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from the is-that-a-railgun-or-are-you-just-happy-to-see-me? dept.
The Motley Fool's Rich Smith writes:
For more than three years now, I've been tracking the U.S. Navy's progress toward building a working electromagnetic railgun prototype — a Mach 6 cannon reputedly capable of striking targets 110 miles away with pinpoint accuracy.
Each railgun projectile would cost about $25,000 to produce — and if you're keeping track, then yes, success on the railgun project would yield a weapon boasting nearly twice the 67-mile range of Boeing's (NYSE:BA) Harpoon II missile but costing just 1/48th the Boeing missile's $1.2 million cost.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/04/22/navys-new-mach-6-em-railgun-almost-ready-for-prime.aspx
Electromagnetic Railgun - First shot at Dahlgren's new Terminal Range https://youtu.be/Pi-BDIu_umo
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27 2017, @04:19PM (1 child)
OK, so the range was only out to the horizon, give or take a bit, but we could hammer away at a target for hours, literally, without damaging our guns.
This underplay the key problem with your argument. My understanding is that combat is all done over-the-horizon now, so having a gun which shoots only to the horizon is useful, but far from comprehensive.
I could just as easy say, "forget your hugely expensive guns, with a combat knife a ship could kill infinite people at arms reach. You don't even need no supply ship, so there is further cost savings there."
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 27 2017, @05:16PM
I don't object to the concept. I object to building a ship around an unproven weapons system. I would heartily approve of a ship being built with on powder cannon, and one rail gun. That ship would gain all the capabilities offered by the rail gun, while retaining the proven reliability of the venerable 5" cannon. If the new-fangled gun proves to be a failure, then the gun might be re-engineered, and made reliable. And, if that were to happen, the ship in question would still be able to fight while waiting for the Pentagon to decide how to proceed. Worst case in this scenario, they dump the railgun, and mount another cannon in it's place. Best case, the railgun is successfully re-engineered, upgraded, and the ship returns to action - again with one of each guns, just in case.
Just for an example of "failed" marine technology - 1200 pound steam boilers. The Navy used 600 pound steam for almost forever. Some bright boys decided that if 600 pounds is good, then 1200 pound should be twice as good. My second ship was a Garcia class frigate, with 1200 pound steam. It was a complete POS. In any real ship-to-ship combat, we would have been the first casualty, because the fire was snuffed so easily. When the fire went out, we were dead in the water, at anyone's mercy. Meanwhile, my first ship only dropped the load in the boiler room ONCE in the 2 1/2 years I was aboard.
After building two or three of those 1200 pound boiler ships, Uncle wised up, and put everything back on 600 pound.
Garcia class ships had one, and only one, redeeming feature. For it's day, it had the most powerful computers available, and could coordinate fleet wide fire control, which also meant we were in charge of tactics. Strategy came from fleet command, whether a carrier, a commodore, or maybe even from the pentagon, but tactics were our specialty.
Fat lot of good that was, when we couldn't keep our own fire lit . . .