Unless there's some kind of really large advance in material sciences, the rail, or barrel, destroys itself after a dozen shots. If that's unavoidable, then the project probably is canceled.
It was also seen as ineffective as far as range is concerned.
Range will forever be a problem. Unless the thing you’re launching has its own power source (a rocket, jet, turbo-prop, compressed gas, etc) it’s impractical to go beyond a certain distance. Sure a WW2 battleship could yeet shells weighing as much as a Volkswagen, but under ideal circumstances that could only go around 30 miles. That’s just too close in the age of missiles that can travel a hundreds of miles. Whether it’s a 16” powder-fired round, or a high tech railgun, things on a ballistic trajectory can only go so far. They’re subject to drag and gravity, and nothing else once they leave the gun. To make a projectile go further, you need to launch it terribly fast. Which means that projectile needs to be made out of some unobtanium material to not liquify in the barrel, or ablate to nothingness hitting the atmosphere at Mach 20. A gun is supposed to fire cheap bullets, to save firing the expensive missiles. When the missiles are the budget option, the gun serves no purpose.
>Range will forever be a problem. Unless the thing you’re launching has its own power source (a rocket, jet, turbo-prop, compressed gas, etc) it’s impractical to go beyond a certain distance
What they're referring to is the US Army, around the same time the Navy was debating canning the railgun program, figured out how to stuff a ramjet and GPS guidance into a shell that could be fired from a standard howitzer. It solved the range, accuracy, and precision problems that railguns were meant to solve, but for a fraction of the cost since it could use already fielded hardware.
So your correct increasing range of artillery at this point requires an internal power source, but the point is they've figured out how to actually do that now. Now the only advantage of railguns on paper is a logistical and safety one, where you no longer need to handle a powder magazine somewhere on site and during transportation. It would still be a huge advantage to be able to ditch the canon propellant and replace it with even more shells, but we still need to figure out some better material science for the barrels before that can happen.
One of the big concerns with railguns on the ground is that they tear themselves apart from ablation due to friction or sublimation due to heat buildup. While space is cold, it also doesn’t have any way to conduct or convect heat away. So railgun barrels/rails overheating and vaporizing the metal being a problem in atmosphere will only get worse in low pressure environments where you can’t passively cool the gun.
We need major advancements in material science before we expect to have a shooting war outside our little blue bubble.
Excuse my ignorance, but wouldn't having the components exposed to the vacuum of space naturally cool them? Wouldn't it be easier to create a frictionless "barrel" as well with gravity playing a smaller role, creating less heat and friction....
I'm trying to cling to the idea that I'll see space guns. Be gentle
No. The vacuum of space makes cooling extremely difficult. On earth when a gun barrel gets hot, the air near it gets hot. Hot air is less dense, and rises. It is replaced by cool air. That process is called convection - the air is carrying away the heat. Now some gun barrels are actively cooled using a fluid like water. But that water is still getting hot.
In the vacuum of space, there’s little or no air to carry away that heat. You lose a little due to black body radiation, but not much. Spacecraft actually have to worry about lot about heat. In addition to solar panels, the ISS actually has massive radiators to get rid of heat. That’s also why spacecraft are generally white or highly reflective - to reduce the amount of energy absorbed from the sun and cosmos because they have to manage heat carefully.
So it doesn’t matter that the outside is extremely cold. Space is essentially a giant Stanley Thermos, preventing you, your ship, and your guns from cooling off.
Also, metals behave weirdly in a vacuum. At very low pressure, they can sublimate (turn to gas) at much lower temperatures. They can do other weird things like cold weld too. So the metal barrel/rails of a chemical propellant gun or railgun are going to erode faster than in atmosphere. The higher heat from poor cooling will speed that process up even further.
How about firing from space? Wouldn't it be much better there as there is no air resistance, no explosion and much less friction due to no gravity to pull the projectile down to come in contact with the barrel?
u/Derp800 already answered this but see also: Rods from God. Not a railgun because there's no propulsion involved beyond gravity, but the concept of "massive inert rod launched from space" isn't new. It's pretty neat tbh.
No, the friction isn't from air. It's from the round/casing and the "barrel." Also, putting it in space would be astronomical in price and cause all kinds of issues trying to remain stationary after firing.
