Railguns when, /k/?

>>32576796
check back tomorrow

Check back when Trump has a SecNav and presents a 350 ship plan to the public.

When they figure out how to get the rail to stop eating itself

>>32576889
>350

Only the beginning I hope
>1000 ship american armada in my lifetime I hope.

>>32576897
Barrel life has increased from tens of shots to over 400, with a program path to achieve 1000
shots.

>>32576796
USS Zumwaltz designed for railgun. Ammo too expensive, boat too unreliable.

>>32576995
And still no honest declaration of an empire, whats the fucking point anymore

>>32576796

When the life costs are less than that of a 127mm Oto Merada gun and ammo.

>>32577326
>Ammo too expensive,
doesn't railgun use solid shot? or does"ammo" include the barrel?

>>32578985
at 800k a round...

http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a23738/uss-zumwalt-ammo-too-expensive/

>>32576796
SOON

>>32577326
The Railgun system isn't ready yet, when it is it's going to be installed on the DDG1000s

>>32578985
reading my own link. 60mile range GPS guided round. hot damn thats sexy.

>>32579014
That's the rocket-assisted projectile for the 5-inch gun, dumbass.

>>32579029
uh... false read the popular mechanics link i just posted. the navy railgun was designed specifically for the Zumwaltz. l

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>>32576796
VERY SOON.

>>32579043
>pop mech

No.

>>32579043
50 cent, please learn to read.

>>32579014
>800k

>>32579707
It's the usual slash and whine. Drop the order by a factor of 10 and the unit cost doubles. Its nothing new.

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>>32579084

When has popular mechanics ever been right? I want my robot tanks and giant fighting robots and land battleships!

>>32580786
Popular Mechanics is just misdirection to make our enemies spend themselves into oblivion.

>>32578774
America is already the leading cultural empire. No need to conquer a place when you can just import your movies, games, food, fashion, etc.

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>>32580786

>>32578985

The "too expensive" meme is dumb. LRAPs basically do the same job as a Tomahawk.

>>32579014
That's not a railgun round though, that's basically a missile fired from a gun.

>>32581599
LRLAP's range is pathetically small compared to a tomahawk. The price shouldn't be in same ballpark.

>>32581287
So why a constant need to expand militarily?

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>>32581599
>Railguns literally promoted by numerous sources as a """""cheaper""""" alternative to missiles
>Achieving accuracy at 200+ nmi requires the same (expensive) precision guidance that missiles have, only it will also need to be hardened against physical and electrical shock
Railguns are a fucking meme. Can't believe we're still pouring money into this shit.

>>32582857
GPS/INS is a cheap seeker. JDAMs only cost 25k. Hardening will increase cost, but the projectile is already slated to be used with conventional guns. Its going to be much cheaper than shooting missiles.

>>32579043
... annnnd, the type designation for the Zumwalt class is?

>>32582857
The cost in the missiles is not the guidence, thats extremely cheap, its the propellent and engine assembly.

>>32582130
The difference is you can stick up to 700 LRLAPs on a ship. You cant do that to tomahawks.

The only reason they are comparable in costs is there are a fuckton of tomahawks and only 200 or so LRLAPs, due to unit cutting.

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>>32576796
RIGHT.

FUCKING.

NOW.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Trenton_(T-EPF-5)

>>32581322

Sometimes I wonder, in an alternate universe where missiles were never invented, if all these wacky designs came to pass?

>>32582393
Corporate welfare engine.

>>32583230
>Hardening will increase cost, but the projectile is already slated to be used with conventional guns.

No. It got cancelled because unit costs.

>In November 2016, the Navy revealed it had decided to cancel procurement of the LRLAP. This was due to rising costs resulting from the trimming of the Zumwalt-class destroyer fleet to just three ships, raising individual shell cost to $800,000-$1 million, about as much as the Tomahawk cruise missile. About 90 rounds had been secured for testing aboard the three hulls, but a full buy of about 2,000 planned rounds would be about $1.8-$2 billion.

>>32587276
LRLAP is an AGS-only shell. That's what got cancelled. The hypervelocity projectile (HVP) is going to have different sabot designs so it can fit 5" Mk45, 155mm AGS, railgun, 155mm Paladin systems. That is the future guided shell for all primary naval gun systems, but it still has another 10 years to develop it. That's why the USN is going with Excalibur for AGS in the meantime.

