19 ms·

US Navy's Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico

156 points by SEJeff 7y ago

spookybones 7y ago
As usual, I find the music in all of the linked videos delusional, as if this high-tech killing machine was created to astonish patriotic five-year-olds. For the sake of analogy, someone should overlay the same music to the engineering of a-bombs and gas chambers.
- 99052882514569 7y ago
  Sorry, are you drawing a parallel between a rail gun and gas chambers?
  - bananocurrency 7y ago
    Sorry, are you implying that a rail gun is that much more humane?
    - dageshi 7y ago
      Gas being banned under various treaties but a rail gun being essentially a faster version of existing munitions... Yeah, I probably would say it is.
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      One of the big differences is that gas chambers are only useful for killing prisoners while there is no indication whatsoever that railguns will be used to kill prisoners. (That said, if it were my execution and the choice were given to me, I would of course chose the railgun! Suffocating on cyanide gas doesn't seem like much fun, I'd rather be vaporized by a hypersonic artillery shell, if it's all the same to you...)
    - sdinsn 7y ago
      It sure is. Are you implying that a railgun is equally or less humane as chemical weapons?
      - godelski 7y ago
        Are you implying that even if you don't think killing people that certain ways of killing people is definitely worse than others?
        sdinsn 7y ago
        You are missing some words there so I'm not sure what you are asking. I think that chemical weapons are far far worse than railguns. And I'm not the only one that thinks that...
    - simonh 7y ago
      The railgun is a precise weapon that strikes specific targets and so the users of it can exercise reasonable judgement on it's use. It's a requirement of various treaties on warfare, such as the Geneva Convention, that war fighters be accountable for their actions and not engage targets under specific circumstances, such as if they are civilians or surrendering. Gas is an extremely unreliable and indiscriminate weapon that is highly likely to affect individuals beyond any reasonably intended target, including civilians. It's not possible to use it and still meet obligations under treaty, such as not engaging civilians and surrendering troops. Therefore it's use is not allowed and any use of it is accountable as a war crime.
      - godelski 7y ago
        Gas also tends to be a more painful and gruesome death. We humans tend to prefer quick and painless deaths, even when it is against our enemies.
- JudgeWapner 7y ago
  I listened to it and agree it sounds very childish. Better would have been to have some intelligent narration, the story in a nutshell. How much energy is required for a railgun? What uses do they have that cannot be done with conventional artillery? what were some of the major challenges faced by the R&D team? All of that could have been explained in the audio track that was instead used for crappy Michael Bay action movie music.
  - SEJeff 7y ago
    One of the problems with existing Navy "gun ships" is that explosive ordinance can be a hazard to sailors and has to be handled very carefully. Additionally, it has to be stored very carefully. One of the things a railgun hypothetically allows is launching non-explosive inert projectiles. What happen when you launch a big hunk of steel at something 200 miles away travelling Mach 6? Another huge benefit is the speed allows using this for anti-surface and potentially anti-air as well (covered in the article), something conventional munitions can not do.
    - kaycebasques 7y ago
      I’m very ignorant about weapons technology. When you say anti-air does that imply some kind of homing technology in the projectiles?
      - SEJeff 7y ago
        It means taking out adversarial missiles or aircraft. When they're travelling so fast, they might not need any homing technology. The state of the art F22 Raptor has a top speed with afterburners of Mach 2 for reference. The railgun projectile is travelling at Mach 6 per the article. If the plane is within range, it might not be able to run away from one of these if they get the aiming correct.
    - nradov 7y ago
      Existing conventional munitions are absolutely used against surface and air targets.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  One day history will likely show the whole project amounted to nothing more than propaganda meant to impress teenage boys so they enlist. I anticipate this supposed weapon system seeing very little if any use in battle, but receiving extensive media and promotional coverage. Some people are hoping for a return of the battleship era, with nuclear powered ships slinging shells at each other across the horizon with electric cannons. But I'm pretty sure that is wishful thinking.
- doctorRetro 7y ago
  I agree on at least the first half of your statement. Although I'm not sure I'd say 'delusional' as much as - I don't know? - Jingoistic? Bombastic? I feel like I should be playing Command and Conquer to that sound track. At the end of the day, these are killing machines that are being designed to take human lives, and it does feel more than a bit inappropriate. I think that's what you're getting at with the latter half.
  - ch4s3 7y ago
    Jingoistic is exactly the word that came to mind as I watched the video.
    - spookybones 7y ago
      Perhaps it is the appropriate word here. However, I think it undermines the bigger picture. Many of these weapon showcases are made at the behest of weapon companies, the items of which are sold to the highest bidders. See Vice's coverage of SOFEX on Youtube for a good showcase of delusion.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    A friend overlaid an EDM track (Flux Pavilion if I recall) on the original test fire videos from several years ago when the prototype was located at the Virginia test site. I enjoyed the short piece of creative they remixed in the same way I enjoyed the Iron Man franchise. It’s a killing machine, but the engineer in me still deeply appreciates the advanced technology these systems are based on (energy/thermal management, power control systems). SpaceX vehicles are a firmware update away from being high precision ICBMs (and their CEO has said they’d take DoD work and build weapons systems). No one on here is calling for somber treatment of that kit and their YouTube launch streams. Condemn the action, not the tool.
    - minikites 7y ago
      >Condemn the action, not the tool. So it's fine to stockpile chemical weapons as long as we don't use them because they're just a tool?
- arch-ninja 7y ago
  Sounds like they paid a highschool student to play a muted version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRh-dzrI4Z4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRh-dzrI4Z4
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    Hans Zimmer recycles that riff all the time (I think he used it first in Drop Zone, then Crimson Tide, The Rock, Gladiator, and probably elsewhere). I guess the Navy wanted to give it a shot too.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago
  DIY videos by armed service members often use over-the-top soundtracks. I bet the intent of that video wasn't to be PR or marketing, just a fun recap of work done.
  - minikites 7y ago
    What makes this work "fun"?
    - SEJeff 7y ago
      Really hard engineering pushing the limits of physics and materials science is fun, killing people is not.
      - minikites 7y ago
        Do you genuinely see the same virtue in the engineering of a bridge and the engineering of a cruise missile?
        SEJeff 7y ago
        Do you not see that materials science from high performance cruise missiles might work its way through other uses of materials science such as structural engineering and bridges? Bridges can be used to hold tanks, does that mean all bridge engineers are bad?
        minikites 7y ago
        There's no way other than weapons engineering to make those discoveries?
        SEJeff 7y ago
        In the same vein, as an industry, pornography really improved computer storage density and video codecs whereas electronic trading really improved the tech to reduce networking latency. Virtually all engineering benefits from other engineering that came before it. There are plenty of other ways, but this is how it is. Most all of what NASA does or has ever done has directly benefited the Department of Defense. Does this mean we should shut down NASA because it helps the military make more efficient missiles or spy satellites? When does this silly argument end.
- newsoul2019 7y ago
  > created to astonish patriotic five-year-olds In other words, the current POTUS?
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    I can't tell if you're being downvoted for being snarky or because people think that Trump isn't patriotic.
- Raphmedia 7y ago
  To my ears, the track of the first video sounds like a royalty free copycat of Hans Zimmer's Pirate of the Caribbean soundtrack. In the context of a new canon to be installed on the Navy's ships I think it fits pretty well. It does not sound nationalistic or over the top to me. The other videos are on personal channels so they are inconsequential.
- keiru 7y ago
  When I watched it I thought "This is pirate adventure music"
tick_tock_tick 7y ago
Does the logo the navy use for railguns show it shooting intercontinental?
- sdinsn 7y ago
  It's just a logo, I think the Railgun only can get to 100 miles or so (at the moment).