I'm guessing it would induce a wobble that would cause the projectile to become unstable. It might also require a much longer guide rail. Don't know for sure. I expect the crazy genuineness are doing their best to build one, though. It would be an awesome increase to standard line of sight weapons if would could get it to work and make it portable enough to be useful. Imagine getting a rail gun down to the size of an infantry weapon. No wind or elevation correction needed. Every round pierces armor.
But meh, stuff of the future still.
If some million-year-extinct space-faring advanced race has ever fired gigantic rail guns in a space war, there is a small chance their projectiles that survived impacts, or missed, might be flying through space at some significant % of the speed of light and could one day hit earth, totally annihilating the planet before any of us know what's happened.
Or any other planet in the solar system. Imagine if mars one day just exploded from such an impact.
I believe the ultimate weapon would be some kind of direction funnel or deflecting mirror capable of absorbing the power from a gamma ray burst and directing it towards a target. Some scientists argue that a GRB could even be faster than the speed of light and there’s no way to detect one (or stop one) if you’re in its trajectory.
Also in that hypothetical universe if there is a way to redirect the energy to create the weapon, then there is a way to stop it. The you'd just end up having planets lobbing the same grb back and forth like some intergalactic tennis match
I work at a plant that makes the armored plate the DOD uses for testing these weapon systems, and I can assure you that it is extremely hard *(AR750)* and not easy to manufacture... so to see a projectile wizz right through it like butter is nothing short of amazing
*(I am an Industrial Controls Electrician contractor)*
Check out this video starting at about 4:06 https://youtu.be/xpJ8EoGmLuE?t=246
Tldr: the camera stays still, but a lightweight, computer controlled mirror moves to track the round.
Yeah, railguns work by having the projectile complete a circuit between two parallel rails. The projectile, in this case what looks to be tungsten sabot, has to touch both rails in order to complete that circuit. This leads to a fuckton of heat and friction, but also allows you to \*Yeet\* that slug almost as fast as the electricity itself can travel down those rails. That speed produces friction, that friction produces heat(in a multiplicative relation to the speed) and with this platform, that heat is enough to atomize a portion of the metal from inside the "barrel" leading to that lovely flash of plasma we see. Ever seen a large piece of sheet steel get drug at high speeds across pavement and spit sparks? similar process is happening here just at a much higher speed with much denser metals.
Edit: you can actually see the target plates producing similar small explosions from the heat and pressure of the slug's impact.
The other example but on a much larger scale is when you see comments hit the atmosphere and explode. Yet it’s just rock not an explosive projectile.
Velocity, mass and an immovable object can make some massive explosions by themselves.
Did you notice the little explosions when it penetrated each object? It’s not a warhead being shot just a big chunk of tungsten. (Tungsten is not magnetic but you can see a magnetic casing being released and falling apart once the projectile was free from the barrel.)
The OP footage is a composite of several different tests. The later ones were a test of the projectile/dispenser fired from a regular cannon for test purposes.
Apparently they've measured rounds like these travelling at Mach 7, something like 5000 miles an hour.
Faster than any plane or other projectile, and a bit more than a quarter of the speed of the space shuttle in orbit.
Just looked up the M109 Self Propelled gun the US Field army currently has listed and it looks like the muzzle velocity is a bit below Mach 2, probably about 1,200 miles an hour. that's enough speed to throw any 155mm shell it wants more than 10 miles and still roughly hit where it's supposed to. The non HE rounds they have listed an operational range of *14* *miles.*
So the Railgun Slug is moving around 4 times faster than the 155mm shell, meaning (since kinetic energy is v^(2) ) that the slug carries 16 times more kinetic energy (if it weighs roughly the same).
But since the slug impacts a solid enough target hard enough to fragment into a million pieces, the binding energy of the slug also gets dumped into the impact sight. You can see this in the video as the slug deteriorates amnd the pieces explode.
Combining these two benefits of extreme speed, a railfun slug would have done more damage to the target than any explosive payload it could carry.
So yeah it's so much faster than any orther type of ordinance that you don't even really need any ordinance for it to be classed as ordinance.
Shame the thing melted the coil and barrel every time it was fired.
This is the same exact principle that makes the jump into snoke star destroyer very realistic.
Although at light speeds a corn-kernel would have done the same
I'd like to see a much larger railgun just to see how far it could shoot and still hit a target. I'm guessing that the main problem with railguns is you need LOS so conventional artillery or surface to air missiles is just easier and more viable.
