Just curious is any research (non classified) is being done on railguns/electromagnetic guns? Just curious. Discuss amongst yourselves.
I’m a Navy employee, and have seen articles in Navy journals discussing them. So, to answer your question in a word–yes.
Any good reference articles? any Jane’s write-ups? I am a fan of studying (in lay terms) terminal ballistics and the interaction of objects at hypersonic velocities fascinates me. Probably should be more of a study of fluid dynamics. One of the military antitank missiles has a 5k ft/sec impact velocity and is nothing more than a tungsten dart, but the damage it does to even reactive ceramic armor seems to be utterly devastating.
I’m pretty sure it was the Military channel that had a show on within the last 6 months on this technology–very good segment–title of the show was something like Super Guns, or Weapons of the Future. Pretty funny that even in this day & age of lasers & stealth technology, the some of the most lethal tools the military are devising still revolve around a solid chunk of metal hurled really friggin fast at a stationary object. Good stuff.
I worked for a company that built large pulsed power machines. they were big banks of capacitors set up to discharge all at once. we mostly used them to make large pulses of radiation to simulate nuclear weapons but we did build a small rail gun. the projectile gets pulled along a channel as it completes the circuit in a series of pulse discharges. the main problem with rail guns is they are kind of “over-kill” for most everything and producing all that electrical energy in not as efficient as a chemical reaction(rocket engine or explosive). much more money goes into producing smarter weapons rather than more lethal ones. using rail guns to put things into orbit has been researched extensively. the drawback is rail guns are rough on things and would have to be huge. too many g’s at take off will turn a satelite into rubble.
Yup, there’s been several DARPA/Dept of the Navy research efforts going on. One is a mobile unit for the Marines. Not much to report beyond that.
I am not sure if it was a rail gun or a large pulse laser, but I seem to recall seeing something in Aviation News a number of years ago about the Air Force having a prototype system (huge apparatus) that was mounted in a C141 or possibly a C17 for testing.
Don’t know about the laser except for the one mounted on the nose of the 747. I did work on the CO2 laser cannon project mounted in a dorsal fairing on a RC-135 in 1980.
I saw a show on Discovery or one of those channels regarding rail guns and using them in a missile defense capacity. Very cool as those puppies can hurl a VW Bug sized projectile tremendous distances at insane velocity. A lot of it was theoretical based on smaller models, but it was a fascinating show.