  - clarkmoody 7y ago
    Someone a little better with aerodynamic drag computations could do a quick back-of-the-napkin to figure out the maximum range of something fired at sea-level going Mach 3,4,5,6,etc. The biggest issue I see is just vaporizing the projectile on launch, so there would be an upper bound on muzzle velocity based on projectile material properties.
    - SEJeff 7y ago
      But the US Military uses depleted uranium (the hardest material) for tank rounds, so they could make pretty hardy railgun projectiles.
      - sharpneli 7y ago
        Not the hardest. Bit less than Tungsten so pretty hard but far from hardest. It is used because it is really really dense and hard enough. Perfect for piercing armor.
        SEJeff 7y ago
        So perfect for a railgun projectile? :) What is the hardest man-made substance?
        RantyDave 7y ago
        Artificial diamond? But it doesn't matter - you don't actually want something hard because you don't actually want it to go all the way through and out the other side. You want it to dump all that lovely kinetic energy into whatever it's hit.
stcredzero 7y ago
It looks right. It looks like it could well be the ancestor of the MAC cannons from Halo. EDIT: I said this to my coworkers a couple of weeks ago: I'm calling it now. Either 1) Naval Railguns also wind up being killer AA weapons and there aren't any game changers in submarine warfare or 2) Railguns are going to be the equivalent of WWII naval cannon -- They won't be nearly as important as something else.
- ohaideredevs 7y ago
  "2) Railguns are going to be the equivalent of WWII naval cannon -- They won't be nearly as important as something else." Railguns would completely surpass missiles for StS warfare, which can be intercepted by other missiles, whereas a railgun shot cannot at this time.
  - vosper 7y ago
    Except maybe not these hypersonic missiles, which were discussed here just the other day? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227021
    - ohaideredevs 7y ago
      Well aware. The radar signature is still significantly smaller for the projectile. Also, note how hard-kill tank defense systems work better on missiles/rockets than SABOT. P.S. Zircon is probably vaporware.
    - qball 7y ago
      Sure, but missiles have to propel themselves, are very large compared to railgun projectiles, and are easier to break apart by putting a heavy wall of lead in the air. Railgun projectiles have none of these disadvantages. They don't need propellant (or a warhead; the energy delivered upon impact is more than sufficient to break things without needing to explode), they're a solid projectile (and as such can't be as easily destroyed or knocked off course), and they're smaller than a missile is making them much more difficult to track. To successfully defeat an incoming railgun projectile, it would both required sufficient detection technology coupled to a laser that would need to fully ablate it; where missiles require detection of a significantly larger object and can be defeated by shooting at them/more active protection measures.
travisporter 7y ago
Is there any active research on this technology for non-rocket launch systems?
- clarkmoody 7y ago
  I assume that the same technology could be applied for launch systems, with one major change: maximum acceleration. An electric railgun would need to be very long in order to reach high velocity without undergoing huge accelerations as in the Navy railgun. Ramping up a vehicle with payload and fuel in it without destroying it is the name of the game.
- godelski 7y ago
  Do you mean like going to space? There's some research but after everyone figured it that all humans inside would be instantly squished they started researching other avenues. The g forces are pretty large and would damage a lot of cargo too.
  - ars 7y ago
    > would be instantly squished Not so. That's only for a very short launch. You would actually have a track a few miles long (probably up the side of a mountain) and launch using that. The g-forces would be very mild.
    - logfromblammo 7y ago
      You need about 1200km to reach LEO from the equator with max acceleration of about 3G. I did the math once, and a track from the Galapagos Islands to the peak of Chimborazo on the continent in Ecuador would do it.
      - ars 7y ago
        I was a little shocked at that number, so I ran the math again, and wow. Quite a bit longer than I expected. Maybe a circular track till you build up speed, then switch over to the mountain track? Of course the circular track would have g-forces due to that..... (Do you feel like doing more math?) I guess it's more practical to use the track just for the initial boost above the atmosphere, then a rocket to add speed. Also a track that can handle something moving at km/s is .... not easy.
alistproducer2 7y ago
Am I supposed to celebrate the spending of untold billions on an unnecessary weapon of death while my Bridges and roads crumble, my health care system sucks and absolutely nothing is being done about, or to prepare for, climate change?? I'm not impressed
- deweller 7y ago
  Is there a widespread lack of funding for bridges and roads infrastructure in the US? The bridges and roads around me in middle TN are well maintained. These are funded by local government resources, right?
  - smcl 7y ago
    Yep, this has been pretty widely reported, in fact when I was looking for an article that covered this the first one I found (from April this year) talked about a bridge in TN which collapsed: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/05/710364158/report-finds-more-than-47-000-structurally-deficient-bridges-in-the-u-s https://www.npr.org/2019/04/05/710364158/report-finds-more-t...
  - Tuna-Fish 7y ago
    The reason there were such problems in this area until recently was congressional earmarks. When people lobbied for their representatives to support their pet cause, traditionally the best way they had to do this was to issue an earmark as part of some bill. Earmarks are not heavily fought by other representative because they do not give federal money to a state, rather they are the federal government forcing a state to spend some of their own money on something they wouldn't otherwise have done. The problem with this is that unless the local government decides to overbudget for this and run a surplus every year, this money comes from somewhere. Typically something boring that people don't care about, like infrastructure maintenance. That is, people don't care about it until it starts to actually fail... Then congressional earmarks got banned. Only, things are actually worse now, because it turns out the political horse trading around earmarks was the only reason representatives have to compromise across party lines, instead of always holding a hard line on the issues their supporters want. This is the direct cause of the current political gridlock.
drewbt 7y ago
In South Africa, we are putting our weapons in art galleries, as relics. The art of war days are over. That Art of Peace struggle is gaining momentum.
- pageandrew 7y ago
  that's not how the world works
  - drewbt 7y ago
    How does it work, how should it work, and what are we doing about it?
    - toss1 7y ago
      How it works now is that some percentage of the humans want to become, and/or want to support authoritarian rule. Authoritarian rule always wants to expanad, and will treat both it's subjects and other people as objects. How should it work? Like eradicating smallpox, we'll need to somehow engineer, or teach, or by some other method, eradicate from the entire human race the authoritarian impulse. Until then, the choices are: 1) submit, or 2a) create systems of laws & institutions to ensure that power remains distributed and is difficult to hijack/co-opt/capture by any one person or group and 2b) (since all systems are hackable/fallible) be prepared to fight for your freedom and the freedom of others less fortunate. EDIT: add 2a
      - drewbt 7y ago
        “Hi Drew/Glenda It is with great pleasure to see the project at this stage. We have yet once again proved the sceptics, nay sayers and persmists wrong. From a plain field to a sight commanding building that yields hope to drags of our society and the future itself. Despite of the hindrances we have encountered along the way, I am humbled, awed and jubilant to have been a part of such a gesture. In this money fueled life style I would also been delighted to have made myself a fortune in building such a building that is going to make a difference in many people's lives but the greatest fortune of all is the joy I find in knowing that these hands have built such a meaningful building. The project may have come to its end but the memory will linger in my heart forever. This hasn't only equipped me with skills but changed the way I view life. It is this reason that I would love the organisers to allow us to keep the tools we have used in building the hope and the future of our society so that we can continue putting bread on our tables and helping those in need of our assistance. My humble thanks to all those who selflessly opened their check books and offered with their hard earned cash to the project, and not forgetting those who could not offer funding but took it upon themselves and used their precious time to personally give a hand in this project. This project is a full proof that humanity/Ubuntu still exists. Regards Michael Dyasi”