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>>32585480
does it need capacitor banks to run the rail gun ?
hp seems pretty good
probably even better with the reduction gears being used

>>32587343
Yes, you need to store the energy for a shot. It's not a constant load.

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HVP and railgun progress

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>>32582857
>>32587276

Canceling railgun research just because the PRECISION ammo is too expensive is retarded. Railguns being able to fire over the horizon precision ammo is understandably expensive. However railguns have been and always will be meant first and foremost for direct line of sight destruction. Everything withing 60km's: railgun. Everything beyond that: missiles. Why is that unreasonable?

>>32577326
Funny thing is that they're delaying the boat and gun but reassigning the ammo to other guns.

>>32579014
>http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a23738/uss-zumwalt-ammo-too-expensive/
That's actually an argument to fuck the expensive rounds and just add railguns. Hell, load up flechettes and put a timed fuze on it. If anything else it would make a good CIWS system

>>32580786
Funny thing is that we actually got the self-guided torpedo. The main limitation is that water resistance kills the range.

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>>32579014
lrlap might have been saved if bae had gotten their ags-l onto the flight III burkes.

>>32581322
> super destroyer laying smoke screen

holy shit

>>32581322
>running exhaust through the entire length of your ship

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?

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>>32581322
>>32590615
The Japanese carrier Kaga had one of these. The ship was infamous for having one of the worst onboards living conditions in the navy because of it.

>>32590693
>sidepipes

we shelby cobra now

So question. I went to the gun range a while back and briefly talked to a guy who said he was a vet. This man claimed that the Germans are working on infantry PDW-like railguns. Now barring the obvious "retard fag" and "not even a vet", both of which may be true, I was just wondering if any of you had heard about anything about/like that. Because it seems pretty ridiculous imo, just from the power issues alone.

>>32590966
Yeah, PDW are a pipe dream right now, and are likely to stay that way until you find a way to miniaturize the giant accumulators modern railguns typically require.

That said it's pretty safe to assume every major military in the world is developing their own railguns right now. I know that up until at least a few years ago there was a joint french-german institute working on a railgun named PEGASUS but I don't know if the project is still ongoing.

Which will come first /k/, railguns or plasma guns?

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/153630-open-air-plasma-device-could-revolutionize-energy-generation-us-navys-weaponry

>>32591710
Plasma weapons won't be viable in an atmosphere for a very long time. It dissipates too quickly.

>>32591710
Railguns. Plasma doesn't even have shotgun ranges yet.

>>32592317
>doesn't know about MARAUDER

>>32592357
>doesn't know MARAUDER is a meme

>>32592388
do you honestly believe nothing came of it?

>>32576796
Why are we still pretending that naval support needs to be a thing in ground conflicts? A railgun serves no purpose that an attack drone couldn't accomplish in a more efficient and cheaper manner.

>>32592600
>The more capable platforms the adversary has to account for, the more thinly distributed his surveillance assets will be and the more diluted will his attack densities become. The more distributed our combat power becomes, the more targets we hold at risk and the higher the costs of defense to the adversary.

>>32592527
If AFRL was actually still working on it, it would still be public.

>>32593074
just like with the nighthawk, spirit and raptor were all publically known during their developments huh?

>>32593147
Because AFRL works on big budget aircraft.

At most, they developed RAM coatings and other material science projects.

>>32592357
To quote the youtube video, that's a jet engine.

>>32593147
We learned about those aircraft eventually. However, we still haven't heard about practical plasma weapons.

>>32592600
Because sending $17 million dollar drones with million dollar missiles over enemy territory is surely the cheaper option than shooting 100k shells.

>>32590966
I'm not sure, it's not worthwhile if it just imitates existing weapons.

But if you were to do something like fire a small 2mm tungsten rod at mach 6+ it may have unique advantages. Capacitors are the main problem but it's mainly because no one is building capacitors specifically for railguns. If someone is willing to spend the money to design and produce specialized capacitors it's probably possible.

>>32594283
General Atomics makes their own capacitors.

>>32592600
Mostly, it's a worry that China will want to take on Japan or Taiwan or something equally proud but ultimately foolish. Like bullying fishing ships in indonesia like they've been doing for months now.

