US Navy Hopes stealth ship answers a rising China

Rail guns are old news. They've been talking about them for at least a decade. I think it falls into the same category as the OICW and the Comanche- it fills a void that only the defense contractors want to see filled.

Try more than 100 years- with lots of interest during both WW1 & WW2. The idea has been around a long, long time, but the technology was never there- particularly the ability to generate enough power to make these feasible.

Of all the stupid spending going on, the creation of rail guns lies among the few actually worth-while ideas.

Creating these guns now means that in 20 years we will probably develop the ability to miniaturize them, as well as increase the accuracy to levels unthinkable today. These rails guns -along with LASER development- will eventually serve important functions in the area that needs the most work: defense.

A working rail gun will be able to take down incoming cruise missiles - even at extremely high velocities. Rail guns can also take out targets that are LASER resistant. So, for instance, an incoming nuke traveling at hyper-velocity (above Mach 5) that was built to reflect away LASER energy weapons would be a serious threat to our national security. Building rail guns (which have ranges over 250 miles) that can fire tiny projectiles up to Mach 25 (about 9 kilometers per second) ...or even faster... means we would have the ability to deploy a sci-fi-like curtain of defense all along the entire perimeter of our nation. No incoming threat- no matter how fast or how many countermeasures- would be able to escape these. Also, the ability to quickly reload and fire these inherently stable weapons means platforms that could fire at unimaginable cyclic rates (perhaps a million rounds per second) for incredible distances with accuracy that is only slightly lower than energy beam weapons. Eventually, we're talking a massive impenetrable curtain of defense... and all at speeds, distances and cyclic-rates-of-fire that boggle the mind.

Like it or not, the threats of the future will require this kind of technology.

I read one article where the author envisioned a rail gun that could fire a million rounds-per-second (already there are electric gun prototypes that can fire a million rounds per minute). In the article, the defensive gun fired rounds at mach 25, and the projectiles were actually made of industrial diamond- cheap and easy to make even today, to the point where drill bits and saws are studded with thousands of them.

At that speed and cyclic rate of fire, your almost talking a beam-like weapon that can cut through just about anything inside of it's 250-mile radius. And that is all with technology that is perfectly conceivable even today.

I'm still not convinced on the accuracy portion of the argument. I'm sure most of it has to do with me trying to apply conventional internal ballistics to the equation and my complete lack of understanding.

Having them on ships off-shore would be pretty slick- preventing incoming nukes from becoming dirty bombs over the continental US when they are destroyed.

The thing that is changing accuracy is computers.

At these extreme hypervelocities, ballistics, temperature, and everything else we think of is totally different and requires different material science. And computers will make it possible to do things that we can't begin to do now. For instance, just one or two nano-seconds before firing, a rail gun platform could fire a series of lasers to "measure" the atmosphere between the rail gun and the target. In another nano second, the computer could calculate precisely how the round is going to behave, depending on the density of the air, altitudes involved, rotation of the earth, plus a million million other variables, and fire at the perfect trajectory- and all in a millionth of a second. We're talking accuracy that just 25 years ago would have been total sci-fi.

I understand the atmospherics, but it's the actual internal and external ballistics of the projectiles themselves that is hard to fathom.

The step between where we are now and miniaturized rail guns is what will be interesting to watch- at least the declass portions of it, whatever we can get our hands on.

Right now, we're starting to get really good at doing things like shooting down incoming mortar rounds with LASER energy weapons- but these are slow by comparison to the threats of the future. There's video on it, showing the energy weapon heating the incoming round for a second or two before it is destroyed. Pretty cool stuff.

Ballistics start to stop mattering so much when there's not really a trajectory to speak of. Conventional weapons beat issues with accuracy through "make it go faster longer" so you don't have to make something that's stable through the trans-sonic speed barrier.

As long as it's symmetrical in prrojectile design.... 1" group at 100 yards. Double the speed, and you just brought the 1/2" group from 50 yards out to 100, as an example.

Just hit the warhead high enough and the matter will burn up.

Very much so, unless people across America wake up and begin voting for values rather than party.

They will, soon.
Regardless of who wins in November, we are fucked.

As it was said in Rome.................

When you only buy three of them they can't be the answer to anything.

Thought I wrote this earlier...but how do we counter a threat with only three of these?

What do you mean?

We have a big Navy...and to be on top we have to continuously buy newer kit...and we only have three funded.