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I find the physics of rail guns pretty fascinating. For something nominally invented in world war 1 (1918) which is now "only a few years" away from possible deployment. We are talking literally a 100 years later. We went from powered flight to flying in orbit in less time, think about that. Is it a compelling weapons concept? Of course it is, you don't need explosives to shoot things that is pretty huge. Are wars bad? Of course they are. That said, the concept has been around for a hundred years, so people are going to work on making a practical weapon out of it. Which means that at some point its going to be a component of a military action. And not having one of your own, will change the calculus of what you can and cannot do.
- derefr 7y ago
  It's not like the technology behind railguns hasn't been stable and ready to use for decades now. It's just that, until the more recent invention of ancillary technologies like supercapacitors, it's been so costly to fire them that there was no logical place for them on the battlefield, so we never bothered to operationalize them.
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    I can't agree with this: "It's not like the technology behind railguns hasn't been stable and ready to use for decades now.", at least not in terms of practicality. I did a bit more research on flight and found a similar comment from Wilbur Wright[1] about George Cayley. It is very different to be able to demonstrate a principle in physics (such as flight, or accelerating a piece of metal with electricity) and building a practical application of that principle. In many ways the time it takes between those two points is likely a good indicator of just how difficult it is to reduce the principle to practice. You yourself mention super capacitors, another comment mentions the rails, then there are the switching devices themselves, the wiring harnesses, the control system. That is why I'm pretty awestruck at the fact that they were able to make it work and get this close to being something they can field test. [1] "About 100 years ago, an Englishman, Sir George Cayley[2], carried the science of flight to a point which it had never reached before and which it scarcely reached again during the last century." -— Wilbur Wright, 1909 --- http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/cayley.html http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/cayley.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley
pneill 7y ago
Does anyone know why there is a flash of light and a puff of smoke when the gun fires? Since it's electromagnetic, you'd think you wouldn't see anything.
- bobloblaw45 7y ago
  The air infront of the projectile. When you compress a gas it creates heat. The projectile is moving so fast it super heats the air infront of it as it compresses it. Also normally things that go the speed of this projectile (mach 6 I believe) are way up in the sky where the air is less dense. So theres a whole lot of air down here for it to shove out of its way. The explosion is from the rapid expansion of the superheated gas after leaving the barrel.
- coder543 7y ago
  Railguns are not coilguns. Railguns maintain physical contact between the projectile and the rails for the entire length of the barrel. That's a lot of friction. Friction leads to heat, light, and a puff of smoke from material that has been ablated during the launch, if I were to guess. This leads to one of the big problems with railguns, which is that you have to replace the rails frequently due to wear and tear.
  - xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
    They don't need to maintain physical contact. You can have an air gap, as long as the circuit shorts through the projectile. The rails still wear down.
    - FreeFull 7y ago
      If you have a gap, then you end up with electrical arcing which generates even more heat
- tropo 7y ago
  It's a wrapper (sabot, carrier, etc.) that ignites due to the speed.
- 7y ago
module0000 7y ago
Sadly, news these days involves a lot of "we've invented <X>, to kill people that disagree with us". Often the word "disagree" is replaced with "undermine" or "threaten". It's all the same human-life-ending bullshit. I don't feel at home in this world any more. When I was 18, I enlisted in the armed services and "did my part" as people often say. What a fucking mistake, I'm humiliated and embarrassed every single day to have played "my part" in any of this. The modern-day me wishes I could go back to the 18-year-old me and turn my weapon on my masters when they were all gathered to cheer us on. Unfortunately, I'm sure dozens would have stepped in to take their place as quickly as I ended them.
- oblongx 7y ago
  ?? Sadly, news these days involves a lot of "we've invented <X>, to kill people that disagree with us".....The modern-day me wishes I could go back to the 18-year-old me and <kill people I now disagree with>
  - brink 7y ago
    What's a pacifist with militaristic sentiments? A hypocrite? A doublethink?
  - perfmode 7y ago
    > "Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other's throats. ... [Tolerance] is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact."
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- rmcrx 7y ago
  Have some respect for the men who saved you from Communism.
antpls 7y ago
Could the same technology be used to help the lift off of Falcon9-sized space rockets from a deep vertical tunnel ?
- krastanov 7y ago
  On bodies without atmosphere, yes. It is a common thread in many futuristic exploration plans and scifi stories.
- ars 7y ago
  See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver You actually want horizontal velocity, not vertical. Getting "up" is easy (it's only a few miles), it's the horizontal speed that keeps you there. The only reason rockets launch straight up is to avoid the thick air as quickly as possible, then they turn and accelerate sideways the rest of the way.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    Or they do a gravity turn to round off the corner, largely in the same manner as that one math problem you probably did in school that involved finding the fastest path that includes running on the beach for some distance, then swimming at slower speed to a point in the water. Also, different rocket designs have different efficiencies at different outside pressures due to overexpansion or underexpansion of the exhaust plume. Kicking a rocket out of the atmosphere--or at least up to a lower pressure altitude--with a big gun first stage changes the requirements a bit for the second stage rocket engine. It's slightly more efficient. But the biggest advantage is that you aren't ever accelerating the fuel for the first stage along with the rest of the vehicle. The disadvantage is that you need a very long track if you don't want to reduce vehicle occupants to thin red paste with excessive acceleration. Also, you can evacuate the gun barrel and put one or more plasma windows at the end, so your initial acceleration doesn't have so much atmospheric drag.
Fej 7y ago
Why have coilguns not gotten the same amount of attention as railguns?
- leetcrew 7y ago
  I'd guess the main reason is that it's an inherently more complicated design; if you don't sync the electromagnets perfectly you spend energy decelerating the round. it does have the advantage that the projectile doesn't need physical contact with an electified rail, so maybe it could be less damaging to the device itself.
  - shereadsthenews 7y ago
    These railguns also have synchronized pulsed power systems that are quite complex. The University of Texas has been researching this stuff for decades. Here's a simple paper I Googled up https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a639371.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a639371.pdf
  - ThrustVectoring 7y ago
    The coils are inductors, and so cannot be turned off instantaneously - you get a voltage across them proportional to how quickly you're changing the current. As you build a faster coilgun, it gets harder to deal with the voltages generated by the sharper current pulses necessary to do useful work. And presumably you're also increasing the current involved to get higher velocity, which also contributes to the engineering difficulties involved in managing the coil voltages.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  Does a coilgun have any advantages over a railgun?
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Amateur railgun builders comment about the projectiles welding themselves to the rails; that certainly doesn’t happen in a coilgun. I think there’s also a big problem with supplying extremely high currents, which you can circumvent a bit in a coilgun by having more turns of wire.
jiveturkey 7y ago
No mention of China. I wonder if the revival of this is due to China's railgun developments.
- crimsonalucard 7y ago
  I find this invention will solve our problems. Just point at China, fire the gun, and all problems solved. Just kidding, seriously what do we point it at? And what problem will it solve after it's been fired? Also why are we not competing on high speed rail technology? Why do we always have to beat a country with military technology given how completely useless most of it is.
  - adventured 7y ago
