Navy railgun with 220 mile range closer to reality

[Eugene]

Source: CNET

January 30, 2012 10:02 AM

Navy railgun with 220 mile range closer to reality

By Daniel Terdiman

(CNET)

Imagine a Naval gun so powerful it can shoot a 5-inch projectile up to 220 miles, yet requires no explosives to fire.

That's the Navy's futuristic electromagnetic railgun, a project that could be deployed on the service's ships by 2025, and which is now a little bit closer to reality with the signing of a deal with Raytheon for the development of what's known as the pulse-forming network.

Rather than using explosives to fire projectiles as do conventional naval weapons, the railgun depends on an electromagnetic system that uses the ship's onboard electrical power grid to fire the gun. The pulse-forming network is a system that stores up electrical power and then converts it to a pulse that is directed into the gun's barrel, explained John Cochran, the railgun program manager in Raytheon's Advanced Technology Group.

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While Raytheon has scored the $10 million project to develop the pulse-forming network, it isn't the only contractor working on such a system. According to Roger Ellis, the program manager for the Railgun program at the Office of Naval Research, the Navy has awarded similar contracts to BAE Systems and General Atomics in a risk-reduction strategy that counts on having multiple contractors attacking a problem in order to arrive at the best possible technology.

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Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57368128/navy-railgun-with-220-mile-range-closer-to-reality/

[MADem]

1. Fascinating. At those speeds, though, you don't wanna be in the way.

...the process is akin to that of a car's starter, and how turning the ignition sends a jolt of electricity into the solonoid, which then creates a magnetic field in the solonoid/starter system. With the railgun, he said, current is sent into the barrel, forming a magnetic field, and that, in combination with the current, exerts force on a projectile, firing it out of the barrel. At Mach 0.75.

[denverbill]

2. WTF do we need that for?

I seriously don't think a projectile hurled 250 miles is going to land anywhere close to what it's aimed at. At 1% miss would land 2 miles away from the target. I doubt the target would even hear the explosion. And between imprecise aiming, wind, rain, humidity, clouds, etc, I think a 1% miss is a near certainty.

Why are we wasting money on this crap? What could it possibly be used for?

[arcane1]

3. We need the three $10-million contracts

We can't have that money going to waste on useful things!

[ret5hd]

4. i don't know anything about this, but i don't think anything precludes the projectile...

having a guidance system, even if it's just fins and a rudder.

on edit:
as to your question about need: i got nuthin'.

[RC]

6. What could it possibly be used for?

What else, Killing people. Shelling cities. You know the next "Shock and Awe", to prove how Superior we are.

[Old and In the Way]

7. Well, eliminating gunpowder stores would be a good thing.

Don't know if that's a primary reason for developing this, but it would certainly seem to be a side benefit.

[jeff47]

9. 1) Eliminates need to carry as many explosives - good for sailors not going 'boom'.

2) MUCH cheaper per projectile than missiles - It's kind of silly to destroy $10k worth of stuff with a $10M missile
3) This "gun" should require far less maintenance than a conventional gun, so it will save money on that end too.

[provis99]

14. if it is not a guided missle, it ain't going to hit anything.

total waste of money.

[jeff47]

18. And why do you assume the final product won't be guided?

Once the launcher's done, you can launch anything with a magnetic casing. No reason you couldn't use a guided munition - which would still be cheaper than a guided missile.

[krispos42]

19. I'll bet a dollar it's launching guided projectiles

5" guided shells. Like a JDAM... GPS guided, maybe with laser guidance as a backup. Or maybe in the air-to-air role, some sort of infrared or active-radar seeker.

So it's faster than a cruise missile, and lots cheaper, and a ship can store a bunch more of them than missiles. Plus, if there's a fire, there is no fuel to burn.

Not that roasting warheads are any great barrel of laughs, but if the choice is warheads or warheads AND rocket motors...


Cruise missiles enable cheap, light launchers for expensive missiles. They give small ships and planes and ground vehicles a whallop way out of proportion to their size.

Stuff like a railgun enable cheap, light ammunition for expensive guns. The range of a cruise missile, but the projectiles move faster and the ship can store more of them.