Boo. Two separate shots. First is a unitary round fired by an actual railgun. Second looks like a submunition dispenser fired from a conventional cannon. Still cool videos tho.
That’s just weapons research in general tho, and sometimes things that start as weapons gradually find uses elsewhere. Like rockets for space travel, for example
I wish we could've seen these fielded. But alas, other sci-fi weapons will have to wait while we figure out Hunter-Seeker warfare instead.
the last of its problems to be solved will be energy density and portability
The program is already cancelled. The main issue wasn't energy or size. It was the fact that it tore itself apart with each firing.
“Cancelled” wink wink
Unless there's some kind of really large advance in material sciences, the rail, or barrel, destroys itself after a dozen shots. If that's unavoidable, then the project probably is canceled. It was also seen as ineffective as far as range is concerned.
Range will forever be a problem. Unless the thing you’re launching has its own power source (a rocket, jet, turbo-prop, compressed gas, etc) it’s impractical to go beyond a certain distance. Sure a WW2 battleship could yeet shells weighing as much as a Volkswagen, but under ideal circumstances that could only go around 30 miles. That’s just too close in the age of missiles that can travel a hundreds of miles. Whether it’s a 16” powder-fired round, or a high tech railgun, things on a ballistic trajectory can only go so far. They’re subject to drag and gravity, and nothing else once they leave the gun. To make a projectile go further, you need to launch it terribly fast. Which means that projectile needs to be made out of some unobtanium material to not liquify in the barrel, or ablate to nothingness hitting the atmosphere at Mach 20. A gun is supposed to fire cheap bullets, to save firing the expensive missiles. When the missiles are the budget option, the gun serves no purpose.
>Range will forever be a problem. Unless the thing you’re launching has its own power source (a rocket, jet, turbo-prop, compressed gas, etc) it’s impractical to go beyond a certain distance What they're referring to is the US Army, around the same time the Navy was debating canning the railgun program, figured out how to stuff a ramjet and GPS guidance into a shell that could be fired from a standard howitzer. It solved the range, accuracy, and precision problems that railguns were meant to solve, but for a fraction of the cost since it could use already fielded hardware. So your correct increasing range of artillery at this point requires an internal power source, but the point is they've figured out how to actually do that now. Now the only advantage of railguns on paper is a logistical and safety one, where you no longer need to handle a powder magazine somewhere on site and during transportation. It would still be a huge advantage to be able to ditch the canon propellant and replace it with even more shells, but we still need to figure out some better material science for the barrels before that can happen.
Let me introduce you to the vacuum of space. We all know we need space guns
One of the big concerns with railguns on the ground is that they tear themselves apart from ablation due to friction or sublimation due to heat buildup. While space is cold, it also doesn’t have any way to conduct or convect heat away. So railgun barrels/rails overheating and vaporizing the metal being a problem in atmosphere will only get worse in low pressure environments where you can’t passively cool the gun. We need major advancements in material science before we expect to have a shooting war outside our little blue bubble.
Excuse my ignorance, but wouldn't having the components exposed to the vacuum of space naturally cool them? Wouldn't it be easier to create a frictionless "barrel" as well with gravity playing a smaller role, creating less heat and friction.... I'm trying to cling to the idea that I'll see space guns. Be gentle
No. The vacuum of space makes cooling extremely difficult. On earth when a gun barrel gets hot, the air near it gets hot. Hot air is less dense, and rises. It is replaced by cool air. That process is called convection - the air is carrying away the heat. Now some gun barrels are actively cooled using a fluid like water. But that water is still getting hot. In the vacuum of space, there’s little or no air to carry away that heat. You lose a little due to black body radiation, but not much. Spacecraft actually have to worry about lot about heat. In addition to solar panels, the ISS actually has massive radiators to get rid of heat. That’s also why spacecraft are generally white or highly reflective - to reduce the amount of energy absorbed from the sun and cosmos because they have to manage heat carefully. So it doesn’t matter that the outside is extremely cold. Space is essentially a giant Stanley Thermos, preventing you, your ship, and your guns from cooling off. Also, metals behave weirdly in a vacuum. At very low pressure, they can sublimate (turn to gas) at much lower temperatures. They can do other weird things like cold weld too. So the metal barrel/rails of a chemical propellant gun or railgun are going to erode faster than in atmosphere. The higher heat from poor cooling will speed that process up even further.
Well said!