    > Also why are we not competing on high speed rail technology? The US competes at the top in dozens of other categories, from aerospace to biotech to software to agriculture to semiconductors to spacetech to medtech. Why should we need to compete in high-speed rail technology? It's the last problem the US has. There's no need to dominate everything - as no nation practically can anyway - just buy Japan's excellent high-speed rail tech. If the US were going to build a national high-speed rail network, it would be best served to buy that tech elsewhere rather than reinventing the wheel, so as to save money and time. The high-speed rail that gets built in Texas for example should probably use Japanese tech: June 2019: "Japan's 'supreme' bullet train aims to impress Texas with speed" "The real audience for the demonstration, however, was the stakeholders of a privately constructed high-speed rail line in the U.S. state of Texas connecting the cities of Dallas and Houston." https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Japan-s-supreme-bullet-train-aims-to-impress-Texas-with-speed https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Japan-s-supreme-b...
    - crimsonalucard 7y ago
      Three things. 1. I'm talking about public government projects like the space race or international highway system. Not commercial business sectors like biotech, software or agriculture. Typically governments do projects for the good of society or to compete for prestige (which offers no tangible utility) with another country. I'm thinking kill two birds and instead of building a gun they will likely never fire, build a huge public bullet train system that actually benefites society and makes America not look like a giant car mono culture. 2. My mistake, I meant the rail network infrastructure itself not the technology. 3. Not only is there no need for the US to dominate every industry. There is no need for the US to dominate at all for the industry I'm talking about and that is government projects. The rail gun serves a single purpose. Prestige, that's it. With globalization taking over the world today, firing that rail gun at any country is just bad news for everybody and unlikely to happen at all so why build it at all. Governments should serve utilitarian needs of the people. Governments should not build projects just to one up another country. Seriously who cares if China's GDP surpasses the US... It doesn't matter in the end.
mcguire 7y ago
1) "The system charges for two minutes..." One shot per two minutes is pretty bad; the current 5" gun shoots 16-20 rounds per minute. 2) "...at speeds up to Mach 6." One of the issues with old school, large caliber naval guns was that the blast from the guns would damage or destroy equipment near the muzzle. (I was just reading Pursuit by Ludovic Kennedy, about the British pursuit of the Bismark, and (IIRC) one ship (the Prince of Wales?) had its bridge windows blown out when firing the B turret "over its shoulder".) Is the shockwave from a railgun going to be similarly dangerous?
- xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
  No, beyond the initial propellant. The projectile accelerates constantly (hand waving here) so it's a constant force on the origin (relative mass should make this a wash), whereas the projectile enjoys exponential velocity. Two minutes is pretty short, I'm actually blown away. If only we could all charge our electric vehicles that quickly.
  - frede 7y ago
    Nitpick: the velocity grows linearly, not exponentially.
- mjevans 7y ago
  A good question to ask is if it would still take 2 min if hooked up to a ship's nuclear reactor power grid, or if the 2 min is more of an artifact of it being an alpha test rig designed more for data and refining the design. I'm positive that at the very least they've got plans for making the version fire faster than one shot ever 2 min in a production model, even if that means throwing 16 times the hardware / capacity at the charging and cooling components.
- opwieurposiu 7y ago
  Most of the muzzle blast from a powder gun is from the hot gases that escape after the projectile, not the shockwave from the projectile itself. The rail gun has very little hot gas escape so the blast should be much diminished.
- 7y ago
openasocket 7y ago
I've never quite understood why we need to change technologies so completely to get the projectile moving faster. As in, why couldn't we do the same thing by just making a bigger explosion in the barrel? I assume there's some point of diminishing returns or inefficiency that makes it impractical, but I haven't been able to find a source that gives the math to explain it.
- asark 7y ago
  Explosives are really dangerous to carry around. Go looking through the fates of ships lost in WWI and II (last time there was a fair amount of ship combat going on) and there's an awful lot of "several rounds hit but everything was basically fine, except then one hit the magazine, blowing the ship in two and sinking her", or a fire starting and doing something similar, or a smaller cache of explosives readied for immediate use in a gun blowing up and causing massive damage, or whatever. Not sure if that's the reason, but it's probably a reason.
  - vkou 7y ago
    It wasn't even shells hitting magazines. It was shells hitting gun turrets, with the explosions reaching the magazines. In the Battle of Jutland (The largest naval battle of WWI), the Royal Navy lost three capital ships (Two battlecruisers and a heavy cruiser) to single shells that struck their gun turrets, detonating their ammo magazines. The gun turrets were, in theory, supposed to be sealed off, by blast doors, from their magazines - but in order to increase fire rates, it was standard practice to leave those doors open in combat. The Germans, not being suicidal lunatics, kept equivalent blast doors closed, which is why none of their capital ships went up in flames, despite taking a lot more damage.
    - CapricornNoble 7y ago
      As an addendum: The Royal Navy had a long and well-established tradition of exceptionally well-drilled gun crews, probably going back almost 150 years from WWI through the Napoleonic era. It could be argued that their fast-firing and disciplined gunnery were decisive in more than one British victory. HOWEVER....as you point out this led to objectively-suicidal practices....What's that term for when you've been doing a risky job for so long you don't realize how dangerous your habits are? Yeah Royal Navy gunnery is a textbook example of that.
zw123456 7y ago
You could rule a punkin chunkin contest with that if you could find a way not to pie :)
dfilppi 7y ago
Get the projectile up to mach 33 and it can shoot satellites out of orbit from the ground.
- lm28469 7y ago
  Making a satellite capable of surviving the launch will be the second part of the problem.
  - keiru 7y ago
    "shoot satellites out of orbit", not "into orbit"
    - fooker 7y ago
      Same fundamental problem.
      - RantyDave 7y ago
        Except that in one case they thing you're trying to launch is a tonne of assorted electronics, and in the other case it's two kilos of tungsten.
      - Balero 7y ago
        Not really. Orbit isn't just about getting up there. It's about moving fast enough when you are up there. To destroy something in orbit, you just need to get the projectile up there. You don't also have to get it up to escape velocity.
      - wolf550e 7y ago
        No. If your projectile reaches altitude of target satellite with 0 velocity, hangs for a moment and starts to fall down, but then is impacted at relative velocity of kilometers per second by a satellite, your weapon (or Kessler syndrome trigger) works. It doesn't need orbital velocity at altitude, only the altitude. That is a lot lower energy!
      - 7y ago
fnord77 7y ago
I wonder how durable these will be in combat Seems vulnerable to damage during a battle. A couple stray bullets or shrapnel hitting those power cables would put it out of commission unless it was heavily armored. where as they would just ping off an old-timey cannon harmlessly.
- russdill 7y ago
  old-timey cannons need a lot of systems to slew/aim/etc. And without these systems, they are useless.
- tdxcbkifxxxx 7y ago
  Go back to playing video games. That's the dumbest comment I've read all week
sandworm101 7y ago
Some forgotten limitations of railguns: There is a maximum speed for projectiles in naval warfare. Earth is round. So anything moving too fast (~8000m/s) simply cannot hit distant targets. If fired horizontally, the shell will climb up as the earth curves away. This causes all sorts of difficulties if trying to attack another ship. At best, your shells will hit horizontally, far above the waterline. You would need a shell that could either fly itself downwards, bleeding speed, limiting penetration, and defeating the point of using a railgun.
- percutaneous 7y ago
  Theoretically you could have a projectile with downforce. This would allow you to break that limit. I imagine it's highly impractical though. I hadn't thought of that limit though, good comment!
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    Then it needs to fly, which means it cannot be spinning. And it probably needs some internal mechanisms to control that flying. Now it is more a hypervelocity drone than a inert kinetic impactor.
    - closeparen 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ship_ballistic_missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ship_ballistic_missile
- cascom 7y ago
  Article references a goal of achieving a 100 mile range? How do they plan on doing that then?
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    100 miles to what? An aircraft? A very tall ship? A bunker on a mountainside? Until they have a reliable system that can be run over and over for days, I don't think anyone knows exactly how these things will be employed.

