Why didn't railguns work out, /k/?
They burn themselves out too quick, the barrels get to 3000 degrees in a handful of rounds and then the whole thing needs stripped and rebuilt.
>>65272172Missiles made them obsolete. the barrel life problem has been solved though.
>>65272172Power requirements was insane to the point where the entire surface fleet basically needed to be rebuilt. Barrel wear was also a huge hurdle to the point where the navy decided to just do lasers instead
>>65272183>navel engineers
>>65272204lol I caught it just before you posted. Naval.
>>65272172They will when we do nuclear powered cruisers again
>>65272172The bean counters realized that, while railguns are really cool, we already have big-ass boat-mounted guns that kill things very well.
>>65272172Japan still don't give up. It's more for anti-air though.
>>65272326Anti-air/anti-missile and CIWS
>>65272172>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-R7E5R0pWAthey worked out, next question
>>65272326They need it for kaiju attacks.
>>65272867They didn't work it out. They successfully tested it for their own purposes, which aren't the same as the USN's.
>>65272172We need fusion reactors + room temp superconductors first. You can't jump the tech tree.
>>65272172Couldn't compete with missiles. US is a missile-focused power and anything we could do with a railgun we could do with a missile.On the flipside, Japan is using railguns to shoot down cruise missiles. Turns out a nation that might get attacked by China wants an affordable missile defense. https://www.laserwars.net/p/japan-electromagnetic-railgun-us-navy
>>65272301The railguns can fire over the horizon. seewiz is nice and all, but does not give you that capability.>>65273347Those would be useful, but not necessary.Fission reactors and some flywheels+capacitor banks would do the job fine for energy supply.And in the end you still need regular conductors as rails because SCs would just quench under those conditions.
>>65272172They did work out. In order to understand why railgun development is seeing a resurgence now after ten year winter, you have you understand the reasons why railguns are desirable. Because railguns source their propellant energy either from diesel fuel or a hardened and shielded reactor, neither of which can be set off by a match, they are much safer than storing thousands of pounds of powder that would likely destroy the entire ship were it somehow set off. Also playing into this same concept, by deriving more of its effect on target from kinetic energy target than explosives, the amount of high explosive in the ship's magazine is reduced.Next is precision. We have highly accurate satellite guided munitions currently, but even micron-level precision won't help you if the coordinates you input are wrong. Hypersonic weapons enable not just spatial precision but temporal precision, allowing targets to be struck before they have a chance to move or change course. And once again, this allows for a smaller warhead. A single TLAM can achieve more than thousands of tons of high explosives in a WW2 style carpet bombing campaign by precisely hitting the targeted factory. A railgun offers that same sort of advantage by hitting targets in a couple of minutes that might take half an hour or more for a cruise missile to reach. This means that you can precisely hit a target when you know exactly where it is, instead of guessing where it will be some time from now.All of this together made railguns a very attractive proposition for the Navy in the 90s and 2000s, when they were being told that naval gunfire support was a primary mission for them and they were integrating new damage control concepts from experiences in the Falklands and Iran-Iraq wars. However, they had determined that in order to meet their gunfire support requirements, a gun with a minimum muzzle energy of 64 MJ would be required.(1/2)
>>65272172The dream of railguns was long range accurate fire cheaper than a missile.For all the reasons listed ITT it turned out way more expensive than just sending missiles.
>>65274235Oh it was definitely cheaper. Railguns only got expensive due to the fancy ammo needed to get them accurate and long range.
>>65274224(2/2)All of this imploded in the mid-2010s due to several factors. The Zumwalt class, which were the only ships in the fleet with the space and power allowances necessary to fit a railgun, were canceled. This also marked the end of naval gunfire support as a mission for the Navy as the Iowa class had already been fully retired. Additionally, while testing their prototype 32 MJ railgun it was determined that the materials science problems for a production ready 32 MJ railgun could be solved in the near future, a 64 MJ system with useful rail life remains a pipe dream. Since a 32 MJ railgun wouldn't meet the Navy's requirements, which weren't required anymore, and they had nowhere to put the things anyway, the program was killed off.However, even without direct funding for a naval railgun program, BAE systems continued to develop the guided projectile they had originally designed for the railgun program with the aim of firing it from 5" naval guns and from the Army's 155mm howitzers as part of a missile defense program to supplement Patriot. Meanwhile, General Atomics continued to their railgun system based on EMALS tech and they are now advertising a production-ready 32 MJ railgun system.This coincides with a new US Navy large surface combatant, and a strong interest in missile defenses that are replenishable at sea. The railgun is in a very advantageous position again because it offers key advantages in potentially being able to intercept hypersonic antiship missiles at a fraction of the cost of not just existing missile interceptors but also vastly cheaper than the threats themselves. While the same projectiles can be fired from a 5" gun for drone and cruise missile defense, the hypersonic velocity enabled by a railgun allows engagement at much further ranges, which is crucial if follow-up shots are required against hypersonic threats.
>>65274282The BAE HVP costs $86,000 per round, similar to the M982 Excalibur 155mm guided shell. The problem before now has been the life of the rails.
>>65272172>Why didn't railguns work outOnly for the US
atmospheric drag is wild.
>>65274396weird that that they never show it firing
>>65273923>railguns can fire over the horizonso can missiles and drones.Big fuckin woop.
>>65273923>The railguns can fire over the horizon.you mean like every naval gun since 1900?
>>65272172Too many Pentagon critters got booty blasted about not having a YJ-21 equivalent. They killed railgun so they could spend more than a billion per year on Conventional Prompt Strike.
>>65272172spiritually trans
>>65272172Coilguns are cooler.
They still feel like they’re a concept in search of a purpose that’s constantly being shoehorned into roles missiles do better before disappearing for a while once it’s clear they’re no good at it. This time they’re apparently great air defense, though to my knowledge not a single flying object has ever been successfully targeted with one even in testing.
>>65274224>>65274372Good post but this is a seething Canadian chink thread
>>65274396Implessive!
>>65274282Do you know what's cheaper than an inaccurate and short ranged railgun yet much better? A normal cannon.
They will be on all the new Trump-class bantleships.This is not sarcasm, I'm dead serious. Look it up.
>>65276987If it ever gets built. Normies are retarded, government will swing back left and plans like that take a decade minimum before the first ship is christened.That is the strength of ch*na, the party stays relatively the same.
>>65276558Yeah, but much more maintenance intensive.
>>65274396Vely impleassive. Vely ching khu lung
>>65277443I get that countries like China like to do the military circus performance but what does this sort of training actually achieve that stabbing a straw bag doesn't?If you were really going to show how impressive the chinese martial prowess was why not have them all practice martial arts like the Koreans teach TKD to everyone in the military.
>>65272172JP did it; USA failedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5b1yH4Ak-w
>>65278980This is just wrong, Japan just has a different set of requirements, the US won’t adopt a weapons system that doesn’t perfectly jive with the assigned role for the sake of doing it, it has to actually do what we want or it’s of no use, and therefor shelved
>>65276586The projectile that will be used in the railgun has successfully been guided close enough to a target that the target would have been destroyed were the shell equipped with a real warhead. Pointing a railgun at a target is not any more difficult than pointing a normal gun at a target.
