Can a railgun sink a ship?
Can a railgun sink a ship? How effective could a railgun be at sinking something like a U.S. carrier? Not very. Basically, a railgun just fires a slug of inert metal.
Battleships were designed to take a lot of hits in slugfests they envisioned between like-armed and armoured ships. Certainly. Current railguns are not anywhere *near* so damaging as the old 14″-16″ shells that those old beasts threw at one another, and they were designed to *absorb* at least several his from *those*.
How hard does a railgun hit? A 32 megajoule railgun shot is equivalent to about 23,600,000 foot-pounds, so a single 32 MJ shot has the same muzzle energy as about 200,000 . 22 rounds being fired simultaneously. In more conventional power units, a 32 MJ shot every 6 s is a net power of 5.3 MW (or 5300 kW).
The current railgun 'barrel' does not last long enough to be useful on ships, and does not operate reliably enough to be operationally useful. It is also only suitable for bombardment using kinetic kill projectiles; it cannot respond to fire control solutions against at sea targets.
If the railgun round is coming in from a LONG way away (like from naval bombardment) then possibly a laser could deflect it or even destroy it.
By firing smaller projectiles at extremely high velocities, railguns may yield kinetic energy impacts equal or superior to the destructive energy of 5"/54 caliber Mark 45 Naval guns, (which achieve up to 10MJ at the muzzle), but with greater range.
The railgun system was designed to accelerate only 14 kg to 6 km/s. Of significance in this development is the opportunity to use the launcher for aeroballistic research of the upper atmosphere, eventually placing packages in low earth orbit using a small rocket.
By traveling faster than the missiles it's designed to intercept, a railgun slug could punch a hole through a missile, disabling or destroying it mid-flight. The United States, China, and North Korea all tested hypersonic weapons last year.
The U.S Navy, after spending some 15 years and $500 million developing a railgun for destroyers, gave up on the idea in 2021. But the railgun concept is not dead.
China has unveiled a super-ship concept, a railgun-armed nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, reviving an old Soviet concept in line with its bastion strategy in the South China Sea.
Is the Navy railgun finally dead?
The U.S. Navy is finally canceling its electromagnetic railgun development program. The railgun appears to be the victim of the service's new emphasis on great power competition. Although impressive, the railgun has been overshadowed by other weapons, particularly hypersonics.
There is no technical reason for a limit to the length of the permanent magnet rail gun, however there may be a limit to the speed the projectile may reach.
The current excites the rail's molecules, causing them to heat. In rail guns, this effect results in intense heat. Melting: The high velocity of the armature and the heat caused by resistive heating damages the surface of the rails.
The Navy plans to abandon its electromagnetic railgun, citing unsolved technological hurdles. The service lacks a good way to store the energy to fire the gun and a barrel that can handle the strain, Vice Adm.
The 6-inch guns that the Navy currently uses have a range of 15 miles; the 16-inch guns of World War II had a range of 24 miles, and could penetrate 30 feet of concrete. The 38-foot railgun, though, has a range of 125 miles, five times the impact, and can shoot through seven steel plates.
By their design, ship-based tube artillery is far more accurate that traditional land-based systems. Naval guns are first and foremost designed to destroy ships and provide a limited anti-aircraft capability. This translates to a weapons system that is optimal for point target neutralisation and destruction.
A ship which has a large weight displace a large volume (thus large weight) of water. Hence the buoyancy force acting on the ship is much greater than the weight of the ship itself, making it to float on water. Thus ship do not sink in water.
The first to be used operationally was a German weapon, the Fritz X. Initial attacks were unsuccessful, but on 9 September 1943, Fritz X damaged the Italian battleship Italia and sank the battleship Roma, the first successful strike by a guided missile against a capital ship.
First of all, no matter how powerful the railgun is, it will struggle to launch any thing into orbit. You see, rockets do something called a gravity turn when they reach a sufficient velocity. This maneuver is basically slowly flattening out the trajectory of the rocket by angling the nose down.
Is it possible to fire a rail gun in the vacuum of space? Yes, a rail gun does not need the presence of oxygen or even an atmosphere to work correctly. One issue will be somewhat more severe than in a thick atmosphere such as Earths however and that is the cooling requirements.
Can a railgun reach escape velocity?
Can a projectile launched from a railgun reach escape velocity? Yes, railguns could theoretically accelerate projectiles over escape velocity.
A railgun projectile flies at hypersonic speeds, a trait necessary to intercept hypersonic threats.
Having said all that, it still feels intuitively odd that there's not explosive propellant in a railgun and yet it still has significant recoil kicking back against the breech. It's all to do with the law of conservation of momentum. It's the same law that makes rockets fly into space.
The railgun will have more recoil, because the recoil is actually imparted on the gun rather than blasting out into the air behind the gun as it is in a recoilless rifle or rocket launcher.
Rail Guns Have Numerous Advantages over Traditional Guns
More recently, The Debrief reported on an American company that had built a handheld railgun that claims to match the power of a 22 rifle and is strikingly similar to the new Chinese version.
Rail gun ammunition, in the form of small tungsten missiles, would be relatively light, easy to transport and easy to handle. And because of their high velocities, rail gun missiles would be less susceptible to bullet drop and wind shift than current artillery shells.
The price of 1 Railgun currently costs $0.31.
With the exception of individuals with hunting permits and some ethnic minorities, civilian firearm ownership is restricted to non-individual entities. Law enforcement, military, paramilitary, and security personnel are allowed to use firearms.
Gustav was destroyed by the Germans near the end of the war in 1945 to avoid capture by the Soviet Red Army. Schwerer Gustav was the largest-calibre rifled weapon ever used in combat, and in terms of overall weight, the heaviest mobile artillery piece ever built. It fired the heaviest shells of any artillery piece.