The question remains... how many rounds per minutes can it pump out?

Is this a slow, precision-strike kind of railgun? Can it deal with a saturation cruise-missile attack?



It's undoubtedly the future, though.

[bemildred]

5. 0.75 Mach doesn't seem that fast, sub-sonic.

I don't see how that is going to carry 220 miles.

[montanto]

16. I think they meant to say 7.5

[bemildred]

17. That would be more impressive. nt

[Glassunion]

23. I agree it was a typo...

In one of the articles linked from the story they did state over Mach 7.

[JohnnyRingo]

8. It sounds like Raethon is reaching for govt money on something we don't need.

But that's their job, after all.
In this case, it's an idea first explored and abandoned during WWII.

Does this mean Raethon plans to pull cruise missiles that do the same thing better with longer range and fly-by-wire capabilities? I don't think so either. I think they're just out of good ideas for weapons systems and don't want their allocation of tax dollars to get scaled back.

[msongs]

10. wow it's 1917 all over again...with better technology nt

[bemildred]

12. Who can forget the "Paris Gun"?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=105&topic_id=1814431&mesg_id=1819054

[Botany]

11. Pissing money away

The Navy already has a weapon that can go more than twice as fast
as the railgun and go much further than 220 miles too.

How about spending the money and research on solar energy?

[AnOhioan]

13. Proudly brought to you by the military-industrial complex.....Long live the Empire

What a colossal waste.

[Maven]

15. USA...#1 in creative ways to kill people

[cbrer]

20. And so it goes...

This gun will definitely make a serious boom. Mach .75 = sonic kablooie! Expanding airwaves won't make the classic sonic "boom", but trust me, you're not going to want to be next to this thing when they energize the coils.

However, as happens quite regularly in the defense business, there are alternate applications of this technology that could produce a huge boon to the space program. I know they shelved NASA. But this thing can launch any ferrous object fast and far. Allowances for fragile human tissue of course, if manned. Cheaper than solid fuel, but with a set of it's own issues. Start up costs are sky high (literally, you escape much of the friction coefficient losses at higher altitude). The length of the mag. tube grows to achieve escape velocity. So launch locations would probably be high and long. Preferably running east to west. Mountain ranges/ ridgelines... Takes advantage of earth's rotational velocity.

It just seriously sucks that this comes about due to improving technology for killing people, and going deeper into debt to get there.

[malakai2]

21. Check out Youtube for more videos

A range of up to 220ish miles, perhaps as many as 6 or 8 shots per minute. I'm guessing they'd more typically be firing at shorter ranges and a slower rate of fire.

One benefit is that, as already pointed out in the thread, there is no powder involved and so it's theoretically safer for sailors to fire. That is, as long as they figure out how to moderate the energy pulse for repeated shots without catastrophic rail failure. Another benefit that was pointed out is that this is theoretically much cheaper than missiles or aircraft, because once built it operates on a platform that will already be deployed to the target area and will use electricity generated by the power plant inside the ship to put rounds on targets. If the projectiles are primarily iron and don't contain some expensive metal or other then they should be a lot less expensive than multiple multi-million dollar missiles or a flight out and back with a plane that fires similar missiles. This doesn't leave unexploded ordinance laying around, and as long as a shot is accurate shouldn't have nearly the effect on civilians that happen to be in the area.

I don't think they could put a functional guidance system on these things. The principle of a railgun is that the projectile itself completes an electrical circuit by bridging the gap between the rails, physically touching both, and using the resulting magnetic fields of the rails to push the perpendicular magnetic field of the projectile out of the barrel - that's how they are able to accelerate a chunk of metal from stationary to mach 7.5 in the distance of a few tens of feet without explosives. I would think guidance systems inside the projectile would be fried when the weapon fired and/or damaged by the rapid acceleration.

[Angleae]

22. Slower RoF yes, shorter range not so much.

They want this thing so they can hit a target 100-150 miles inland with a GPS guided round. This is the requirement the navy has for this weapon, without meeting it , they won't deploy it.