trippenbach
tanith6227
rustedangel
Pale HorseOK, you’ve got my interest piqued.
What is LiveScience doing posting this video? (The same one as posted from YouTube below.)
I agree with the comments on I Need Gun. That Live Science vid looks totally dodgy and almost certainly not output by the US Navy. Anything the Navy puts out is going to be well polished, like this:
This looks more authentic to me - no backyard, no dirty, scored gun, no dudes in trainers and sweatshirts. OK, they’re wearing t-shirts, but they’ve got a clipboards, safety glasses, and a big hangar full of massive arrays of mag-coils. Kind of important for a magnetic rail gun.
As for the projectile burning as it penetrates the target, this is probably simply due to the release of kinetic energy on impact. If you’ve got a metal slug travelling at mach 7 hitting just about anything, it’ll release a hell of a lot of heat. Try clapping your hands; they get warm. Clap your hands together at mach 7, they catch fire.
Another possibility is that they’re using depleted uranium for the penetrator slug:
depleted uranium is favored for the penetrator because it is self-sharpening and pyrophoric. On impact with a hard target, such as an armoured vehicle, the nose of the rod fractures in such a way that it remains sharp. The impact and subsequent release of heat energy causes it to disintegrate to dust and burn when it reaches air because of its pyrophoric properties (compare to ferrocerium). When a DU penetrator reaches the interior of an armored vehicle, it catches fire, often igniting ammunition and fuel, killing the crew, and possibly causing the vehicle to explode.
OK, it’s unlikely that they’d use DU for a tester where people are going to be walking around right after the shot, as there’d be lots of fine uranium dust about. But I’m not a materials scientist - other metals might do the same, and the principle of heat release through impact stands.
Have we just caught Live Science making a beeg mistaeke? (anyway, they’d been scooped by our creepy bald dude from the discovery channel!)
Filed under: Tech, internet | Tagged: Live Science, navy, railgun, video, youtube
I considered posting both vids mentioned here, but went with the other because it mixed a good demonstration with a short running time.
I hope those guys in the original vid weren’t playing with DU rounds for their test firings - that shit is unhealthy.
Oh, and regarding the Discovery Channel “scoop” - the vid I originally linked was shot at the end of January 2008, so these latest tests (or whatever) came well after the DC did their piece.
After watching both vids, I’m rejecting any theories that one is “dodgy” or otherwise unreliable. All the videos linked show the same thing: a bunch of people demonstrating their version of a magnetic railgun. That some of these people are able to put together a more slick presentation in a nicer facility is of no relevance to the matter at hand, which is: can someone make a working railgun prototype that the U.S. Navy could conceivably mount on its ships?
Here’s a question: assuming that a practical (current prototypes generally need to be serviced after every firing - not exactly “battle ready”
railgun design is developed and becomes feasible, will the United States’ military industrial complex allow it to come into use? Will the companies that are currently building 16-inch guns and supplying ammunition for them just slink off into the corner so that the shiny new technology can come into use? Will the colossal lobbying machines that those companies have nurtured and perfected simply look at the design specs and say, “well, we can’t compete with that” and go home?
I say no. Even if a battle-use railgun design is perfected in the next 5 years, I don’t believe that it will see implementation, deployment and use for another 15 years after that. Think I’m nuts? Convinced that the U.S. military will always equip themselves with the best available? Then here’s a thought for you: if you are a high-ranking officer in the army, what do you do after you retire from the service? In many cases, you become a consultant for a supplier. Are you going to make decisions now that could adversely impact your future employers?
Well, the stated objetive is to deploy by 2016 or 2017, so those 16 inch guns will be shelling third world countries for some time yet.
The other things to bear in mind are the length of time required to retrofit existing ships, the cost of doing it, and the question of whether to develop an entirely new ship platform for the railguns, which isn’t necessarily unlikely given their unique power requirements. As for the question of replacing the old technology, in the long run I don’t see why not. The railguns themselves will almost certainly be extremely expensive to research, make and mount, so it wouldn’t be a net loss for the arms industry, just a shift from one supplier to another.
It seems to me that the combat capabilities of Navy railguns, assuming they perform as anticipated, will warrant a switch. The military-industrial complex is important, but so is maintaining military superiority. I imagine that in 20 years President-for-life Chelsea Clinton will be very happy she can shell Beijing from international waters on the other side of South Korea.
…well-researched, btw - and thank you for the explosives clarification.
“The railguns themselves will almost certainly be extremely expensive to research, make and mount, so it wouldn’t be a net loss for the arms industry, just a shift from one supplier to another.”
I agree. But what if you are one of the suppliers who might find themselves suddenly out of a contract? I mean, people have been talking about replacing the M16 as the general issue rifle of the United States Army since we were in high school, but that seems no closer to happening now than it was then. How do you compete with a superior product? By applying political and economic pressure years before the competing product is even ready for use. I’m not just making this stuff up, either - I’m just echoing the same comments and question that people who are in the United States military are already saying.
“The military-industrial complex is important, but so is maintaining military superiority.”
Again, I agree. But if your military industrial complex already gives you massive military superiority, where is the impetus to switch things up? President-for-life Clinton doesn’t need railguns to shell China from South Korea - she can spend all those hundreds of million of cruise missiles and accomplish the same thing.
It’s entirely possible (likely?) that I’m incorrect, but it will be interesting to see the true cost of deploying railguns, and whether or not it is judged to be worth the investment. On the other hand, given how much the U.S. is dumping into its defense budget, maybe the policymakers won’t even bat an eyelash at ear-marking money for a new class of railgun platform for the Navy.
OK.