156 points by SEJeff 7y ago

As usual, I find the music in all of the linked videos delusional, as if this high-tech killing machine was created to astonish patriotic five-year-olds. For the sake of analogy, someone should overlay the same music to the engineering of a-bombs and gas chambers.

99052882514569 7y ago
Sorry, are you drawing a parallel between a rail gun and gas chambers?
- bananocurrency 7y ago
  Sorry, are you implying that a rail gun is that much more humane?
  - dageshi 7y ago
    Gas being banned under various treaties but a rail gun being essentially a faster version of existing munitions... Yeah, I probably would say it is.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    One of the big differences is that gas chambers are only useful for killing prisoners while there is no indication whatsoever that railguns will be used to kill prisoners. (That said, if it were my execution and the choice were given to me, I would of course chose the railgun! Suffocating on cyanide gas doesn't seem like much fun, I'd rather be vaporized by a hypersonic artillery shell, if it's all the same to you...)
  - sdinsn 7y ago
    It sure is. Are you implying that a railgun is equally or less humane as chemical weapons?
    - godelski 7y ago
      Are you implying that even if you don't think killing people that certain ways of killing people is definitely worse than others?
      - sdinsn 7y ago
        You are missing some words there so I'm not sure what you are asking. I think that chemical weapons are far far worse than railguns. And I'm not the only one that thinks that...
  - simonh 7y ago
    The railgun is a precise weapon that strikes specific targets and so the users of it can exercise reasonable judgement on it's use. It's a requirement of various treaties on warfare, such as the Geneva Convention, that war fighters be accountable for their actions and not engage targets under specific circumstances, such as if they are civilians or surrendering. Gas is an extremely unreliable and indiscriminate weapon that is highly likely to affect individuals beyond any reasonably intended target, including civilians. It's not possible to use it and still meet obligations under treaty, such as not engaging civilians and surrendering troops. Therefore it's use is not allowed and any use of it is accountable as a war crime.
    - godelski 7y ago
      Gas also tends to be a more painful and gruesome death. We humans tend to prefer quick and painless deaths, even when it is against our enemies.
JudgeWapner 7y ago
I listened to it and agree it sounds very childish. Better would have been to have some intelligent narration, the story in a nutshell. How much energy is required for a railgun? What uses do they have that cannot be done with conventional artillery? what were some of the major challenges faced by the R&D team? All of that could have been explained in the audio track that was instead used for crappy Michael Bay action movie music.
- SEJeff 7y ago
  One of the problems with existing Navy "gun ships" is that explosive ordinance can be a hazard to sailors and has to be handled very carefully. Additionally, it has to be stored very carefully. One of the things a railgun hypothetically allows is launching non-explosive inert projectiles. What happen when you launch a big hunk of steel at something 200 miles away travelling Mach 6? Another huge benefit is the speed allows using this for anti-surface and potentially anti-air as well (covered in the article), something conventional munitions can not do.
  - kaycebasques 7y ago
    I’m very ignorant about weapons technology. When you say anti-air does that imply some kind of homing technology in the projectiles?
    - SEJeff 7y ago
      It means taking out adversarial missiles or aircraft. When they're travelling so fast, they might not need any homing technology. The state of the art F22 Raptor has a top speed with afterburners of Mach 2 for reference. The railgun projectile is travelling at Mach 6 per the article. If the plane is within range, it might not be able to run away from one of these if they get the aiming correct.
  - nradov 7y ago
    Existing conventional munitions are absolutely used against surface and air targets.
darkpuma 7y ago
One day history will likely show the whole project amounted to nothing more than propaganda meant to impress teenage boys so they enlist. I anticipate this supposed weapon system seeing very little if any use in battle, but receiving extensive media and promotional coverage. Some people are hoping for a return of the battleship era, with nuclear powered ships slinging shells at each other across the horizon with electric cannons. But I'm pretty sure that is wishful thinking.
doctorRetro 7y ago
I agree on at least the first half of your statement. Although I'm not sure I'd say 'delusional' as much as - I don't know? - Jingoistic? Bombastic? I feel like I should be playing Command and Conquer to that sound track. At the end of the day, these are killing machines that are being designed to take human lives, and it does feel more than a bit inappropriate. I think that's what you're getting at with the latter half.
- ch4s3 7y ago
  Jingoistic is exactly the word that came to mind as I watched the video.
  - spookybones 7y ago
    Perhaps it is the appropriate word here. However, I think it undermines the bigger picture. Many of these weapon showcases are made at the behest of weapon companies, the items of which are sold to the highest bidders. See Vice's coverage of SOFEX on Youtube for a good showcase of delusion.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  A friend overlaid an EDM track (Flux Pavilion if I recall) on the original test fire videos from several years ago when the prototype was located at the Virginia test site. I enjoyed the short piece of creative they remixed in the same way I enjoyed the Iron Man franchise. It’s a killing machine, but the engineer in me still deeply appreciates the advanced technology these systems are based on (energy/thermal management, power control systems). SpaceX vehicles are a firmware update away from being high precision ICBMs (and their CEO has said they’d take DoD work and build weapons systems). No one on here is calling for somber treatment of that kit and their YouTube launch streams. Condemn the action, not the tool.
  - minikites 7y ago
    >Condemn the action, not the tool. So it's fine to stockpile chemical weapons as long as we don't use them because they're just a tool?
arch-ninja 7y ago
Sounds like they paid a highschool student to play a muted version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRh-dzrI4Z4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRh-dzrI4Z4
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Hans Zimmer recycles that riff all the time (I think he used it first in Drop Zone, then Crimson Tide, The Rock, Gladiator, and probably elsewhere). I guess the Navy wanted to give it a shot too.
TimTheTinker 7y ago
DIY videos by armed service members often use over-the-top soundtracks. I bet the intent of that video wasn't to be PR or marketing, just a fun recap of work done.
- minikites 7y ago
  What makes this work "fun"?
  - SEJeff 7y ago
    Really hard engineering pushing the limits of physics and materials science is fun, killing people is not.
    - minikites 7y ago
      Do you genuinely see the same virtue in the engineering of a bridge and the engineering of a cruise missile?
      - SEJeff 7y ago
        Do you not see that materials science from high performance cruise missiles might work its way through other uses of materials science such as structural engineering and bridges? Bridges can be used to hold tanks, does that mean all bridge engineers are bad?
        minikites 7y ago
        There's no way other than weapons engineering to make those discoveries?
        SEJeff 7y ago
        In the same vein, as an industry, pornography really improved computer storage density and video codecs whereas electronic trading really improved the tech to reduce networking latency. Virtually all engineering benefits from other engineering that came before it. There are plenty of other ways, but this is how it is. Most all of what NASA does or has ever done has directly benefited the Department of Defense. Does this mean we should shut down NASA because it helps the military make more efficient missiles or spy satellites? When does this silly argument end.
newsoul2019 7y ago
> created to astonish patriotic five-year-olds In other words, the current POTUS?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  I can't tell if you're being downvoted for being snarky or because people think that Trump isn't patriotic.
Raphmedia 7y ago
To my ears, the track of the first video sounds like a royalty free copycat of Hans Zimmer's Pirate of the Caribbean soundtrack. In the context of a new canon to be installed on the Navy's ships I think it fits pretty well. It does not sound nationalistic or over the top to me. The other videos are on personal channels so they are inconsequential.
keiru 7y ago
When I watched it I thought "This is pirate adventure music"

tick_tock_tick 7y ago

Does the logo the navy use for railguns show it shooting intercontinental?