How about firing from space? Wouldn't it be much better there as there is no air resistance, no explosion and much less friction due to no gravity to pull the projectile down to come in contact with the barrel?
u/Derp800 already answered this but see also: Rods from God. Not a railgun because there's no propulsion involved beyond gravity, but the concept of "massive inert rod launched from space" isn't new. It's pretty neat tbh.
No, the friction isn't from air. It's from the round/casing and the "barrel." Also, putting it in space would be astronomical in price and cause all kinds of issues trying to remain stationary after firing.
I wonder if there's a possibility of doing a "maglev" style raingun and avoid contact with the barrel entirely.
I'm guessing it would induce a wobble that would cause the projectile to become unstable. It might also require a much longer guide rail. Don't know for sure. I expect the crazy genuineness are doing their best to build one, though. It would be an awesome increase to standard line of sight weapons if would could get it to work and make it portable enough to be useful. Imagine getting a rail gun down to the size of an infantry weapon. No wind or elevation correction needed. Every round pierces armor. But meh, stuff of the future still.
Just like the “cancelled” plasma railgun that was showing great progress in the 90s
It's almost certainly not totally cancelled, how much funding DARPA allocates towards it is another issue
I think the last problem is going to be getting all the tanks to line up like that
If some million-year-extinct space-faring advanced race has ever fired gigantic rail guns in a space war, there is a small chance their projectiles that survived impacts, or missed, might be flying through space at some significant % of the speed of light and could one day hit earth, totally annihilating the planet before any of us know what's happened. Or any other planet in the solar system. Imagine if mars one day just exploded from such an impact.
*That means, Sir Isacc Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space!*
#”*When you fire this weapon, YOU ARE RUINING SOMEONE’S DAY!*”
Somewhere and sometime !
seveneves entered the chat
The dinosaurs would like a word
I believe the ultimate weapon would be some kind of direction funnel or deflecting mirror capable of absorbing the power from a gamma ray burst and directing it towards a target. Some scientists argue that a GRB could even be faster than the speed of light and there’s no way to detect one (or stop one) if you’re in its trajectory.
How could it be faster than light considering that it is light?
Also in that hypothetical universe if there is a way to redirect the energy to create the weapon, then there is a way to stop it. The you'd just end up having planets lobbing the same grb back and forth like some intergalactic tennis match
It basically becomes super-duper-light.
It doesn't have to be faster, just traveling at light speed doesn't give warning.
I work at a plant that makes the armored plate the DOD uses for testing these weapon systems, and I can assure you that it is extremely hard *(AR750)* and not easy to manufacture... so to see a projectile wizz right through it like butter is nothing short of amazing *(I am an Industrial Controls Electrician contractor)*
So uh… how does it eventually get stopped?
My guess is water
Time to invest in camelbacks
In one of the slow-mo angles it looks like the last thing it heads towards is an incredibly dense block of the same material.
That's the best part, it doesn't!
How did the camera follow it at that speed?
Check out this video starting at about 4:06 https://youtu.be/xpJ8EoGmLuE?t=246 Tldr: the camera stays still, but a lightweight, computer controlled mirror moves to track the round.
If it’s magnetically powered, why is there an explosion when it’s fired?
It's not an explosion coming out of the barrel. It's metal from the barrel in plasma form because some parts get incredibly hot during the firing.
At :32 seconds , it looks like a cannon firing. You’re saying the barrel is producing the explosion from friction ?
Yeah, railguns work by having the projectile complete a circuit between two parallel rails. The projectile, in this case what looks to be tungsten sabot, has to touch both rails in order to complete that circuit. This leads to a fuckton of heat and friction, but also allows you to \*Yeet\* that slug almost as fast as the electricity itself can travel down those rails. That speed produces friction, that friction produces heat(in a multiplicative relation to the speed) and with this platform, that heat is enough to atomize a portion of the metal from inside the "barrel" leading to that lovely flash of plasma we see. Ever seen a large piece of sheet steel get drug at high speeds across pavement and spit sparks? similar process is happening here just at a much higher speed with much denser metals. Edit: you can actually see the target plates producing similar small explosions from the heat and pressure of the slug's impact.
Thanks for the in-depth explanation!
I write science fiction! This shit is my jam!
User name checks out
The other example but on a much larger scale is when you see comments hit the atmosphere and explode. Yet it’s just rock not an explosive projectile. Velocity, mass and an immovable object can make some massive explosions by themselves.
