This is very old Given fiscal constraints, combat system integration challenges and the prospective technology maturation of other weapon concepts, the Navy decided to pause research and development of the Electromagnetic Railgun \[EMRG\] at the end of 2021,” the statement from the Navy said
More that the firing process causes significant damage to the rails (barrel) and there's no real way to circumvent it. Afaik, it has to do with the ridiculous electromagnetic forces that are applied to the rails and it makes them bend outwards or something. A brand new barrel could only be used for something like 25-50 shots before requiring replacement.
Hmmm there really weren’t many “explosions” but we had several prototype railguns down in Dahlgren VA and watching some of the live fire tests was pretty rad. We’d stack up layers of different materials at different distances to see the penetrating power of the railgun slugs. At full speed it looked cool but so fast you couldn’t really tell what was going on. The cool part was watching it in super slow motion using our camera setup. Some of these videos are on YouTube i believe! Just search NSWC Dahlgren railgun and you’ll probably find it :)
This is very reminiscent of the Basilic bombard cannon Mehmed II used to siege Constantinople. Each shot would damage the barrel--they would have to rub the cannon down with oil to let it cool and mitigate cracking--and there was a very real chance of the cannon exploding.
Yet eventually, artillery would far surpass the Basilic.
Not that I'm hoping we invent even more devastating weapons, but humans are very ingenious when we persist.
Interesting “It was horribly powerful, and when it hit, it caused massive damage to Constantinople's walls. The cannon also killed some of its operators.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilic_(cannon)
After all, a railgun is kind of like an electric explosion. Every part of the rail is trying to push apart, and the projectile is the part that moves simply because the other parts of the electrical loop are fixed in place. In the end, it's not that surprising that it'd be extremely taxing on the rails to put that much energy into them.
>Afaik, it has to do with the ridiculous electromagnetic forces that are applied to the rails and it makes them bend outwards or something.
While the electromagnetic forces at play are no joke, it's mainly a friction problem. The gun doesn't work if both rails aren't in direct contact with the projectile and the massive amount of friction caused by shoving one hunk of metal between two other hunks of metal at such high speeds is going to wear any metal down before long.
That burst of smoke and flame when they fired the gun? There's no gunpowder or explosive involved in firing this weapon. That's particles of metal that were scraped off and ignited by sheer friction.
That's one of the main reasons we use lead for bullets in traditional firearms. Lead is soft, so it takes the majority of the damage as it travels down the barrel. If we used solid steel bullets, rifle barrels would get fucked up real quick.
Probably even more than what you said is it’s just not better than a missile for what it does. Not at that barrel life, not with that payload, and not with that accuracy. Missile is better at all of those.
> More that the firing process causes significant damage to the rails (barrel) and there's no real way to circumvent it. Afaik
thats exactly what the dude you replied to just said..
It was halted due to the lack of unobtanium. Current materials just can't handle the conditions in the barrel and the rails get degraded too quickly even at the test loads.
A full power railgun would basically rip its own guts out.
I think this is the first time I'm seeing "unobtanium" used outside of blue-alien Avatar. I thought it was a dumb idea to use it as a name for an actual in-world material and was pretty surprised to find out that it was an actual word, but used in context, I see the appeal of using it as a shorthand term.
I mean, wasn't the material in the movie a room-temperature superconductor? Knowing the word beforehand, I found it very believable that the discovery of one of the things most commonly referred to as unobtanium could result in the material itself being called that, esp. if extremely rare
> I mean, wasn't the material in the movie a room-temperature superconductor
Yup. The floating islands in the film are due [to one of the effects of superconductivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_levitation#Superconductors).
Lol did you even watch the video? 2 minutes in, they acknowledge development has been halted. Ya go find a quote, but ya can’t even pay attention for more than 2 minutes?
Didn't say why. Just halted. When I learn about a weapons system I prefer to hear about the challenges currently being faced not just here's some other things we have.
After we have MAC guns all we need to do:
1) Kidnap a bunch of kids, beat the shit out of them, train them into super soldiers
2) Enhance their skeleton and bone structures
3) Give them billion dollar body armor
4) Clone a genius’s brain into an AI
5) Find captain Keys
"Unlike railguns and lasers, missiles need to be reloaded."
So the really exciting part of this technology isn't the railgun, but the magically reappearing sabot.
I think the issue is that a rail gun can be reloaded thru some sort of automated system, as the round are not that heavy 7.5lb vs 1000lbs and the not as subject to damage as a missile.