sdinsn 7y ago
It's just a logo, I think the Railgun only can get to 100 miles or so (at the moment).
- clarkmoody 7y ago
  Someone a little better with aerodynamic drag computations could do a quick back-of-the-napkin to figure out the maximum range of something fired at sea-level going Mach 3,4,5,6,etc. The biggest issue I see is just vaporizing the projectile on launch, so there would be an upper bound on muzzle velocity based on projectile material properties.
  - SEJeff 7y ago
    But the US Military uses depleted uranium (the hardest material) for tank rounds, so they could make pretty hardy railgun projectiles.
    - sharpneli 7y ago
      Not the hardest. Bit less than Tungsten so pretty hard but far from hardest. It is used because it is really really dense and hard enough. Perfect for piercing armor.
      - SEJeff 7y ago
        So perfect for a railgun projectile? :) What is the hardest man-made substance?
        RantyDave 7y ago
        Artificial diamond? But it doesn't matter - you don't actually want something hard because you don't actually want it to go all the way through and out the other side. You want it to dump all that lovely kinetic energy into whatever it's hit.

stcredzero 7y ago

It looks right. It looks like it could well be the ancestor of the MAC cannons from Halo. EDIT: I said this to my coworkers a couple of weeks ago: I'm calling it now. Either 1) Naval Railguns also wind up being killer AA weapons and there aren't any game changers in submarine warfare or 2) Railguns are going to be the equivalent of WWII naval cannon -- They won't be nearly as important as something else.

ohaideredevs 7y ago
"2) Railguns are going to be the equivalent of WWII naval cannon -- They won't be nearly as important as something else." Railguns would completely surpass missiles for StS warfare, which can be intercepted by other missiles, whereas a railgun shot cannot at this time.
- vosper 7y ago
  Except maybe not these hypersonic missiles, which were discussed here just the other day? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227021
  - ohaideredevs 7y ago
    Well aware. The radar signature is still significantly smaller for the projectile. Also, note how hard-kill tank defense systems work better on missiles/rockets than SABOT. P.S. Zircon is probably vaporware.
  - qball 7y ago
    Sure, but missiles have to propel themselves, are very large compared to railgun projectiles, and are easier to break apart by putting a heavy wall of lead in the air. Railgun projectiles have none of these disadvantages. They don't need propellant (or a warhead; the energy delivered upon impact is more than sufficient to break things without needing to explode), they're a solid projectile (and as such can't be as easily destroyed or knocked off course), and they're smaller than a missile is making them much more difficult to track. To successfully defeat an incoming railgun projectile, it would both required sufficient detection technology coupled to a laser that would need to fully ablate it; where missiles require detection of a significantly larger object and can be defeated by shooting at them/more active protection measures.

travisporter 7y ago

Is there any active research on this technology for non-rocket launch systems?

clarkmoody 7y ago
I assume that the same technology could be applied for launch systems, with one major change: maximum acceleration. An electric railgun would need to be very long in order to reach high velocity without undergoing huge accelerations as in the Navy railgun. Ramping up a vehicle with payload and fuel in it without destroying it is the name of the game.
godelski 7y ago
Do you mean like going to space? There's some research but after everyone figured it that all humans inside would be instantly squished they started researching other avenues. The g forces are pretty large and would damage a lot of cargo too.
- ars 7y ago
  > would be instantly squished Not so. That's only for a very short launch. You would actually have a track a few miles long (probably up the side of a mountain) and launch using that. The g-forces would be very mild.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    You need about 1200km to reach LEO from the equator with max acceleration of about 3G. I did the math once, and a track from the Galapagos Islands to the peak of Chimborazo on the continent in Ecuador would do it.
    - ars 7y ago
      I was a little shocked at that number, so I ran the math again, and wow. Quite a bit longer than I expected. Maybe a circular track till you build up speed, then switch over to the mountain track? Of course the circular track would have g-forces due to that..... (Do you feel like doing more math?) I guess it's more practical to use the track just for the initial boost above the atmosphere, then a rocket to add speed. Also a track that can handle something moving at km/s is .... not easy.

alistproducer2 7y ago

Am I supposed to celebrate the spending of untold billions on an unnecessary weapon of death while my Bridges and roads crumble, my health care system sucks and absolutely nothing is being done about, or to prepare for, climate change?? I'm not impressed

deweller 7y ago
Is there a widespread lack of funding for bridges and roads infrastructure in the US? The bridges and roads around me in middle TN are well maintained. These are funded by local government resources, right?
- smcl 7y ago
  Yep, this has been pretty widely reported, in fact when I was looking for an article that covered this the first one I found (from April this year) talked about a bridge in TN which collapsed: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/05/710364158/report-finds-more-than-47-000-structurally-deficient-bridges-in-the-u-s https://www.npr.org/2019/04/05/710364158/report-finds-more-t...
- Tuna-Fish 7y ago
  The reason there were such problems in this area until recently was congressional earmarks. When people lobbied for their representatives to support their pet cause, traditionally the best way they had to do this was to issue an earmark as part of some bill. Earmarks are not heavily fought by other representative because they do not give federal money to a state, rather they are the federal government forcing a state to spend some of their own money on something they wouldn't otherwise have done. The problem with this is that unless the local government decides to overbudget for this and run a surplus every year, this money comes from somewhere. Typically something boring that people don't care about, like infrastructure maintenance. That is, people don't care about it until it starts to actually fail... Then congressional earmarks got banned. Only, things are actually worse now, because it turns out the political horse trading around earmarks was the only reason representatives have to compromise across party lines, instead of always holding a hard line on the issues their supporters want. This is the direct cause of the current political gridlock.

drewbt 7y ago

In South Africa, we are putting our weapons in art galleries, as relics. The art of war days are over. That Art of Peace struggle is gaining momentum.

pageandrew 7y ago
that's not how the world works
- drewbt 7y ago
  How does it work, how should it work, and what are we doing about it?
  - toss1 7y ago
    How it works now is that some percentage of the humans want to become, and/or want to support authoritarian rule. Authoritarian rule always wants to expanad, and will treat both it's subjects and other people as objects. How should it work? Like eradicating smallpox, we'll need to somehow engineer, or teach, or by some other method, eradicate from the entire human race the authoritarian impulse. Until then, the choices are: 1) submit, or 2a) create systems of laws & institutions to ensure that power remains distributed and is difficult to hijack/co-opt/capture by any one person or group and 2b) (since all systems are hackable/fallible) be prepared to fight for your freedom and the freedom of others less fortunate. EDIT: add 2a
    - drewbt 7y ago
      “Hi Drew/Glenda It is with great pleasure to see the project at this stage. We have yet once again proved the sceptics, nay sayers and persmists wrong. From a plain field to a sight commanding building that yields hope to drags of our society and the future itself. Despite of the hindrances we have encountered along the way, I am humbled, awed and jubilant to have been a part of such a gesture. In this money fueled life style I would also been delighted to have made myself a fortune in building such a building that is going to make a difference in many people's lives but the greatest fortune of all is the joy I find in knowing that these hands have built such a meaningful building. The project may have come to its end but the memory will linger in my heart forever. This hasn't only equipped me with skills but changed the way I view life. It is this reason that I would love the organisers to allow us to keep the tools we have used in building the hope and the future of our society so that we can continue putting bread on our tables and helping those in need of our assistance. My humble thanks to all those who selflessly opened their check books and offered with their hard earned cash to the project, and not forgetting those who could not offer funding but took it upon themselves and used their precious time to personally give a hand in this project. This project is a full proof that humanity/Ubuntu still exists. Regards Michael Dyasi”