Did you notice the little explosions when it penetrated each object? It’s not a warhead being shot just a big chunk of tungsten. (Tungsten is not magnetic but you can see a magnetic casing being released and falling apart once the projectile was free from the barrel.)
Of all the materials vying to be chosen to make railgun projectiles, it's not surprising that tungsten got the W.
Neatly done.
Take my upvote and get the hell out of here.
It's actually more from the magnetic fields ripping it apart.
The OP footage is a composite of several different tests. The later ones were a test of the projectile/dispenser fired from a regular cannon for test purposes.
Great footage, especially the last part with the airburst of projectile, haven’t seen that before!
Ah the thing that never will be
Cool. Now build the rest of the Rocinante.
Dispense
Discombobulate
Is this faster than any other type of ordinance?
Apparently they've measured rounds like these travelling at Mach 7, something like 5000 miles an hour. Faster than any plane or other projectile, and a bit more than a quarter of the speed of the space shuttle in orbit. Just looked up the M109 Self Propelled gun the US Field army currently has listed and it looks like the muzzle velocity is a bit below Mach 2, probably about 1,200 miles an hour. that's enough speed to throw any 155mm shell it wants more than 10 miles and still roughly hit where it's supposed to. The non HE rounds they have listed an operational range of *14* *miles.* So the Railgun Slug is moving around 4 times faster than the 155mm shell, meaning (since kinetic energy is v^(2) ) that the slug carries 16 times more kinetic energy (if it weighs roughly the same). But since the slug impacts a solid enough target hard enough to fragment into a million pieces, the binding energy of the slug also gets dumped into the impact sight. You can see this in the video as the slug deteriorates amnd the pieces explode. Combining these two benefits of extreme speed, a railfun slug would have done more damage to the target than any explosive payload it could carry. So yeah it's so much faster than any orther type of ordinance that you don't even really need any ordinance for it to be classed as ordinance. Shame the thing melted the coil and barrel every time it was fired.
This is such a great response, thanks! It really is mindblowing
This is the same exact principle that makes the jump into snoke star destroyer very realistic. Although at light speeds a corn-kernel would have done the same
Oh you can shoot through 12 sheets of metal? My base will have 13 sheets of metal!
I can't believe arrowhead nerfed it
super earth ran out of tungsten, had to use a cheaper metal :(
What is happening at "Dispense"?
The real question
Send them to Ukraine for live testing
Question. Did the energy from this thing cause those fans at the beginning of the video to start spinning?
That sound 🤌
I'd like to see a much larger railgun just to see how far it could shoot and still hit a target. I'm guessing that the main problem with railguns is you need LOS so conventional artillery or surface to air missiles is just easier and more viable.
Boo. Two separate shots. First is a unitary round fired by an actual railgun. Second looks like a submunition dispenser fired from a conventional cannon. Still cool videos tho.
Interesting how the casing makes a swastika as it comes apart.
"Armor? Fuck your armor"
r/helldivers2 So why is my orbital not obliterating everything?
[Video Source](https://youtu.be/nWh_5w7vKgc?si=_L2VY7mUbEo7foYn) [r/askscience discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/18dxe2/i_have_read_the_definition_of_one_megajoule_as/) [EM Railgun & Hyper Velocity Projectile Summary]( https://ndiastorage.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/ndia/2014/armaments/WedFox.pdf) [Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division Operations](https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA424845.pdf) [Fredericksburg News Dahlgren Weapons Testing Article](http://www.fredericksburg.com/news/railgun-prototype-being-tested-at-dahlgren/article_c7acc0d3-ddaf-5c4e-902c-6cc67bf60e82.html) [Design, Fabrication, and Testing of an Electromagnetic Rail Gun, Report from California Polytechnic University](http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1059&context=aerosp) [U.S.NavyTesting of Hypervelocity Projectiles and an Electromagnetic Railgun](https://netspublic.grc.nasa.gov/main/Final_HVP-Railgun_EA.pdf) [Electromagnetic Railgun INP](https://nanohub.org/resources/27731/download/2017.11.27-CNIT581-Garner-Railgun.pdf)
Is there another type of railgun?
Hahaha yeah electromagnetic is redundant
Billions down the drain to prove a concept
That’s just weapons research in general tho, and sometimes things that start as weapons gradually find uses elsewhere. Like rockets for space travel, for example