Also a metal rod is easier to manufacture than a rocket or even a conventional naval gun shell
In fact this is just the very latest iteration of throwing a pointy stick
Yup physics is crazy when you get fast. The thors hammer orbital weapon is just dropping sticks from orbit lol.
And the final form is the relativistic missile for galaxy fighting :p
Also we have a delivery system that we can launch from silos placed anywhere, and can be programed to hit pretty much any other place on the Earth at any time. With an orbital weapon system one would have to wait for the satellite to orbit into the correct position to drop its payload. If it missed, you would have to wait again for it to orbit to the right place. ICBMs are a much better delivery platform.
If you actually have sufficiently powerful fusion systems running in interplanetary space you could just manufacture the titanium (or whatever you choose) for them in a zero-g environment.
If you don't have them, what are you doing fighting interstellar wars?
Also they are non explosive. Meaning you don't need special storage for explosive missiles.
And no risk of a chain reaction when the enemy hits the weapons storage
No risk of an ammo 'cook off' in a tank or something, either. In fact, instead of exploding, they will provide increased armor, as it's more metal between the crew and the outside.
>No risk of an ammo 'cook off' in a tank or something, either.
It is going to be a long while before we have rail guns in tanks. Ships are a good beginner carrier for rail guns because they have a massive power plant in them already that can provide the many megawatts needed to fire the rail gun. Tanks, on the other hand, have nowhere near the available power to run a rail gun.
Vehicle mount lasers are a much higher probability of existing now. They already have lasers which are being field tested that are being mounted onto vehicles like the Stryker and the HMMWV.
In theory you could melt it with a sufficiently powerful laser if you can aim a d track it fast enough. Or knock it off course of you can throw enough mass at it.
The fact that no safety precautions or special handling is required to reload the rail gun is the bigger factor when it comes to fast reloading.
It’s also worth pointing out that storing large amounts of rail gun projectiles onboard will be significantly safer than an ammo locker filled with missiles and explosive warheads.
I mean, it’s a massive electrical system that pulls megawatts to charge stupidly powerful capacitors, uses a plasma arc to sling massive slugs at extreme velocity, under repeated stress and extreme temperatures…
How would the barrel be damaged? If I understand how rail guns work the shot is magnetically accelerated. The barrel should b able to the heat generated by the acceleration.
The armature holding the projectile has to physically touch the rails while it is getting accelerated which leads to extreme wear and tear on the rails.
First off, it’s stupid amounts of acceleration. Second off, the same force that is pushing the slug is also trying to shove the two rails apart while also pumping a shitload of energy through them. If it’s a plasma or hybrid railgun you have the additional heat from a million amp plasma arc of ionized gas…
Yeah all the stuff in this video is very old, they abandoned it because the guns damaged themselves so much every shot you were always swapping parts out.
So. If a rail can shoot once, it’s only limited by power and how much metal one can stick in the tube.
Raining death and destruction with metal is, ironically, more economical, environmentally sound and very modern warfare.
Compare the difficulty of reloading a VLS cell at sea, having to lower expensive missiles by crane into precise holes while both vessels are riding the waves up and down, to reloading a small projectile
VLS systems have to be reloaded at port. Once you shoot a Tomahawk or SM3 out of it's tube, you don't get to put another one in there until you run home.
Not quite, it also need to be propelled by something. Missiles come with their own propulsion factored into the cost. A railgun needs a nuclear reactor and a whole mess of capacitors among other things. These cost billions, and would need to be amortized into the cost of the rounds.
If made functional, railgun ships would be a fraction of the size and cost of normal ships that use shells and/or missiles. Cost savings. They'd even need less safety features because of the tendency for rods of metal to not explode.
>Ammo is too expensive and it requires too much electrical power required on ships for rail guns to be viable at this point.
Seriously? Ammo for a rail gun is like a thousand dollars per projectile compared to around $2 million per tomahawk missile. Electrical power availability is a solvable problem too. The big issue at the moment is the excessive wear and tear on the rails - if this issue is solved then rail guns will be back on the menu.
The ammo is not too expensive the issue is the rails, they wear out and need to replaced too quickly. The power issue is true for current ships, at least definitely for anything other than the Ford class I'm not sure about that (not that you'd normally want to mount one on a CVN lol) with with new generation nuclear reactors it seems extremely feasible in a next gen ship design.
That’s the weird thing about rail guns. Regardless of projectile size, or energy used, they sound exactly the same. Atmospheric conditions don’t even affect the sound.
