Navy’s Mach 8 Railgun Obliterates Record

[n2doc]

by Spencer Ackerman December 10, 2010

DAHLGREN, Virginia — There wasn’t much left of the 23-pound kilogram bullet, just a scalded piece of squat metal. That’s what happens when an enormous electromagnetic gun sends its ammo rocketing 5,500 feet in a single second.

The gun that fired the bullet is the Navy’s experimental railgun. The gun has no moving parts or propellants — just a king-sized burst of energy that sends a projectile flying. And today its parents at the Office of Naval Research sent 33 megajoules through it, setting a new world record and making it the most powerful railgun ever developed.

Reporters were invited to watch the test at the Dalghren Naval Surface Warfare Center. A tangle of two-inch thick coaxial cables hooked up to stacks of refrigerator-sized capacitors took five minutes to power juice into a gun the size of a schoolbus built in a warehouse. With a 1.5-million-ampere spark of light and a boom audible in a room 50 feet away, the bullet left the gun at a speed of Mach 8.

All that energy was “dump in 10 milliseconds,” says Charles Garrett, project manager at Dahlgren for the railgun.


But since there no explosion powering the projectile, why should the railgun have made any noise at all? Answer: the bullet went so fast it released a sonic boom.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/video-navys-mach-8-railgun-obliterates-record/

video at link

[wtmusic]

1. 23 pounds? That's one helluva kilogram. nt

[laconicsax]

3. Some kilograms are more kilogram than others. n/t

[dimbear]

7. Looks like the writer got tired of carrying the decimal point and the parentheses, and dropped them

somewhere.

[krispos42]

12. *snort*

:rofl:

[Tunkamerica]

2. Was this written by a native English speaker?

[qazplm]

5. the write was a native English speak

the editor however, is from Ork.

[mwrguy]

4. Great, another weapon

There are kids with no food or healthcare, but I guess we needed a new killing machine.

[wtmusic]

6. And the advantages this offers over conventional weapons are..?

Higher muzzle velocity than a cannon, but requires capacitors the size of refrigerators.

A state-of-the-art money sink.

[krispos42]

13. In the long term...

...much more ammunition capacity for the same weight (no powder or case), more range, shorter flight time, no chance of unexploded ordanance.

And if it can replace a missile, well then you're saving all the money, weight, and maintenance on thousands of rocket motors and turbine engines.

:shrug:

It's also safer if the ship mounting it is hit by, say, a cruise missile. No explosive warhead and no chemical fuels means less to burn or explode in a ship fire..



This is the future; it's just a matter of when.

[YankeyMCC]

8. Better use would be

for launching objects into orbit. I seem to recall that NASA was also looking into this.

[Angleae]

9. It would have to be scaled up severely.

From 23 lbs at mach 8 to several hundred pounds to mach 20-30.

[social_critic]

10. The exit velocity looks pretty good, the throw weight is low

A high powered rifle has an exit velocity of 2799 ft/s. Mach 8 is about 1116 ft/s times 8, or 8928 ft/sec. That's more than triple the velocity of a 16-inch Mark 8 shell (2500 ft/sec). So the question is, what's the rail gun supposed to hit? If it's a tank, then a 20 lb steel and depleted uranium shell ought to carve a pretty big hole. The question is whether one should be running around with a tank carrying a school bus on top to launch a bullet.

Which tells me this is more of a bs research project, more military spending running amok. They can accomplish the same result with a small missile.

[Angleae]

11. The projectile is will eventually be GPS guided.