On a Future Weapons segment on the History Channel the other day they were talking about a new rail gun the Navy is testing. They said the projectile that this rail gun fires travels at something like Mach 10. The impact of the projectile is enough to destroy anything it hits without using any explosives. The program said the range on this new weapon was over 215 miles. Developing a guidance package that has electronics that can withstand the terrific G forces seems to be one of the major hurdles to overcome. One of the big advantages that this new weapon will have is a lower cost per projectile. Instead of the hundreds of thousands that a missile might cost, $40,000 or less. The Generals sure do have some neat toys to play with.
I am surprised to hear that the military is considering rail guns. Well, not really. But I digress.
Rail guns were used by the Germans in WWII, and found to be very ineffective and very vulnerable. They took HUGE crews to operate, and you didn't even have to hit the thing to immobilize it, just hit the train tracks. Lots of European tracks would not support the gun and its accompanying railroad vehicles.
But, then, the military has to do SOMETHING with all that money, don't they?
There's a good story on electronics in projectiles with high G
During WWII, Brits developed proximity sensor for AA artillery shell.
The main target was German V2 rockets and bombers, that were destroying GB. Now, the electronics back then was all about vacuum tubes, none of the semis we have today.
So, as the tests begun, they quickly discovered that regular tubes would simply turn into fine glass powder as shells were fired. Still, they were able to overcome all the obstacles and highly successful shells were produced, with very high kill probability, grossly superior to anything before.
Your typical AA shell will have muzzle exit velocity @ about 1400m/sec. It accelerates to that speed, from standstill, in probably under 5ms. Simply insane G and very hard to control.
I have my doubts about any AA weapon that requires direct hit to kill the target. Especially, at M10, as on-board guidance system acquires target within relatively short distance, controlling the direction with the minute accuracy required will be a tough task. Not having ability to control vector of thrusters (not having thrusters to begin with), will severly limit ability to change angle to attack targets that are going through evasive maneuvering.
For true "modern weapons" affectionados, we just might soon see the best SAMs ever designed (S300, latest Tors) put in action, for the 1st time ever, against cruise missiles and state-of-the art aircrafts (B1, B2, etc), all in heavy ECM.
That is if the Prez goes on to try to "democratize" yet another country, Iran. Judging by where 1/4 of US Navy is steaming to, won't be long .
Not sure if these replies are serious or not, but rail guns and rail(way) mounted guns are entirely different things. Rail guns use electromagnetic fields to accelerate a projectile to hypersonic speeds. Rail mounted guns just move large conventional guns around.
It wasn't the British - they did develop RADAR, however.
The National Bureau of Standards Ordinance Development Division, now known as the Harry Diamond Ordnance and Fuze Lab, developed the proximity fuze used on a wide variety of ordnance, and it was very effective. Some people have said (or written) that the electronic proximity fuze was the most important technical advantage that won WW II. I don't know if that is hyperbole or not, but it was a significant development.
The main target was German V2 rockets and bombers, that were destroying GB. Now, the electronics back then was all about vacuum tubes, none of the semis we have today.
The V2 traveled at 4000 MPH, and would have been impossible to defend against with WW II technology. Even the RADAR of the time was quite innefective at spotting them, let alone guiding a gunner to shoot at them.
On the other hand, when a stream of 1000 bombers was flying over Great Britain, being able to have artillery shells pop when they were within 100' or so of the bombers was extremely effective, and vastly more useful than a timed altitude fuze system.
So, it was at least largely a US development, not British.
These guns are electromagnetic projectile weapons, using metal rails to conduct fantastic electrical currents to accelerate a conductive metal projectile. This has nothing to do with railway transportable large artillery, which would be ludicrous for a NAVY to have, anyway.
Jon Elson wrote in news:45B69760.2040805 @artsci.wustl.edu:
In 1940 the British developed a proximity fuse for AA that, rather than the US-designed RADAR proximity fuse of later years, used a photo-electric sensor to detonate the shell when it passed through an aircraft's shadow.
Operational testing was carried out by the Royal Navy's AntiAircraft unit (later expanded to become the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons and Devices).
