Navy’s Magnetic Super Gun To Make Mach 7 Shots At Sea In 2016

[Jgarrick]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/04/navys-magnetic-super-gun-to-make-mach-7-shots-at-sea-in-2016-adm-greenert/

NATIONAL HARBOUR: 23 pounds ain’t heavy. But it sure hurts when it hits you going at seven times the speed of sound. That’s what a prototype Navy weapon called a “rail gun” can do, and it does it without a single gram of gunpowder or rocket fuel — just electricity. For many missions, a rail gun is better not just than current cannon but than the laser weapons the Navy is testing this summer in the Persian Gulf (I’ll explain why in a minute). And, after years in development and hundreds of test shots on land — see the video for a small sample of the destruction — the rail gun is finally going to go to sea.

“We’re beyond lab coats, we’re into engineering now,” Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the Chief of Naval Operations, told the audience at the Navy League’s annual megaconference here, Sea-Air-Space 2014. “It’s going on a Joint High Speed Vessel in 2016.” Just in time for the Navy’s biggest gathering of the year, the Sea-Air-Space conference, the Navy released this video and issued new details of the test plan. Both rail gun prototypes will be shown off to the public in San Diego this summer, aboard the new Joint High Speed Vessel USNS Millinocket. Then the Navy will install either the BAE Systems prototype or the General Atomics one — that hasn’t been decided — on Millinocket for at-sea test shots in 2016.

It’s a crawl-walk-run approach, however. The 2016 tests will only involve one shot at a time. Firing multiple rounds in a row will wait for another series of tests in 2018. Actually installing a rail gun permanently on a combat ship — Millinocket is a transport with a civilian crew — is even further in the future. Meanwhile, while one prototype or the other is doing the tests at sea, BAE is already working on a “Phase II” rail gun with such improvements as an automatic multi-loader for rapid fire and better heat control so rapid fire doesn’t melt the barrel. (General Atomics didn’t win a Phase II contract).

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials have been impressed with the Navy’s tests and are exploring the idea of a land-based version of the rail gun for missile defense, a mission currently performed by expensive and often unreliable anti-missile missiles. So why do rail guns matter, besides generating cool clickable video? Three words: impact, range, and reloads.

(excerpt, remainder of article at link)

[Recursion]

1. Ooh we helped with a prototype of that in grad school

It was at BU; we kept begging our prof to let us just point the damn thing north across the Charles at MIT...

[A HERETIC I AM]

18. MIT probably had an anti-rail gun prototype reflectorizer.

Because....you know.... The "T" part.

[Warren DeMontague]

2. Oh, hell yeah.

So when do we get one designed to shoot stuff low-cost into Orbit, or maybe off the surface of the moon?

[pinboy3niner]

4. The plan is to shoot AT the moon

It's the mop-up after the bombing campaign.

[neverforget]

6. Somebody has to bomb the moon

It's up there, mocking us, getting bigger and brighter every month and then fading away. It's just begging us to bomb it.

[pinboy3niner]

8. It's a controversial issue

Support for bombing seems to wax and wane, for some reason. You can't explain that!

[neverforget]

9. Like the tides......you can't explain that!

Falafel Bill

[NBachers]

17. But I think the tide is turning

The gravity of the situation must be considered.

[pinboy3niner]

19. There are no neap answers. People just go by whatebber floats their boat.

At least, that's what the latest Gallup Pull shows.

[NBachers]

22. Well, we need to overcome the lunatics baying through their media outlets.

[pinboy3niner]

23. Backed by their scientific understanding, they see moon bombing as just swell

"No harm in a little fondue."

[Warren DeMontague]

13. pass the word along.

[Orrex]

33. Nice post, Mike.

Oh, wait. Those were fired from the moon.

[Arcanetrance]

3. That's really cool I know this is going to completely reveal my inner nerd

But back in high school I used to play an RPG called rifts and had a character with power armor and a rail gun

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. Battletech also used them

[DetlefK]

25. You are mixing up railguns and coilguns.

The Gauss from BT is a coilgun, a projectile inside a spool.
The railgun accelerates the projectile while it slides on a track that emits the magnetic field.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun

[nadinbrzezinski]

29. I used to write for them, so depends on the decade

Truly.

The HPG and FTL also changed over the years. Hell Outreach changed places regularly.

I would never recommend anybody write for any gaming company, or even post on forums, like ever...but that has to do with the ethics challenge in the gaming industry. And that is another story.

[Baclava]

5. USNS Millinocket

that's a pretty big gun platform



http://www.navsea.navy.mil/teamships/PEOS_JHSV/JHSV3-launched.aspx

[kentauros]

30. I would suspect a fair amount of the interior space is for power generation

for the rail gun magnet-coils.

The Navy has also been investing more and more into Polywell Fusion. I'm sure they'd like to pair the two technologies.

[Baclava]

31. It's built for high speed - a catamaran

Description
The Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV) is a shallow draft, all aluminum, commercial-based Catamaran



The U.S. Navy’s third joint high-speed vessel also has a 20,000-square-foot open mission deck and an aviation flight deck.

Shallow-draft transports for troops, military vehicles and equipment, can carry 600 short tons and travel 1,200 nautical miles at an average speed of 35 knots.

