Railguns Getting Closer

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I can see people a hundred years from now argueing over which pistol is better. The Grailock or the 2011.:D
 
Vertical Range

I was thinking more along the lines of an anti-satellite gun.

Not for the high-up stuff, but for the low-earth-orbit stuff.

Like spy sats.

Imagine, hurling a thousand-dollar brick of steel up a couple hundred miles and taking out 10 million bucks worth of eye-in-the-sky.
 
I was thinking more along the lines of an anti-satellite gun.
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It could be used the other way around too. Mount one of those babies in a satellite, and you could orbit the earth, picking off stuff with impunity.
 
Rail guns destroy the rails, sometimes it's the first shot or it comes later. The rails have to be stiff. Arcing, galling, warping and other damage will cause delays in being able to fire another shot with that gun.

There are pictures online of Darpa's railgun firing. It's not a gentle push but a fireball.
Scratch that, it's Sandia's and it's at the power labs site.

This is an idea of what students have been working on.
http://www.powerlabs.org/railgun.htm

I had read one research paper where a plasma was initiated and accellerated down the rails and used to slam the projectile imparting energy and sending it on it's way. They were testing spalling and other deformations. I don't have a link handy. The benefit to this is rate of fire and substantially increased rail life.
I've not followed this as avidly as I was as the process was becoming more mainstream and less new and shiny. :)

The DDX all electric warship is the target for those rail guns. Even if they're slow firing 64 megajoules is pretty impressive.

A Texas university department had the fastest gauss (coil) gun so far but those are way too finicky and as power hungry as a rail gun.
 
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Is there a difference between a magnetic sled and magnetic rail delivery system? Just curious because PopSci did an article on a MagSled that is being designed to launch stuff into space.
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When people think of how magnetic guns work, they generally think of coil guns. When they think of what they do, they think rail guns.

A coil gun uses a magnetic coil to generate a magnetic field which pushes/pulls the projectile, generally acting on a magnet in the projectile to improve performance. The coils generate a lot of heat, and take alot of power.

Rail guns work differently. The power goes up one rail, across an armature on the projectile/sabot, and down the other. The rails repel each other, and when they interact with the armature, they move it away from the power source. You have to get very high currents to make it work. The other problem here is arcing. Try scraping a welding electrode over some metal. It sticks, right? If you do it just right to make it move, you'll also get the arc, which will tear up the surface of the metal. This happens in a rail gun. Arcing between the rail and the projectile tear up the surface, leading to a very short barrel life. Even with big guns, you expect more than twenty shots before swapping out the barrel.

I've been playing with some of this. My brother and I figured a forty foot gun running off a semi engine to charge can give you a shot a minute that's equivalent to a 155mm shell. We calculated the HE content of hte shell with 40% weight, and TNT. This is the energy of the EXPLOSIVE, not the muzzle energy. I wonder if with a gun that big, you get much destructive power out of the velocity.
 
It could be used the other way around too. Mount one of those babies in a satellite, and you could orbit the earth, picking off stuff with impunity.
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I think Newton might have a problem with that scenario. :)
 
So, what caliber for railgun????
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Uh oh... whole new arguments to have:
Well, if it isn't .45ACP, then i'm not carrying.
and don't talk to me about those 9mm railguns, i just don't feel safe carrying one.

:neener:
 
I think Newton might have a problem with that scenario.
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Ya think? ;)

It would have to be the B model, "recoil-less" railgun. But those are not available just yet. At least not over .355", ergo, utterly worthless.
 
I ask this question out of ignorance: can today's non-nuclear standard shipboard power charge up the capacitators at a decent rate? Does that account for the slow rate of fire mentioned above? Would a shipboard reactor, already used for propulsion and the electronics and hotel loads, be able to deliver more energy to a railgun system faster than the gas turbine or diesel propulsion plants?
 
This system would be effective only if it was mounted on a mobil platform. The Gremans of WW1 & 2 proved that theory with the great big cannon. Stationary targets aren't what we are about. Expeditionary Forces is what we (Americas Military) are now, literally called that.:evil: We go to the BG's yard, and I don't forsee ever having a need for those type of weapons to be around here. Might, if we can get a good deal from the mfg.:neener: .
 
...I don't forsee ever having a need for those type of weapons to be around here.
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Since when has "need" ever been relevant in the military procurement process?
 
The naval rail gun was originaly developed for the army, but the Army doesn't have the launch platform. We don't have nuclear powered Abrams (yet). The research and technology was then marketed to the Navy and their nuclear powered ships. In the early '90s, alot of the research was funded by Congress, not the Pentagon.
Here's a link to the company my father works for. He has alot of interesting stories about rail guns and hyper-velocity weapons.

http://www.iat.utexas.edu/index.html
 
I ask this question out of ignorance: can today's non-nuclear standard shipboard power charge up the capacitators at a decent rate? Does that account for the slow rate of fire mentioned above? Would a shipboard reactor, already used for propulsion and the electronics and hotel loads, be able to deliver more energy to a railgun system faster than the gas turbine or diesel propulsion plants?
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As I mentioned, a semi engine can power a railgun that can replace a 155mm, and possibly with a higher rate of fire(we calculated one minute charging time, don't know how long it takes to load a tube). Key thing with the naval gun is that they plan to put it on a destroyer than has an electric drive train. The turbine runs a generator, and that powers a motor connected to the propeller(current ships have a transmission in there, which diverts power to hydraulic pumps and generators for other stuff). One of the things you can do here is switch all of the power to the capacitor banks, charge them up, then go back to propulsion. Wiki says the Zumwalt class will have 78 megawatts of gas turbine(the steam turbine in a nuclear ship would have a similar shaft output. You'd just be getting the energy from uranium rather than oil). All of that can be used for the gun, with the electric drive train. If my brother was awake we could probably work out how much time it would take to charge a 65 megajoule shot, but I don't see it as very long. The low rate of fire is probably for a test prototype, which might take longer because of power availability and measurements and such done between shots.
 
How hot do the rails get when firing a shot? Do they have to cool before you can take another shot? If so how long does it take the rails to cool?
 
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