http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/06/can-navys-electric-cannon-be-saved/128793/?oref=d-riverThe Navy’s futuristic electric cannon, or railgun, received yet more hype this week for its ability to fire a shell at up to 5,600 miles per hour, and do it far more cheaply than a missile. But there’s a daunting reality behind the hype: the Pentagon is already looking past the railgun to a less power-intensive, more easily deployable alternative. The railgun rounds can be fired from more conventional cannons, giving the same capability sooner and cheaper.
In 2012, the Pentagon realized that they could fire the railgun’s projectile out of the 5-inch powder guns on existing ships. No, it wouldn’t hit speeds of Mach 7 (topping out closer to Mach 3), but that’s twice as fast as a normal round fired from a 5-inch powder gun.
Pentagon leaders who vaunted the program recently started talking it down. “We thought railguns were something we were really going to go after, but it turns out that powder guns firing the same hypervelocity projectiles gets you almost as much as you would get out of the electromagnetic rail gun, but it’s something we can do much faster,” Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work told Congress in May.
No, ymmärrän jenkkien yskän raidetykin suhteen, mutta samanlailla kuin kävi heidän laserprojektien kanssa uskon että raidetykki ei pysy koipalloissa kauan aikaa.
“The capacitors and switches could always just be scaled up. Additional power plants could be provided if needed to maintain the firing rate … The real limit is how much energy per shot you can deliver to the projectile + sabot without destroying the rails too fast,” he said. “All that plasma that you see when the gun erupts, that’s material from the rails and sabot being vaporized at the sliding contact, unlike a powder gun where the barrel isn’t much eroded and the flame is from the propellant gases. I think this is what limits the total energy that can be delivered to the projectile in practice,” he said.
The reason you want to deliver more power into the shell is to give it more kick when it actually reaches its far-away target.
“They are trading off mass vs. velocity/range, under a constraint on the total energy,” says Gubrud. “They want to be able to say it’s hypersonic, and has much greater range than powder guns … That’s the principal virtue of the railgun as compared with powder guns or any pyrotechnic gun.” Because the round is so light, 23 lbs versus 70 for a conventional 5 inch shell it loses most of that energy in flight, he says.
In other words, no matter how much you improve the power source, the gun will still face limitations.
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