Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by LaminatorX on Friday April 11 2014, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the Gauss-him?-I-just-met-him! dept.

Allen McDuffee writes the US Navy's latest weapon is an electromagnetic railgun launcher that can hurl a 23-pound projectile at speeds exceeding Mach 7 with a range of 100 miles turning a destroyer into super-long-range machine gun able to fire up to a dozen relatively inexpensive projectiles every minute. The Navy says the cost differential $25,000 for a railgun projectile versus $500,000 to $1.5 million for a missile will make potential enemies think twice about the economic viability of engaging U.S. forces. "[It] will give our adversaries a huge moment of pause to go: 'Do I even want to go engage a naval ship?'" says Rear Admiral Matt Klunder. "Because you are going to lose. You could throw anything at us, frankly, and the fact that we now can shoot a number of these rounds at a very affordable cost, it's my opinion that they don't win."

Engineers already have tested this futuristic weapon on land, and the Navy plans to begin sea trials aboard a Joint High Speed Vessel Millinocket in 2016. Railguns use electromagnetic energy known as the Lorenz Force to launch a projectile between two conductive rails. The high-power electric pulse generates a magnetic field to fire the projectile with very little recoil, officials say. Weapons like the electromagnetic rail gun could help U.S. forces retain their edge and give them an asymmetric advantage over rivals, making it too expensive to use missiles to attack U.S. warships because of the cheap way to defeat them. "Your magazine never runs out, you just keep shooting, and that's compelling."

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by MozeeToby on Friday April 11 2014, @05:20PM

    by MozeeToby (1118) on Friday April 11 2014, @05:20PM (#30153)

    Also important, how hard is it to hit a target when your computer stabilized, auto-tracking, auto-leading railgun fires it's slug at 2000 meters per second? It's not like you have to lead the target here... we're talking about taking out boats at a few hundred meters, aim for center mass and pull the trigger. Point-blank for this thing is effectively the horizon.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 11 2014, @08:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 11 2014, @08:22PM (#30257)

    I thought one of the important features here was range. This railgun has a range of 100 miles, which is comparable to fairly high-tech missiles. At 100 miles, 2 km/s is almost a minute and a half of flight time. That is, if your enemy is in missile range, then flight time, even at mach 7, is significant, and you should expect to miss a lot. If you can fire 12 rounds/minute, you can fire a spread big enough to counter that, but you're basically trading 12 $25,000 projectiles, one of which is likely to hit for 1, $1M missile that will hit.

    If your enemy is in range where mach 7 travel time is irrelevant, then they're also in range where standard guns, firing $100 or $1000 shells can hit them pretty well.

    • (Score: 1) by MozeeToby on Friday April 11 2014, @09:07PM

      by MozeeToby (1118) on Friday April 11 2014, @09:07PM (#30277)

      The use is two fold.

      One is what you are talking about, what used to be called coastal bombardment (with a 100+ mile range that is no longer an accurate name IMO). The purpose wouldn't be to take out moving targets, rather to eliminate known hardened positions for a fraction the cost of a cruise missile. A tomahawk missile costs $600,000 for instance, compared to $25,000 for this. Put GPS and control fins on the shell and you've got comparable accuracy too, though I don't know if this is planned for this system.

      The second use is to take out small, fast, cheap ships (usually equipped with small short ranged missiles) in an asymmetric war. Numerous naval war games have shown the US Navy to be susceptible to those kinds of attacks, fighting a war of attrition with relatively cheap boats taking potshots at our multibillion dollar warships. Again it comes down to cost, if it takes $20,000 to fire a round from this rail gun and you can take out a $500,000 gunship the math swings back the other way and the hit and run tactics are no longer economically feasible.