These fuses were intended primarily to be used by Naval Gunners stationed upon British merchant ships in combatting low-level air strikes by German planes.
I think that there are twi kinds of rail guns. One is an artillery piece that travels along railroads. Another is a electricity powered gun where a projectile is propelled along copper "rails" by magnetif roces generated by enormous electric currents. I think that the original post talked about the latter type.
When development testing prox fuzes in 155 rounds (no HE), folks I knew packed them with tamped brown sugar. That immobilized the elex within so they'd tolerate the G forces, but could be later dissolved out with hot water to examine how things fared within.
A rifle (including artillery) using a chemical propellent is limited in max muzzle velocity by the speed of sound in hot gas, the temperature of which is limited to some extent by the materials from which the barrel is made. An electromagnetic railgun does not have that limitation. They may not have significantly higher acceleration, may just keep accelerating over a longer length.
I read today or yesterday in Las Vegas Review-Journal about a new company at the Nevada Test Site, north of Las Vegas. NTS is where they set off all the A bombs, do tests, do the black aircraft programs, Aurora, etc. My dad used to take me to the edge of the desert at dawn in the fifties to witness the above ground tests. The jury is still out on how it affected me. affected me. affected me ............ SLAP!
I used the usual fifteen second rule, and after not finding it in fifteen seconds in my crumpled newspaper file, will quote it from memory.
(accuracy not guaranteed)
At the NTS, there is a new company that proposes to launch small lightweight satellites as projectiles at 20,000 mph that will orbit the earth. These will be very small, and be used for communications, weather, internet chat rooms, etc.
They said that a man would weigh a million pounds comparatively, so, that works out to 5,000 g's if you are a 200# Joe Six Packer.
The project is in a corner of the test site heretofore unused, and now leased out to such things as solar farms, solar research, hydroponic prunes, etc.
They set the parameters of the site as "having a long launch rail, and being 'secure'." I guess being "secure" means that the usual use of lethal force would be allowed under current NTS policy. The article did say they intended to use electromagnetic forces as an accelerant.
Your glass would have to be good to sustain 5,000g force, and whatever you launched would have to be the same. Or just use enough styrofoam peanuts, I guess.
In the Martlet 2 program they built for 15000 g's. From
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: "Martlet 2's were used ... at altitudes of up to 180 km with some
200 flights being conducted between 1963 and 1967. The very low cost per flight, about $3,000, made it ideal for a wide variety of applications" ... "The Martlet 2 nose cone payloads included magnetometers, temperature sensors, electron density measurements and even a Langmuir probe. For the electronic instrumentation to function properly after gun launching it was necessary to harden all of the circuitry prior to launch. This was typically accomplished by casting the entire circuit in a block of epoxy which prevented the components from moving and being damaged. In this way the Martlet 2 regularly carried complicated electronic instrumentation subjected to gun launching loads of up to 15,000 g's." ... "The Martlet 2 regularly achieved altitudes in the range of 160 km ... On November 19, 1966 a Martlet 2C was fired to an altitude of 180 km ..."
The program was aiming at orbital instead of suborbital launches in mid 1967 when HARP lost funding. HARP had about 300 launches in all, per
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, which also has a picture of a Martlet launch firing.
IEEE Spectrum magazine had an article on the WWII fuse project. This would have been 20 years ago. They said that during teh war three top priority research projects had similar scale of finance and resources;
The Manhattan project. The fuse project Figuring out how to mass produce penicillin.
The first use of the fuse was by the navy antiaircraft gunnery in the pacific, so that there was no chance that the Axis would get their hands on one.
Use against V1 bombs came later and it wasn't used in Europe until it was too late for the Germans to do anything about it.
These won't work real well at night, or in heavy cloud cover. The radar fuzes could work when the gunners could HEAR the planes going over, but couldn't see them due to clouds, and so could not set the time/altitude fuzes used before.
The radar fuzes also would work even when the shell was not in the plane's shadow, but still close enough to cause flak damage.
My understanding is that once the'd seen these radar fuzes work, they wanted to use nothing else.
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