Navy ditches futuristic railgun, eyes hypersonic missiles

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Business

Navy ditches futuristic railgun, eyes hypersonic missiles

By David Sharp | AP
July 1, 2021 at 7:37 a.m. EDT

BATH, Maine — The U.S. Navy pulled the plug, for now, on a futuristic weapon that fires projectiles at up to seven times the speed of sound using electricity.

The Navy spent more than a decade developing the electromagnetic railgun and once considered putting them on the stealthy new Zumwalt-class destroyers built at Maine’s Bath Iron Works.

But the Defense Department is turning its attention to hypersonic missiles to keep up with China and Russia, and the Navy cut funding for railgun research from its latest budget proposal.

“The railgun is, for the moment, dead,” said Matthew Caris, a defense analyst at Avascent Group, a consulting firm. ... The removal of funding suggests the Navy saw both challenges in implementing the technology as well as shortcomings in the projectiles’ range compared to hypersonic missiles, he said.

The Navy’s decision to pause research at year’s end frees up resources for hypersonic missiles, directed-energy systems like lasers and electronic warfare systems, said Lt. Courtney Callaghan, a Navy spokesperson.

{snip}

[marble falls]

1. I remember reading about the rail gun in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics ...

This Brilliant Maniac Built His Own Homemade Railgun

It's huge, dangerous, and completely awesome.
By Eric Limer
Oct 17, 2015

Dabbling amateur armsmakers mess around with potato guns. Serious amateur armsmakers 3D print their own portable railguns. This man is clearly one of the latter. (I admit it. I built several spud guns. I used to be the uncle that brought and set up the fireworks. I used to.)

Known as NSA_Listbot on Reddit, this guy clearly takes his projects seriously, and gets into all the nitty-gritty details of his inadvisable but super awesome weapon in a long post on Imgur. Unlike a coilgun or gauss rifle which use a series of electromagnets to pull a magnetic projectile down a tube at great speeds, a railgun operates on more complicated physics, but doesn't require its projectiles to be magnetic. What NSA_Listbot's got here is the same thing the Navy is building, but on a much smaller scale.

When all wired up, the railgun's 20 lbs of capacitors—3 pairs of 300J, 350V, 5500uF units—can electrify the gun's rails to fire tiny aluminum rounds like this:

It may not look like much, but according to the video, that pellet was doing over 250m/s out of the barrel. For context, a standard velocity round coming out of a .22 does around 350m/s. This thing is serious.





"Don't try this at home." Well, of course not. Wink, wink, nudge, budge.

[PsakiPswirli]

2. DARPA dreamers

If this amount of money was spent on climate research, our kids might have a better chance of survival.

[LT Barclay]

3. Jacques Cousteau realized environmental problems are people

Problems, largely due to economic inequalities. An economist he was working with said that if we spent the annual budget the world spends on war on helping each other it would eliminate most of the causes of war.
Pink Floyd said it this way:

[speaktruthtopower]

4. The Russians have been focusing on Hypersonic Missiles...

seems to be a tacit admission they focused on the better technology.