They feature a 20,000-square-foot open mission deck, an aviation flight deck to support day and night air vehicle launch and recovery operations, and have berthing space for up to 42 crew members, 104 personnel, and airline-style seating for up to 312.



https://bangordailynews.com/2013/04/18/news/penobscot/usns-millinocket-to-be-christened-saturday/?ref=relatedBox

[pinboy3niner]

34. Thanks for the info

I was Army, so I tend to be a dunce on Navy and Air Force stuff.

[kentauros]

36. I noticed it was a Catamaran.

But that railgun is still going to need a fair amount of power generation, no matter what the ship or hull-configuration.

[undeterred]

7. Who we shootin'?

[Baclava]

10. aliens on the moon

it's about time we taught them a lesson

[pinboy3niner]

15. Well okay...but just the ones on the dark side

Those nervy bastards are recruiting!

[kentauros]

16. "That's no moon!"

[longship]

11. It was the best Doom! weapon.

When one got the rail gun, all the beasties died quickly. (Of course, the chain saw was pretty damned good for close in combat.)

Give me a rail gun and a chain saw and I'll be just fine.


Like the BFG-9000:

[undeterred]

12. Hey, can it find planes that end up at the bottom of the ocean?

Because we need somethin' like that.

[A HERETIC I AM]

21. No, but it can blast the shit out of them once you find it. N/T

[NBachers]

20. Arnold used the EM-1 (Electro Magnetic-1) rail gun in Eraser

Arnold teamed up with Tony Two-Toes and the Mafia and the Longshoreman's Union to protect America from the arms-dealing terrorists.


I love watching Joe Viterelli. He's like the Italian Danny Trejo.

[Savannahmann]

24. Got to love the Defense Industry

If you want a showy way to slaughter people and destroy things, our Defense Industry is without equal.

[RandoLoodie]

26. I fixed your type

. . . to slaughter BROWN people and destroy things,

[Blue_Adept]

27. Well, that's the point, isn't it?

If you're going to do it, do it the best way possible.

But it's also worth remembering that most defense projects end up with civilian applications and more, so it's not just a single-use kind of project.

Linkage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun#Applications

[Savannahmann]

28. Seriously?

Applications, like shooting things into space. Let's do a little theoretical exercise shall we? Satalites are designed for launch by rockets. These are normally less than five G forces, or five times the gravitational constant.

Design something that can be launched out of a rail gun barrel with sufficient force to acheive orbit, or even break the gravitational field of earth. Now, you might get a "dumb slug" chunk of alloy to do it. Assuming that the deflection from the atmosphere didn't cause it to change course significantly enough to fail to achieve orbit. But let's pretend that the atmosphere isn't a problem.

The G-Forces would be up over that of an automobile accident. Short readings of 100 G's have been read, and survived, in specially equipped race cars. But the acceleration of a rail gun round towards space would be way more than that. Any electronics inside the bloody thing would be powder in the can of the round. If the electronics were designed to handle the what, thousand or so G's of acceleration, they would be so large and robust that there wouldn't be room in the round for more than a small chip that went beep ala Sputnik.

So perhaps we could target asteroids that were going to hit the earth. Again, atmospheric deflection, that darned thing that makes stars twinkle, would be an issue. The Keck observatory uses lasers to measure the atmospheric interference, and ajust the mirrors constantly, when taking images of faint objects. So your rail gun would have to pound out thousands of rounds before one managed to hit the asteroid in question. Each round monitored and measuring the atmospheric deflection, and then you would have more atmospheric defleection from the passing of the round at several times the speed of sound.

I read one book where the railguns fired from orbit. One meter rounds fired at a planet. They had a deflection of over a kilometer. In other words, from the point of aim, the round could miss by as much as a 1,000 meters. Sure if you fire enough rounds, you'll eventually pound everything in the region to dust.

But to be honest here, to have an effective asteroid interception system, it would have to be space based. Darn that treaty that prohibits such things. Then the platforms would have limited ammunition. I mean, there is no such thing as unlimited ammunition except in Hollywood.

So the idea of using a rail gun to shoot things into orbit is romantic nonsense at best. The idea of using it to intercept asteroids is questionable at best. That leaves what the Navy is doing, planning on using it to slaughter people. I mean, kinetic energy is one of the most misunderstood of all the energy forces. NASA forgot how much kinetic energy things moving fast can have, hence the Columbia foam strike problem. The instinctive response was it's foam, you don't destroy your car running over it on the highway. But as we learned, even foam traveling fast enough can do catastrophic damage to an object.

So the only real use for the Rail Gun is to launch Kinetic Kill Rounds. Chunks of alloy traveling rather fast to do catastrophic damage to people and buildings. Which is why they are not seeing how far the round can go, but are seeing what kinds of things it can go through.

[pinboy3niner]

32. Mach 7? Pffft. That's nothing

My friends tell me I blow Mach 8 out of my ass.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

35. So, who will be the designated terrorists to use it on?

[SomethingFishy]

37. Yours for the low low price of

$240 million, plus $25,000 a shot... Way cheaper than a missile fired from a drone that could cost hundreds of thousands.

And if we buy wholesale death comes even cheaper!

We have to cut social programs because there is no money

Yeah. There. Is. No. Money.

Fuck. This.