigate becomes an instrument of power-projection (the Navy's main doctrine, which's kept it so carrier-centric for so long).
It'd also be NASTY in a littoral fighting ship w/ a foot of armor (to shrug off exocets).
Well, don't forget the method this thing works. A railgun has great "direct" range (i.e. it shoots in a straight line), some work is going to be needed to make this work as an indirect fire weapon. For that you need something that can loft shells in an angle. For a ship to ship fight this thing works, for shore bombardment, not so much.
Related to the indirect fire issue - I wonder if one could use a rail gun for artillery purposes. Certainly if you can use the rail to magnetically move the round you don't have to have any propellant which means more payload for explosive. But - wouldn't the explosive have to be even more electrically/shock inert? To much electrical charge and the round might go off on the rail. Otherwise just kinetic energy doesn't seem like enough force upon impact to really serve as a replacement for a Tomahawk or HE round.
I may be missing something though. Since this is the Navy using this I would think it would be used for more than just ship to ship combat so that they can use it for shore bombardment and power projection, but there may be lots of other issues to work out besides just the capacitor and power requirements.
Mike: with enough power, I think indirect fire won't be a big deal. The thing that has me scratching my head is how to make it something that goes "boom" instead of something that goes "crash". But perhaps if you can pump enough energy into it, "crash" is enough?
That was my concern as well. You can do a lot of damage with just kinetic energy, especially if you can get the item to fragment upon impact. But you can't get all the heat energy and gas expansion force from this same mechanism. Further, any material that fragments on impact can fragment when getting fired at high speeds, which means it breaks apart upon exposure to high g forces in the rail gun.
Or, at least this makes sense to me based upon what I know of materials science and chemistry but I may be missing something very important.
In order to make enough Crash to offset the lack of Boom, you make it a more direct fire weapon which kills the indirect fire application. You could drop the speed to make just "heave" the round out to target, but in losing the extra energy you lose range and so on so normal artillery works just as well. The electrical aspect is another issue with this. Now using this as a Main Gun on something is another story, this would be the ultimate in armored vehicle killers or armored ship killers. Not a bad ADA weapon either. But you need to have straight shots, until the explosive and angle problems are fixed that is pretty much what you are going to have.
Lots of officially smart people are discussing this very problem over at Samizdata. My pretenses to being able to make a judgment call were exploded at about comment #5.
Mike: According to an article that I read, the plan for the full-powered version (over 50GJ!) is that the projectile will leave atmo for about four minutes before coming back down. With a nautical horizon of what, 13 miles, I can't imagine that this's LOS only.
Sorry, that should be 64MJ, not 50GJ. Even still, that's enough energy to supply one second's worth of power to a small-to-medium sized city.
Did you ever read Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns"? Your comment about 1 s of power for a city reminds me of the scene where Batman decides to take on Superman and the only way he can beat him is to have his (Batman's) powered armor suit hooked into, and consuming, the Gotham power grid.
Okay, having something like that shoot that high and and then have it fall to earth might not need a big boom to work.
The Samizdata folks were describing some of the math involved. Apparently it's perfectly sufficient if we hit people with *kittens* travelling at Mach 5...
KITTEN GUN! squee! I wants one! :)
Now that would be just outstanding. We could load pigs too and then REALLY piss off AQ.
Don't know why PsyOps hasn't spread the rumor that you've made FAE with pig fat. A very unclean bomb indeed.
The rumor wouldn't matter; apparently uncleanliness w/ pigs must result from choice -- if you're starving, for example, you can eat bacon. Go figure.
I just want a gun that can hit people with Mach-5 kitten-pulp (claws optional).
The rumor does matter to those who, if contaminated by pig matter, would become Haram rather than Halal.
And only you would want Mach 5 kitten pulp - you monster. Don't be surprised when your cats decide to mat, claws extended, on your groin some evening. :P
If you're going to throw something soft and gross at Mach 5, why not this?
"What's brown and at Mach 5 will ring you like a bell?"
"Dung!"
That is nasty. But I think a cow would be a nice taste of the classic (MP's Holy Grail). WE just need to have the gunner speak in a bad French accent.
Oooooo, or a wolverine. Even if you survive, the odds are the damn wolverine did too and now you get to deal with that. Badgers would do in a pinch.
I volunteer immediately. My French accent is particularly bad and highly insulting to the French and those who hear it.
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