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I find the physics of rail guns pretty fascinating. For something nominally invented in world war 1 (1918) which is now "only a few years" away from possible deployment. We are talking literally a 100 years later. We went from powered flight to flying in orbit in less time, think about that. Is it a compelling weapons concept? Of course it is, you don't need explosives to shoot things that is pretty huge. Are wars bad? Of course they are. That said, the concept has been around for a hundred years, so people are going to work on making a practical weapon out of it. Which means that at some point its going to be a component of a military action. And not having one of your own, will change the calculus of what you can and cannot do.

derefr 7y ago
It's not like the technology behind railguns hasn't been stable and ready to use for decades now. It's just that, until the more recent invention of ancillary technologies like supercapacitors, it's been so costly to fire them that there was no logical place for them on the battlefield, so we never bothered to operationalize them.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  I can't agree with this: "It's not like the technology behind railguns hasn't been stable and ready to use for decades now.", at least not in terms of practicality. I did a bit more research on flight and found a similar comment from Wilbur Wright[1] about George Cayley. It is very different to be able to demonstrate a principle in physics (such as flight, or accelerating a piece of metal with electricity) and building a practical application of that principle. In many ways the time it takes between those two points is likely a good indicator of just how difficult it is to reduce the principle to practice. You yourself mention super capacitors, another comment mentions the rails, then there are the switching devices themselves, the wiring harnesses, the control system. That is why I'm pretty awestruck at the fact that they were able to make it work and get this close to being something they can field test. [1] "About 100 years ago, an Englishman, Sir George Cayley[2], carried the science of flight to a point which it had never reached before and which it scarcely reached again during the last century." -— Wilbur Wright, 1909 --- http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/cayley.html http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/cayley.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley

pneill 7y ago

Does anyone know why there is a flash of light and a puff of smoke when the gun fires? Since it's electromagnetic, you'd think you wouldn't see anything.

bobloblaw45 7y ago
The air infront of the projectile. When you compress a gas it creates heat. The projectile is moving so fast it super heats the air infront of it as it compresses it. Also normally things that go the speed of this projectile (mach 6 I believe) are way up in the sky where the air is less dense. So theres a whole lot of air down here for it to shove out of its way. The explosion is from the rapid expansion of the superheated gas after leaving the barrel.
coder543 7y ago
Railguns are not coilguns. Railguns maintain physical contact between the projectile and the rails for the entire length of the barrel. That's a lot of friction. Friction leads to heat, light, and a puff of smoke from material that has been ablated during the launch, if I were to guess. This leads to one of the big problems with railguns, which is that you have to replace the rails frequently due to wear and tear.
- xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
  They don't need to maintain physical contact. You can have an air gap, as long as the circuit shorts through the projectile. The rails still wear down.
  - FreeFull 7y ago
    If you have a gap, then you end up with electrical arcing which generates even more heat
tropo 7y ago
It's a wrapper (sabot, carrier, etc.) that ignites due to the speed.
7y ago

module0000 7y ago

Sadly, news these days involves a lot of "we've invented <X>, to kill people that disagree with us". Often the word "disagree" is replaced with "undermine" or "threaten". It's all the same human-life-ending bullshit. I don't feel at home in this world any more. When I was 18, I enlisted in the armed services and "did my part" as people often say. What a fucking mistake, I'm humiliated and embarrassed every single day to have played "my part" in any of this. The modern-day me wishes I could go back to the 18-year-old me and turn my weapon on my masters when they were all gathered to cheer us on. Unfortunately, I'm sure dozens would have stepped in to take their place as quickly as I ended them.

oblongx 7y ago
?? Sadly, news these days involves a lot of "we've invented <X>, to kill people that disagree with us".....The modern-day me wishes I could go back to the 18-year-old me and <kill people I now disagree with>
- brink 7y ago
  What's a pacifist with militaristic sentiments? A hypocrite? A doublethink?
- perfmode 7y ago
  > "Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other's throats. ... [Tolerance] is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact."
- deleted 7y ago
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rmcrx 7y ago
Have some respect for the men who saved you from Communism.

antpls 7y ago

Could the same technology be used to help the lift off of Falcon9-sized space rockets from a deep vertical tunnel ?

krastanov 7y ago
On bodies without atmosphere, yes. It is a common thread in many futuristic exploration plans and scifi stories.
ars 7y ago
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver You actually want horizontal velocity, not vertical. Getting "up" is easy (it's only a few miles), it's the horizontal speed that keeps you there. The only reason rockets launch straight up is to avoid the thick air as quickly as possible, then they turn and accelerate sideways the rest of the way.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  Or they do a gravity turn to round off the corner, largely in the same manner as that one math problem you probably did in school that involved finding the fastest path that includes running on the beach for some distance, then swimming at slower speed to a point in the water. Also, different rocket designs have different efficiencies at different outside pressures due to overexpansion or underexpansion of the exhaust plume. Kicking a rocket out of the atmosphere--or at least up to a lower pressure altitude--with a big gun first stage changes the requirements a bit for the second stage rocket engine. It's slightly more efficient. But the biggest advantage is that you aren't ever accelerating the fuel for the first stage along with the rest of the vehicle. The disadvantage is that you need a very long track if you don't want to reduce vehicle occupants to thin red paste with excessive acceleration. Also, you can evacuate the gun barrel and put one or more plasma windows at the end, so your initial acceleration doesn't have so much atmospheric drag.

Fej 7y ago

Why have coilguns not gotten the same amount of attention as railguns?

leetcrew 7y ago
I'd guess the main reason is that it's an inherently more complicated design; if you don't sync the electromagnets perfectly you spend energy decelerating the round. it does have the advantage that the projectile doesn't need physical contact with an electified rail, so maybe it could be less damaging to the device itself.
- shereadsthenews 7y ago
  These railguns also have synchronized pulsed power systems that are quite complex. The University of Texas has been researching this stuff for decades. Here's a simple paper I Googled up https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a639371.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a639371.pdf
- ThrustVectoring 7y ago
  The coils are inductors, and so cannot be turned off instantaneously - you get a voltage across them proportional to how quickly you're changing the current. As you build a faster coilgun, it gets harder to deal with the voltages generated by the sharper current pulses necessary to do useful work. And presumably you're also increasing the current involved to get higher velocity, which also contributes to the engineering difficulties involved in managing the coil voltages.
hanniabu 7y ago
Does a coilgun have any advantages over a railgun?
- ben_w 7y ago
  Amateur railgun builders comment about the projectiles welding themselves to the rails; that certainly doesn’t happen in a coilgun. I think there’s also a big problem with supplying extremely high currents, which you can circumvent a bit in a coilgun by having more turns of wire.

jiveturkey 7y ago

No mention of China. I wonder if the revival of this is due to China's railgun developments.

