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One important difference is heat management. Electric weapons are super neat. Their specs can put the projectile very kenetic, they can uitilize more exotic en
by Balgair 7y ago
One important difference is heat management.
Electric weapons are super neat. Their specs can put the projectile very kenetic, they can uitilize more exotic energy sources, etc.
However, in terms of a man portable gun, they just really don't have the specs needed. Sure, we can make them more ruggeded and more effective at lower KE output. But a major issue for a man portable gun is heat. Heat causes expansions and affects ductility, ductility and expansion cause jams. Jams mean you're dead.
It turns out that the brass cartridge is really really good at getting hot and then taking that heat with it as it is ejected. The HK-G11 is a good example of the issues that the lack of heat ejection can cause [0].
As we do not have super-conducting materials that can be man portable and at room temperature, there is significant heat build up in the copper rails of the rail gun. With catridges you can throw that heat away easily, with rails, you have to have a cooling system in them to continue to use the gun. Either that or you have to stop the warfighter from using the gun until it cools. This, especially when lives are on the line, is non ideal.
Hence, railguns are mostly used in much larger applications like ships. There you can have the cooling equipment to keep the gun functional and operating and you can use the ocean as a heat sink. Your heat issues are still present though. More exotic materials than cooper are used for the rails, things that need to be at LN2 temperatures. But on a ship, you have the room and weight to carry the LN2 cooling equipment. Currently, railgun tech is still being developed. Reliability is a big issue, one that was solved in chemically launched projectiles through decades of tial and error. Rail guns are likewise going to need those decades of learning to occur.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKcvM2Hh4g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKcvM2Hh4g
- petra 7y agoWe have much better engineering tools today, so why would it take decades ?
- Balgair 7y agoThe weapons we have today are very well engineered (cheap, reliable, understood tolerances/ranges, etc). As such, where railgun tech will be used is in limited cases as compared to the well developed cheamically launched projectiles. That means that there are less cases where the railgun can be used and then learned from. Especially with weapons, you need real life testing in order to understand the engineering issues, as lab testing is generally forbidden due to loss of human life. Hunting deer and boars will only give you so much. Fortunately, we humans don't go to War too often these days (though this is very debatable to a lot of real people). Unfortunately for railgun engineers, that means there is not a lot of real world testing in the panic that is a battle.
- petra 7y agoIn my understanding, railgun development is physics and engineering. Can you expand a bit on the need for human life for testing ?
- Balgair 7y agoLike, fire one of these railguns that are ship-based in rough seas at a hostile target that is shooting at you too. There's smoke, flak, little wires, mist, spray, etc in the air that can gum up the gun and jam. Does firing one of these things in a storm have interactions with lightining effects? How does that big of an EM field affect sailors over time, like the concussive blasts affected sailors previously? But that's already something that a person can think of. It's the stuff you cannot think of that are the main issues. When the panic sets in and the battlefield is very live, what happens that will affect the armaments that you did not think of?