Railguns

Whatever happned to railguns? Way back when i was in highschool I used to hear about them all the time and something else called "metalstorm" You know using an electical charge to proepl a projectile at super high speeds? i mean if we could put rail guns on our ships would they not have a greater range thnew missiles?> and imagine if our troops were shooting handhel railguns, wouldnt they just be tearing stuuf up?

reply to post by Czulkang


weapons of war I think have to meet the geniva convention. all other weapons are top secret and or not allowed to be used in war.

reply to post by Czulkang

I want one of these railguns
www.project-apollo.net...

imagine if our troops were shooting handhel railguns,

One huge problem would be powering them - the troops would have to lug around a large backpack to power a railgun, then you would have to worry about charging the power pack....

A normal rifle needs no power, can be unused for years then picked up and used immediately.

reply to post by Czulkang


1 - metalstorm is not a railgun - it uses electric primers to fire sequentially loaded rounds in a single barrel

2 - when i " was in high school " - i heard about all manner of technology that did not come to fruition - get over it

3 - to actually deploy railguns as issue weapons - they have to meat certain criteria :

a - offer a significant improvement on chemical propellant weapons /vis :

i relative to cost

ii portability / ROF

b be reliable / robust

4 the US has a railgun prototype in testing - but the design is not capable of :

a - being a practical replacement for current naval rifles

b - being a usefull mobile land based weapon

c - being scaled to man portable

that's about it - portable rail guns need a powersource we currently don't have - to make them a realistic battlefield weapon

reply to post by Czulkang


I was a pretty mean shot with one in Quake 2, if that counts?

reply to post by Czulkang


They are still working on the technology. The US navy has a railgun project to replace the conventional guns on warships.

www.telegraph.co.uk...

The technology works, they are down to the reliability and packaging issues now.

reply to post by Czulkang


www.youtube.com...
www.youtube.com...

They have had rail gun technology since at least the 1970's though weaponisation of this technology may be relatively new but it may already be in use for delivering packages into orbit for without being detected and indeed may have been in use for this for some time.

The above examples are merely Naval implementation's but SDI systems are probably in place utilising sub surface emplacement's to hide the massive size though the launcher system for non rocket satellite orbital insertion's is probably huge and could be regarded as a DUMB facility.

reply to post by ignorant_ape

1 - metalstorm is not a railgun - it uses electric primers to fire sequentially loaded rounds in a single barrel

Or array of barrels, generally a single shot/burst device though.

The issue with 'handheld' or portable anything is energy. There are some interesting advances in fast discharge batteries that could make some of it realistic.

reply to post by justwokeup


! WOW !

It is estimated that five more years of research may be required to develop cooling systems that will allows the gun to cope with being fired repetitively. According to the Navy officials the desire is for the super-gun to fire ten rounds a minute and shoot missiles up to an astonishing 220 nautical miles.

(Your Link

At another site, after a bit of digging, I came up with a solid number of what that puts within range of Naval guns.

44 % of the world's population (more people than inhabited the entire globe in 1950) live within 150 kilometers of the coast. In 2001 over half the world's population lived within 200km of a coastline.

Source

I wonder what all that technology could do if the efforts were directed to construction and not destruction? The "Super-Gun" Iraq built way back and was the source of endless propaganda points, had originally been intended as a space launch system before being turned into Super Artillery you couldn't really change aim with. Imagine how easily things could happen if getting there was just one electrical charge and trip down the tube away.

@ Thread

Oh and Metal Storm is very real. A few threads on here exist with detail about it as it's being developed. As someone else said though, it's electrical but not the same thing. Not a rail gun.

reply to post by Czulkang
Normally when you don't hear about some weapon that would have been devastating to anyone that stood up against it, its in place or they have moved on to something even more devastating........... like a rail type gun on a satellite that could cut a ship in half in a matter of moments.............I know I watch to much TV.

The Navy's railgun program is just entering phase 2. The prototypes worked. But eventually self destructed.

The Navy has decided to go with the railgun design made by BAE Systems. They are supposed to be creating a gun that is capable of firing up to 10 rounds per minute.

Having read the OP's question there are a few minor details that I do not think that the military has managed to overcome. If they did then look out for the next tech up grade coming soon.

The idea of a railgun is that it uses electromagnetic forces to propel a projectile. The rails having a current in them, and the projectile completing the current and thus creating in short a magnetic field.
Some of the main problems that they are coming up with is the power required to fire said weapon. That would have to be overcome, then there would be how to dissipate the heat generated by the firing of the weapon and finally one small detail. The weapon would produce a magnetic charge, how do you protect any and all electronic equipment from said charge, along with preventing it from becoming a beacon for other weapons? (A simple torpedo would have a magnetic homing device that is activated and primed. Any ship that would have this weapon in use would draw most torpedo's and mines to it.)

If you want something far more interesting look into Free Electron Lasers (FEL) that are being put on Carriers and Aegis Cruisers.

One of my engineering professors worked on the rail gun project at Lawrence Livermore labs, on the 80's.
At that time they were firing a 10mm diameter lexan(polycarbonate plastic) plug at 20,000 feet/second. At that velocity the friction from passing through the air turned the plug into a plasma. My professor kept a 1inch thick piece of armor plate, on his desk, that was used a s a target. The plate had a nice clean hole about a half inch in diameter all the way through.
It was a pretty impressive little display when combined with a sample of the lexan projectile.
There were three areas of design that have taken nearly 30years to address.
Energy generation and storage was critical, it would take a whole day to charge the banks of capacitors used to fire the device. The amount of energy used was the equivalent to what the whole city of Livermore used for like an hr. It also burned out the capacitors.
The barrel or rails also ripped itself apart after only a few shots.
Heat generation was also an issue.
The navy has made strides in the first two areas but heat generation still posses problems.