
The Navy’s Electromagnetic Railgun Is Both Alive and Dead - IntronExon
https://taskandpurpose.com/navy-electromagnetic-railgun-budget-2019/
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olympus
Just like lasers for the USAF, railguns for the USN are a great idea in
principle but doomed to wander around as zombie programs until we have enough
technological breakthroughs to make them viable for real world use.

~~~
j9461701
The difference between lasers and railguns is the former would be
revolutionary, while the later would be an incremental improvement over an
already ancillary system.

If you could fit a multi-kilowatt laser on an F-35, and make it a practical
thing (so no expendable chemicals being used up every shot, no having to gut
air frame to fit all the laser equipment) it could radically alter how America
fought its wars. Imagine a dozen F-35s flying over a combat zone, and killing
individual enemy soldiers with literal laser precision - unlike with
conventional munitions they can keep doing that for as long as their fuel
supplies last. The sustained support laser-equipped planes could provide to
ground forces is kind of amazing/terrifying when you really think about it.

Contrast the rail gun. The primary naval weapon is missiles, whether launched
by plane or by ship. Guns are secondary (tertiary if you count torpedoes)
equipment, mostly used for warding off pirates or shooting down enemy missiles
while they're coming in. The rail gun offers to replace the rarely used 5 inch
gun on most destroyers with...a longer range gun that's also going to be
seldom used. The original idea of using it for "shore bombardment" or that it
can be a backup weapon for when the missile magazines run dry are both...kind
of dubious ideas now that we're facing a resurgent China and Russia who aren't
going to allow our ships to close to within rail range before destroying them
with their own missiles.

~~~
sfifs
> Imagine a dozen F-35s flying over a combat zone, and killing individual
> enemy soldiers with literal laser precision

While I kind of agree with your point on the rail gun, manned aircraft
loitering in any modern battlefront are essentially doomed. Anti aircraft
missiles are a lot more effective and a lot cheaper with modern computers.

~~~
j9461701
A MANPAD can't hit a fast moving jet at 20k feet, and anything larger can be
destroyed by conventional munitions. This is exactly what we saw during the
first Gulf war, when Iraq - which had for the era had a very advanced IAADS -
was torn to pieces by the teen fighters. A decent SEAD campaign + lasers = a
new, scary kind of warfare.

This is, incidentally, why the A-10 is obsolete. Trying to fly slow and low on
a modern battlefield is indeed doomed. During the Gulf War, F-16s performed
more CAS missions than A-10s did because the A-10 was simply not survivable
against modern threats. To the extent they had to be withdrawn from known
Republican hot zones because the danger was simply too great.

~~~
manicdee
By the time a weaponised laser is available for aircraft, we’ll have been
using lasers to shoot down planes for years.

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Parcissons
Its still destroying the rails when firing then?

Last time i checked this was the problem indicated- making a rail replacement
necessary any x-shots, and erasing the saved volume and weight on ammonition
nearly completely.

So what about the obvious TRIZ sollutions?

Make the Rail replaceable? As in build it from a substance that can be
recoolected and swiftly reshaped on the fly into a new rail? Some sort of
conducting ice that only last long enough to keep the current flowing and the
projectile wagon on the rail on its way out?

How about a entirely diffrent approach - seperating rail and conducting? As
in, two laser-created plasmachannels with non-conducting rails?

Has anyone observed this project closer?

~~~
olympus
I think (but don't know since I haven't worked on any of the projects) is that
replacing rails every few shots cuts their shot rate down to an unacceptable
level. Additionally, remember that these guns are designed for coastal
bombardment, must fit on a ship and be served by a reasonable sized crew.
Having to add crew members to swap out rails or machinery to swap out rails
takes up precious space on a ship. And unless you could reform ten barrels per
minute you couldn't keep up with their desired shot rate.

Usually if there is an "obvious" solution they have done at least a cursory
analysis of it and found a deal breaker for putting it on a ship. It's not
guaranteed, but if there is something obvious to try that would solve one of
the major hurdles then someone should have suggested it, and the idea probably
had traction until they figured it it wouldn't work. The engineers and
scientists working on these projects aren't total greenhorns, they are
experienced weapons developers.

~~~
onefortheroad
I have worked with experienced software developers- and usually nothing new is
tryied. You open your previous solution kit, you grab the most viable
sollution and slap it on. Ductape. Done.

At best a little research is done at some experienced user forum, where the
problem is declared unsolveable.

There is a reason why many unversity undergrads find such "genius" new
approaches - its because they usually dont know that the problem is suppossed
to be unfixable. Not professionally blinded, was the term, i presume.

Remember this is the same lab, who did send subs intot a world war without
properly tested torpedos. If my assumption is right, half of them is
traditional explosive cannon engineers, whos life wor would become obsolete on
success.

~~~
olympus
The military acquisition process (of which technology development is part of)
is nothing like software development (even software acquisition projects
barely resemble the way SV approaches software). It is frustrating to be a
part of because of the endless bureaucracy, but during tech development they
do indeed try new things. That is the entire point of Dahlgren's existence, is
to research new stuff.

Remember that this is also the same lab that gave us the Norden bombsight,
which many historians agree was a major factor in the allies winning WWII.

~~~
lttlrck
The bombsight is impressive however:

‘In practice it was not possible to achieve the expected accuracy in combat
conditions, with the average CEP in 1943 of 370 metres (1,200 ft) being
similar to Allied and German results. Both the Navy and Air Forces had to give
up on the idea of pinpoint attacks during the war.’

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight)

~~~
olympus
The ineffectiveness of the Norden is overstated, since that's the trendy thing
to do right now.

Admittedly, the Norden did not live up to its hype. Almost nothing performs as
well in real life as it does under perfect conditions- this is commonly seen
when going from the "golden testers" in development that graduated from test
pilot school to the "regular testers" during operational test. But once
appropriate tactics were developed (this takes a while with all new
technology) and they found a few bombardiers good enough to lead bombing
formations, it was effective. Not at the level of pinpoint accuracy, but the
performance improved quite a bit over the 1943 results. They never took the
Norden off the B-17s because any time the Norden had bad results any previous
technology would have been worse.

To the point of my prior comment, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren, the
place that is working on the USN's railguns, is the same place where they were
able to get Carl Norden's design into a production ready state where 90,000 of
them could be made with the precision of a master Swiss watchmaker. Dahlgren
isn't staffed by a bunch of software devs that call themselves "engineers"
because they think it sounds better. They have _real_ engineers working on
solutions to their problems, and a history to back it up. While you can't
assume they've looked at every possible idea, they have considered many novel
ways to fix the main issues of railguns.

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djrogers
Ugh - that’s a first for me, auto-play video without any pause/stop control?
Seriously, WTF people?

~~~
IntronExon
I’m sorry about that, it was blocked on my browser, or I would have put a
warning in the title.

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viggity
Schrodinger's rail gun?