The gun in the Live Science video is not a rail gun. I thought it might be when I first saw the vid, but having later seen the navy vids with huge racks of capacitors and massive arrays of magnets lining the gun barrel, I’ve thought differently. Looks to me like the first vid was some guys who jury-rigged a sabot around a narrow-cone penetrator round, and fired it off using chemical propellant.
Secondly, 16-inch guns aren’t main armament on any vessel any more, so seems to me that Tanith’s point about procurement dynamics is moot. The military-industrial complex, for all its influence, just isn’t making big guns any more. Tomahawks and Harpoons overtook guns as primary armament on battleships in the 1980s. You can deliver more ordnance, more precisely, from further away, with a missile. Sure, the handful of battleships still active do use their big guns now and again. But no battleships are being built any more. That makes the point; now it’s missiles, not guns, that count.
That’s why the navy is pumping out aircraft carriers (for planes), frigates (for missiles) and destroyers (to protect the other two from aircraft, subs and smaller boats).
In any case, a small group of companies - Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin et al. - essentially make all of the USN’s kit between them anyway. Why would a company lobby the gov’t to keep buying its old tech, when they can just sell the Navy shiny new tech - at ten times the price?
Why would you use a railgun instead of a missile? Because the rounds come in at mach 7. No missiles travel that fast. That means shorter reaction times for the defending crew. Plus, you don’t have to have a hold full of high explosive. And bleeding off waste heat doesn’t seem to me to be that big a deal when you’re surrounded by all the coolant water you could ever want. All you need is to keep moving and shunt the waste heat to the outer hull below the water line. (This could be a problem with IR signature, but I’m sure there are ways around that, like a deep towed array or something.)
And things do change in military armament. OK, the M16 is still with us, but think kevlar jackets, night vision, microlight aircraft, UAVs, Micro Air Vehicles . . . now those are cool . . .
Solid points all - except of course for the one about “not keeping high explosives on board” - those Tomahawks and Harpoons aren’t delivering payloads of daisies, after all. To say nothing of the fuel required to move the ships around - not everything is running on nuclear reactors (yet). But yes, swapping out the tons and tons of high-explosive shells for (presumably) less dangerous railgun slugs or whatever is certainly desireable from a crew and ship safety point of view.
“In any case, a small group of companies - Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin et al. - essentially make all of the USN’s kit between them anyway. Why would a company lobby the gov’t to keep buying its old tech, when they can just sell the Navy shiny new tech - at ten times the price?”
Because it costs a hundred times more than that to develop? Because the old tech is proven effective and doesn’t need to go through tiresome and lengthy testing processes? Because you can maintain your unbreakable strangehold on your piece of the 640+ billion-dolllar pie without making expensive changes to your production facilities or having to provide new training to your employees? Because money you definately have now is far better than money you might have later?
Please do not misunderstand my position here! I personally think that railguns are mega-cool and believe that they should be brought into service as soon as possible; this is the stuff we talked about with barely-contained excitement when we wrote the first FT Codex - we saw the future! I am deliberately playing the Devil’s Advocate here to promote some deliberation and research into a topic on which I believe we would otherwise be of one voice - and where’s the fun in that?
One obvious point missed:
in 20 years, what’s to say that a tomahawk won’t be viewed by the chinese as a hysterical relic that it’s fun to intercept 20 miles offshore with their shiny new VAPOR WePs?
The “other side” is not likely to stand still for the next two decades; it would be potentially fatal for the US to assume that cruise missiles that are already 20 year old technology will be up to suff in 2020, even against the Chinese. Not that they Chinese are to be taken lightly; by one estimate there will be two hundred new cities in China with a population of one million or more within the next ten years. Two hundred. That production power is going to have to come around or collapse at some point, and either way the states is going to want cutting edge arms to maintain their sphere of influence.
I’m not saying that railguns will become standard, but some kind of next generation weapon will have to come into use for the USA to stay on top. Given that they’re working on railguns now, and that - as trip pointed out - it’s very hard to intercept a solid slug at mach 8, rail or coil guns seem like a good bet… at least, for now.
…it’s also worth pointing out that you could carry a LOT of ammo on an aircraft-carrier sized ship. With a nuke to power the gun system, you might need half the number of ships to patrol a given area, especially with drones to do your long-range targeting for you. As the US falls further and further behind the near east in terms of population, their force-projection will need to increase proportionately in efficiency and scope.
“The gun in the Live Science video is not a rail gun. I thought it might be when I first saw the vid, but having later seen the navy vids with huge racks of capacitors and massive arrays of magnets lining the gun barrel, I’ve thought differently. Looks to me like the first vid was some guys who jury-rigged a sabot around a narrow-cone penetrator round, and fired it off using chemical propellant.”
Wrong. It is a railgun. The massive fireball at firing is the air igniting thanks to the projectile moving through it at Mach 7. FWOOSH!
Hear, hear. And why would you want to keep your slice of the 640 billion-dollar pie when you could make the pie EVEN BIGGER?
Yeah. I love pie.
tanith said:
No, it’s not. The gun in the Live Science video is not a rail gun. Where are the magnets? Where are the capacitors? Where is the high-spec and precisely calibrated electronics system?
Nowhere. Because it doesn’t exist. Because that, my friends, is a chemical gun, as mounted on ships for over 200 years. You can see when they load the sabot round into the breech, that it’s just got an ordinary breech, like arty guns - no electronics, nada. We saw all that in the many other videos posted on-line. Rail guns look like this now. (See the article I took that pic from)
I don’t know what that gun in the Live Science vid is, but it ain’t a rail gun.
. . . and this is wicked: (from that Military.com article) “We must be able to reach out and strike down the enemies of our country. That is what taxpayers pay for when they buy a Navy.”