The HVP has also been tested in 6-inch guns and 155mm Army howitzers. While it wouldn't achieve the velocity in the EM railgun of Mach 6, it still travels twice as fast as conventional rounds. The US is not the only country developing railguns. India, Russia, China, and Turkey have all tested prototypes.
Do Navy ships still have guns?
Today, the most prevalent guns in the Navy are the 5-inch/62 (on cruisers and destroyers) and a specialized close-in weapon system (CIWS) known as the 20-mm/76 Phalanx system, which is mounted on many ships as a protection against incoming missile attacks and localized surface attacks.
The entire railgun measures roughly 65 feet from turret rear to barrel muzzle, with the barrel itself about 33 feet long, and 12-20 feet in diameter. Such a wide barrel provides room for the parallel magnetic rails that propel metal projectiles to speeds of over Mach 7.
For example, the air in the gun barrel will be extremely compressed by the projectile accelerating down it. When it compresses it will heat up massively. Also, any friction in the rails will generate heat, as will the high power electrical components of the gun.
Projectiles are guided to the target after leaving the launcher, and reach a target faster. At 100 yards, railguns sound no louder than a . 30-06 rifle firing.
Railguns use magnetic fields created by high electrical currents to accelerate a projectile to Mach 6, or 5,400 miles an hour. The velocity is sufficient to give the EMRG an effective range of 110 nautical miles, or 126 miles on land.
Building and operating a railgun at home could potentially be illegal or subject to strict regulations in many jurisdictions due to safety concerns and the potential risks associated with such a device.
The DARPA Electromagnetic Mortar program is one example, if practical challenges like sufficiently low weight can be achieved. The coilgun would be relatively silent with no smoke giving away its position, though a supersonic projectile would still create a sonic boom.
Rail Gun Power
Since a joule is equivalent to one watt for one second, that means that for a railgun to shoot a projectile, it needs power equivalent to 25 megawatts for one second.
The Navy's last all gun heavy cruiser was the Des Moines class built by Bethlehem Steel Company Fore River, Quincy Massachusetts. The United States Navy used the Baltimore class of heavy cruisers as the blueprint, making Des Moines larger and upgraded with a newly developed semiautomatic 8”gun.
Because modern naval assets aren't really supposed to be fighting with guns. If you are close enough to the enemy that the naval guns are useful - you are doing lots of things wrong. Guns stopped being inside the hull and placed in turrets with the monitor design in 1862 or so. (US civil war, battle of the ironclads).
Will railguns bring back battleships?
Rail guns may bring back heavy cruisers but not battleships. It's simply not cost effective to built larger surface warships because as they become larger, they become more vulnerable. The bigger and more solid their radar and infrared cross sections, the easier they are to hit.
The Railgun has an armour piercing value of 100, meaning it always does full damage to hull regardless of Armour Hardness, but it is still affected by kinetic and thermal resistances. It is also an impulse attack, causing the target to be physically pushed out of its previous trajectory.
A month ago, Raytheon--which is also working on railgun technology--told CNET that it could potentially fire 5-inch projectiles 220 miles. In its own release, however, ONR stuck to the more conservative 100-mile range. When the railgun is deployed in 2025 or so, it could be used in several ways.
| Type | Fixed |
|---|---|
| Projectile Types and Weights | KE 1a: 33 lbs. (15 kg) Shrapnel 2a: N/A HE: N/A |
| Bursting Charge | KE and Shrapnel Rounds: None HE: N/A |
| Projectile Length | about 30 in (76.2 cm) |
| Propellant Charge | None (Electromagnetic Propulsion) 3a |
Rail guns may bring back heavy cruisers but not battleships. It's simply not cost effective to built larger surface warships because as they become larger, they become more vulnerable.
The battleship's predominant weakness comes in the form of submarines, which can easily decimate any battleship fleet, making it necessary to maintain an active layer of protection with destroyer and submarine escorts.
Battleships also proved to be very vulnerable to mines, as was evidenced in the Russo-Japanese War and both World Wars. After the Battle of Port Arthur, a number of Russian and Japanese vessels were struck by mines and either sank or were scuttled to prevent their capture.
The U.S Navy, after spending some 15 years and $500 million developing a railgun for destroyers, gave up on the idea in 2021. But the railgun concept is not dead.
It took four and a half days to sink the U.S.S. Nevada. The 575-foot-long battleship, painted bright orange from its earlier role as a nuclear test target, was towed out of Pearl Harbor to sea, where a classified explosive was detonated in its hull.
According to an assessment by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “A large ship, about a mile away from the explosion, would escape sinking, but the crew would be killed by the deadly burst of radiations from the bomb, and only a ghost ship would remain, floating unattended in the vast waters of the ocean.”
Did the US ever lose a battleship?
No American battleship has ever been lost at sea, though four were sunk during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Of these, only USS Arizona (BB-39) and USS Oklahoma (BB-37) were permanently destroyed as a result of enemy action.
| History | |
|---|---|
| United States | |
| Stricken | 30 April 1948 |
| Fate | Museum ship |
| General characteristics | |
However, the film was rejected by both councils, officially because of its violence. It was remarked by some at the time that, had violence been the real problem, cuts could have been made. However, the fact that no attempts were made to tone down the film suggested political motives.
Eli Reich had accomplished something no other submariner in the U.S. Navy had done. He and his crew sank a battleship. And Reich received his third Navy Cross, “for extraordinary heroism in the line of his profession as Commanding Officer of the USS Sealion (SS-315) on the third war patrol of that submarine . . .”
The source says the super-ship's comprehensive nuclear-powered electromagnetic system could convert nuclear energy into usable kinetic energy or electricity to drive high-energy weapons systems, such as on-board railguns that could hit targets in near space with guided ordnance at up to seven times the speed of sound.
