General Atomics' new railgun

[Eja Cool8]

..another little taste of the future..

http://www.defense-aerospace.com/art...n-to-navy.html

[Eja Cool8]

America! Fuck yeah!

etc.

[Hot Soup]

General Atomics is a great name.

[PsYcHoKiLLa]

"Lower cost per kill"...Super, cheap murder!

[mr_o]

Cheap aaaaand long range.

Any date for them actually putting one on a ship?

[Eja Cool8]

I think they'd like to get one or two on the new Zumwalt Destroyers, but the first in class is still years away from service. They might try and shoehorn one into an Arleigh Burke, but I've no idea if one of those can supply enough leccy power in the system to fire one sustainably in combat.

[mr_o]

142 still seems a larger crew than what they were aiming for on these generations of ship is it not?

Rail guns are just sick. Over 100 miles with an accuracy of 2m is mental for a prototype. Up to 250miles on a production version with an accuracy of 3-5m is just absolutely amazing/insane. I worked out on a scrap of paper (so no guarantees!) that the shell would take approx 3-4 minutes to travel that far.

[Eja Cool8]

Aye, when you think about the 'reach-out-and-touch' factor with these things, combined with a hefty TLAM capability, plus embarked SEAL teams with their equipment, it's a pretty impressive beast.

Unfortunately, unless the US economy improves dramatically, and quickly, then just like the Seawolf-class SSNs, they're only going to get three of them, then probably design something cheaper and a bit less capable (like the Virginia class SSN).

[mr_o]

The thing is the technology has shown so much potential. As a main artillery piece it is hard to find fault. 100-250 mile ranges are a gunners wet dream. And with a stupidly tight accuracy too. But they are already talking about shooting missiles down with these and about making smaller ones that would replace CIWS and things like the RAMS and possibly even replacing or at least augmenting your long range SAM batteries.

So whilst the hull may end up being a lot simpler the gun I reckon will be put into which ever hull they decide to make.

[EvilGrin]

Will these fit in a tank turret? Or even on a plane (perhaps similar to an A-10)?

[mr_o]

Not at the moment no and the current models are absolute electricity whores. Also more electricity = more power/range. But as with everything it is a matter if time if someone wants it until it will happen.

Current rail guns use about 33mega joules per shot but the aim is to get that up into the 40s to get the 100 mile+ range.

[NWA]

I for one can't wait to see the rail gun equipped nuclear powered tanks that use their own waste as ammunition.

[Inertiaman]

As far as weight goes - the turret really is the tip of the iceberg. Generation is one problem, the 20 tons+ of capacitors you'll probably need to deliver that kind of insane charge in parallel are another, the magnets that you then deliver the power to are yet another.

I'd imagine shooting that thing has 100's of tons of tech behind it before you even include the reactor of the ship itself.

[NWA]

Boo hiss, I want one on a tank.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/32-...-on-track.html

Has some indication of the size of the capacitors... 8ft x 8ft x 6.5ft for 3MJ... So for the ultimate target of ~80MJ that they quote for the 250mile range, that's a lot of (heavy) room.

[Inertiaman]

Jeeebus! Frigates will become little more than giant floating circuit boards looking at those numbers.

[Harry Palmer]

At mach 5 impact speed you'd only need about a 2.5Kg projectile for 36MJ into a solid object... make them from DU and you could carry a shit load of them in a small space.

[Inertiaman]

But that takes something key away from the non volatile bonus of the ammo. I'd hate to be on a boat who's DU magazine got hit by something. It'd be floating around in particles from bow to stern.

[Inertiaman]

Still - better than a load of hi explosive in the short term still I suppose!

[Harry Palmer]

[Inertiaman]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-revealed.html

I wonder if that remains the goto material for this action.

[mr_o]

You wouldn't want to be near those capacitors if something went wrong either.

[Inertiaman]

What's the prob with those?

[mr_o]

Well I know capacitors can explode and I would assume given their size it wouldn't be a small pop. Unless there is a difference with them being huge.

[Harry Palmer]

I worked with big multi farad capacitor on medical x-ray machines, the containment is designed to cater for explosion, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[Harry Palmer]

Originally Posted by Inertiaman

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-revealed.html

I wonder if that remains the goto material for this action.

Hmm, in the wiki on DU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium it mentions that the tungsten alloys may be carcinogenic, but I cannot find anything that corroborates it.

[Nomad]

only guessing but don't remember a hospital xray machine being 8ft cubed block, you'ld need a fk load of re-enforcement to contain that going pop. be cool to watch one of these from a distance though, either superfast rounds or one hell of a bang

it does make you wonder, at what point do they decide the round is big enough and going fast enough, i guess never

[EvilGrin]

Here's a video of a test fire done last year.

http://defensetech.org/2011/04/14/we...mach-5-mach-6/

[Harry Palmer]

The old ones I worked on (this is back in '83) were about 4x4x5 and had 4-6 of them and we installed them with a mini crane, but we were only dealing with 100KV @2A impulse, but we could fire 10 shots a sec for about 30 mins

[Harry Palmer]

Originally Posted by EvilGrin

Here's a video of a test fire done last year.

http://defensetech.org/2011/04/14/we...mach-5-mach-6/

Holy crap!

[mr_o]

Yup!

Is anyone around who is good with the maths that can figure out how much the round would drop over the 50miles at those speeds?