Now, China does have a navy with AShMs even if it's mostly speed boats. The key here is that they've got a lot of cheap boats with enough firepower to screw any ship we have active (Arguments are still ongoing on if an Iowa class can tank a current gen AShM) however, modern ship design means that each ship has maybe 60 missiles to kill them with at most and can't reload without returning to a harbor days away.

Just imagine having only 60 bullets and the nearest resupply is at least a weeks trip.

Because railgun rounds are cheap and pretty small when compared to a railgun round we could easily fire off hundreds or thousands at chinese navy ships and not worry about running out of ammo in the middle of a battle.

>>32594550
>General Atomics makes their own capacitors.
Those metal film caps take up a large volume. For smaller applications developing ceramic and graphene capacitors may be more valuable. Metal film capacitors are a fairly mature technology. I haven't been able to find a good source of railgun formulas though, for a small one I'm unsure if volts or amps are a priority.

>>32576897
engineer around it.

it only has to last long enough to not fail during the battle. then make it easy enough to be replaced while under way with fresh rails. quickly.

>>32596013

Maxwell makes (or used to make) special low-inductance, low ESR capacitors for all kinds of pulsed power applications. They weren't cheap.

Don't know if they still do. It's kind of a specialized market.

>>32596013
AmpsxVolts=Watts and watts are joules over one second
Volts is the potential energy and Amps is how fast that energy is doing stuff. So for capacitors, I'd say volts.

The Iowa's main guns produced about 20 MJs of force so....

Fuck it, I'm going to bed.

>>32596141
Problem is supercapacitors are 2.7v
>>32596195
There's a relation ship between volts, amps rail length and projectile mass, amps determine the force, how much mass and how quickly you can accelerate it. But voltage determines maximum velocity. It has to be carefully calculated, if your voltage is too low the projectile will hit maximum speed before the end of the rails wasting energy. If current is too low it won't reach the maximum velocity your voltage and rails can do.

I haven't seen a good explanation of exactly what voltages are needed for certain velocity or on average how much current is needed for mass and required acceleration.

>>32596013
I haven't gone through it myself, but this might be a good read.
>DESIGN AND OPTIMIZATION OF A 600-KJ RAILGUN POWER SUPPLY
http://dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a418310.pdf

>developing ceramic and graphene capacitors may be more valuable
I remember GA looked into developing ceramic-polymer capacitors for railguns, but only achieved energy densities several times lower than their CMX caps.

>>32576796
Actually operational? Now.

Feasible? Soon.

Common place? 10 years.

>>32596013
another resource
THEORETICAL DESIGN AND MODELING OF AN INFANTRY RAILGUN PROJECTILE
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a443240.pdf

>>32596497
>http://dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a418310.pdf
Interesting neither of them explain voltage though. The first one says BEMF reaches 280V by the end of the barrel but not why they opted for 11,000 volts rather than 500V or 1000V.

>>32577326
That expensive ammo is for the AGS (advanced gun system)

The railgun rounds are dirt cheap

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>>32596974

I want General atomics on our naval ships just because it sounds cooler than BAE

>>32597077
I see the issue now, peak currents are so high that the resistance of copper becomes an issue to the point voltage must increase to overcome it.

Still I'm surprised no one has tried the approach of reducing resistance rather than increasing voltage on small railguns. Something like bonding thousands of ceramic capacitors to the rail and operating them via mosfets placed on the low side might work for infantry sized railguns.

>>32593783
we learned about them when they were ready to be fielded and the US military felt comfortable letting the world know they had the technology

>>32577326
>Ammo too expensive

This is bait.

>>32581322
That looks /SPACE/ as FUCK dude.

>>32591710
Plasma guns came like 60 years ago dude.

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>>32598054
I know it's bait... but...

Wait until BAE or Lockheed lock the DoD into a sole supply contract and then jack the price up on their propriety solid projectiles.

$$$

>>32590064
It's never going to be saved with that fictional 71 miles.

>>32598110
The government frowns upon proprietary assets.

>>32597294
Mostly, that would require more conductive material and copper is already one of the most conductive there is.

Graphene is plausibly better but they don't make industrial scale graphene wire.

>>32599427
You're not going to manufacture graphene into 10 m bars.

>>32590693
Kaga-san is such a smelly whore....

>>32598504
This must be bait...

>>32604145
Oh, definitely. The government is out to spend every last tax dollar possible.