crimsonalucard 7y ago
I find this invention will solve our problems. Just point at China, fire the gun, and all problems solved. Just kidding, seriously what do we point it at? And what problem will it solve after it's been fired? Also why are we not competing on high speed rail technology? Why do we always have to beat a country with military technology given how completely useless most of it is.
- adventured 7y ago
  > Also why are we not competing on high speed rail technology? The US competes at the top in dozens of other categories, from aerospace to biotech to software to agriculture to semiconductors to spacetech to medtech. Why should we need to compete in high-speed rail technology? It's the last problem the US has. There's no need to dominate everything - as no nation practically can anyway - just buy Japan's excellent high-speed rail tech. If the US were going to build a national high-speed rail network, it would be best served to buy that tech elsewhere rather than reinventing the wheel, so as to save money and time. The high-speed rail that gets built in Texas for example should probably use Japanese tech: June 2019: "Japan's 'supreme' bullet train aims to impress Texas with speed" "The real audience for the demonstration, however, was the stakeholders of a privately constructed high-speed rail line in the U.S. state of Texas connecting the cities of Dallas and Houston." https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Japan-s-supreme-bullet-train-aims-to-impress-Texas-with-speed https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Japan-s-supreme-b...
  - crimsonalucard 7y ago
    Three things. 1. I'm talking about public government projects like the space race or international highway system. Not commercial business sectors like biotech, software or agriculture. Typically governments do projects for the good of society or to compete for prestige (which offers no tangible utility) with another country. I'm thinking kill two birds and instead of building a gun they will likely never fire, build a huge public bullet train system that actually benefites society and makes America not look like a giant car mono culture. 2. My mistake, I meant the rail network infrastructure itself not the technology. 3. Not only is there no need for the US to dominate every industry. There is no need for the US to dominate at all for the industry I'm talking about and that is government projects. The rail gun serves a single purpose. Prestige, that's it. With globalization taking over the world today, firing that rail gun at any country is just bad news for everybody and unlikely to happen at all so why build it at all. Governments should serve utilitarian needs of the people. Governments should not build projects just to one up another country. Seriously who cares if China's GDP surpasses the US... It doesn't matter in the end.

mcguire 7y ago

1) "The system charges for two minutes..." One shot per two minutes is pretty bad; the current 5" gun shoots 16-20 rounds per minute. 2) "...at speeds up to Mach 6." One of the issues with old school, large caliber naval guns was that the blast from the guns would damage or destroy equipment near the muzzle. (I was just reading Pursuit by Ludovic Kennedy, about the British pursuit of the Bismark, and (IIRC) one ship (the Prince of Wales?) had its bridge windows blown out when firing the B turret "over its shoulder".) Is the shockwave from a railgun going to be similarly dangerous?

xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
No, beyond the initial propellant. The projectile accelerates constantly (hand waving here) so it's a constant force on the origin (relative mass should make this a wash), whereas the projectile enjoys exponential velocity. Two minutes is pretty short, I'm actually blown away. If only we could all charge our electric vehicles that quickly.
- frede 7y ago
  Nitpick: the velocity grows linearly, not exponentially.
mjevans 7y ago
A good question to ask is if it would still take 2 min if hooked up to a ship's nuclear reactor power grid, or if the 2 min is more of an artifact of it being an alpha test rig designed more for data and refining the design. I'm positive that at the very least they've got plans for making the version fire faster than one shot ever 2 min in a production model, even if that means throwing 16 times the hardware / capacity at the charging and cooling components.
opwieurposiu 7y ago
Most of the muzzle blast from a powder gun is from the hot gases that escape after the projectile, not the shockwave from the projectile itself. The rail gun has very little hot gas escape so the blast should be much diminished.
7y ago

openasocket 7y ago

I've never quite understood why we need to change technologies so completely to get the projectile moving faster. As in, why couldn't we do the same thing by just making a bigger explosion in the barrel? I assume there's some point of diminishing returns or inefficiency that makes it impractical, but I haven't been able to find a source that gives the math to explain it.

asark 7y ago
Explosives are really dangerous to carry around. Go looking through the fates of ships lost in WWI and II (last time there was a fair amount of ship combat going on) and there's an awful lot of "several rounds hit but everything was basically fine, except then one hit the magazine, blowing the ship in two and sinking her", or a fire starting and doing something similar, or a smaller cache of explosives readied for immediate use in a gun blowing up and causing massive damage, or whatever. Not sure if that's the reason, but it's probably a reason.
- vkou 7y ago
  It wasn't even shells hitting magazines. It was shells hitting gun turrets, with the explosions reaching the magazines. In the Battle of Jutland (The largest naval battle of WWI), the Royal Navy lost three capital ships (Two battlecruisers and a heavy cruiser) to single shells that struck their gun turrets, detonating their ammo magazines. The gun turrets were, in theory, supposed to be sealed off, by blast doors, from their magazines - but in order to increase fire rates, it was standard practice to leave those doors open in combat. The Germans, not being suicidal lunatics, kept equivalent blast doors closed, which is why none of their capital ships went up in flames, despite taking a lot more damage.
  - CapricornNoble 7y ago
    As an addendum: The Royal Navy had a long and well-established tradition of exceptionally well-drilled gun crews, probably going back almost 150 years from WWI through the Napoleonic era. It could be argued that their fast-firing and disciplined gunnery were decisive in more than one British victory. HOWEVER....as you point out this led to objectively-suicidal practices....What's that term for when you've been doing a risky job for so long you don't realize how dangerous your habits are? Yeah Royal Navy gunnery is a textbook example of that.

zw123456 7y ago

You could rule a punkin chunkin contest with that if you could find a way not to pie :)

dfilppi 7y ago

Get the projectile up to mach 33 and it can shoot satellites out of orbit from the ground.

lm28469 7y ago
Making a satellite capable of surviving the launch will be the second part of the problem.
- keiru 7y ago
  "shoot satellites out of orbit", not "into orbit"
  - fooker 7y ago
    Same fundamental problem.
    - RantyDave 7y ago
      Except that in one case they thing you're trying to launch is a tonne of assorted electronics, and in the other case it's two kilos of tungsten.
    - Balero 7y ago
      Not really. Orbit isn't just about getting up there. It's about moving fast enough when you are up there. To destroy something in orbit, you just need to get the projectile up there. You don't also have to get it up to escape velocity.
    - wolf550e 7y ago
      No. If your projectile reaches altitude of target satellite with 0 velocity, hangs for a moment and starts to fall down, but then is impacted at relative velocity of kilometers per second by a satellite, your weapon (or Kessler syndrome trigger) works. It doesn't need orbital velocity at altitude, only the altitude. That is a lot lower energy!
    - 7y ago

fnord77 7y ago

I wonder how durable these will be in combat Seems vulnerable to damage during a battle. A couple stray bullets or shrapnel hitting those power cables would put it out of commission unless it was heavily armored. where as they would just ping off an old-timey cannon harmlessly.

russdill 7y ago
old-timey cannons need a lot of systems to slew/aim/etc. And without these systems, they are useless.
tdxcbkifxxxx 7y ago
Go back to playing video games. That's the dumbest comment I've read all week

sandworm101 7y ago

Some forgotten limitations of railguns: There is a maximum speed for projectiles in naval warfare. Earth is round. So anything moving too fast (~8000m/s) simply cannot hit distant targets. If fired horizontally, the shell will climb up as the earth curves away. This causes all sorts of difficulties if trying to attack another ship. At best, your shells will hit horizontally, far above the waterline. You would need a shell that could either fly itself downwards, bleeding speed, limiting penetration, and defeating the point of using a railgun.

percutaneous 7y ago
Theoretically you could have a projectile with downforce. This would allow you to break that limit. I imagine it's highly impractical though. I hadn't thought of that limit though, good comment!
- sandworm101 7y ago
  Then it needs to fly, which means it cannot be spinning. And it probably needs some internal mechanisms to control that flying. Now it is more a hypervelocity drone than a inert kinetic impactor.
  - closeparen 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ship_ballistic_missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ship_ballistic_missile
cascom 7y ago
Article references a goal of achieving a 100 mile range? How do they plan on doing that then?
- sandworm101 7y ago
  100 miles to what? An aircraft? A very tall ship? A bunker on a mountainside? Until they have a reliable system that can be run over and over for days, I don't think anyone knows exactly how these things will be employed.