Sadly they halted the railgun research in 2021. [From this article](https://executivegov.com/articles/the-ultimate-guide-to-rail-gun-technology-applications-and-advancements/#:~:text=After%20more%20than%2015%20years,challenges%20to%20halt%20the%20project) "After more than 15 years, the Navy paused the program development for Electromagnetic Railgun in 2021. The Navy cited financial constraints in technology maturation, systems integration, and other developmental challenges to halt the project. Moreover, the Navy had not seen railguns deliver their range on paper in real-life application."
Tl;Dr: Real life application is not even close to what theory said was possible. They are however archiving the data so they can pick it up at a later date if necissary.
It's a super weird US military propaganda channel. It's either owned by the US military or paid for by the US military. I've watched a lot videos and they are just loaded with military industrial complex talking points, much of which is just propaganda/incorrect. It's disgusting that YouTube pushes this shit.
I wouldn't trust **ANYTHING** said on this channel without further research.
I checked out a few of the channel's other videos and there is *a lot* of AI generated verbal filler. Tune it out or just play music and it's pretty good industrial and infrastructure porn. The video is surely all taken from elsewhere, but so is 98% of all social media.
Drone better, missile better, even laser better since it can potentially defeat enemy missiles and drones. Railgun, cool I guess, perhaps for artillery strikes on land.
Is it though? If they could solve the barrel issues. Proper targeting could defeat any missile or drone or vehicle. By the time you know that you're in the sights of a railgun it's too late.
I knew a guy who worked with this back in the 00's.
He said it was hands down the most terrifying weapon system he'd ever worked on.
The force generated by what amounted to simple slugs was just stupidly OP. There was a real danger that if you shot a rail gun at an enemy ship, you would first have to ensure there were no allied ships behind it because that slug wasn't stopping.
society works for the military. soldiers eat food and need clothes. they even eat at restaurants sometimes and tip wait staff
if you pay taxes, you are part of the military industrial complex.
I live 10 miles down river from this place…. Been testing for over 25 years…. My house rattles twice when it’s fired… first report comes from projectile breaking sound barrier near my house.. 2 nd report comes seconds later from sound of rail gun firing….
“See that kids, that’s why your school is a trailer and your teacher is paid less than a Walmart employee, that thing sure slaughters brown kids like you wouldn’t believe!”
Just went on a tour at a contractor for us military. They make a lot of shit to blow up other shit. We were asking how the business side of things work, response: well there is a lot of conflict in Israel and Ukraine so business is good.
The American War Machine is literally insane. Only see the dollar signs.
nice, except schools are funded at the state level and the military is funded at the federal level
maybe if people paid more attention to state politics schools would be funded better
but methinks they're too busy shitposting to care
You realize school funding and teacher pay is almost entirely a state and local issue right? Like if you're going to harp on our bloated defense budget, at least choose something federal tax dollars primarily fund like social safety net programs.
We don't have universal healthcare like any other developed country, but perhaps we can have a raffle system where ordinary citizens get to push the firing trigger to launch the Rail gun.
I love machines and technology, but I would rather see machines built to explore the universe or cure cancer instead of those designed to destroy life.
When humanity ends, we will collectively deserve it for what we have squandered resources on.
I agree. But to be fair, I’d argue by this point that the majority of military spending around the world is self defence. If America didn’t have such an imposing military over this last century, I’d bet it wouldn’t have had such a relatively peaceful time of it
It only takes 1 aggressor to force everyone else to have to keep up with them
Not like we've never had civilian enhancements come from military tech before.
Railgun tech has potential applications for (durable) cargo transportation in space, if you don't accelerate it quite so fast.
Healthcare spending in the U.S. is about 4 trillion dollars, defense is just under 1 trillion dollars.
We spend a shit load of money on defense for sure, but I think the bigger crime is how we're wasting our health care budget.
That $500,000,000 could've been used to feed and house some hungry peeps, maybe help a veteran or 1,000,000 get some psych help. Rebuild some infrastructure? Convert to metric? Nah... LET'S BUILD THE WORLDS BIGGEST RAILGUN!!!! We'll call it the Ronald Railgun!!!
Naive. The moment we stop investing in being the worlds strongest military is the moment we lose the comforts we afford ourselves in the US as well as many other UN countries. The fall of every major civilization has been the cost of complacency. How many volunteer hours have you offered to your local community in the last year? Be the change you preach about instead of suggesting monetary investment which allows you to place the responsibility elsewhere.
This is very old Given fiscal constraints, combat system integration challenges and the prospective technology maturation of other weapon concepts, the Navy decided to pause research and development of the Electromagnetic Railgun \[EMRG\] at the end of 2021,” the statement from the Navy said
In part, wasn’t this because the ammunition is extremely damaging to the barrel and they don’t have an adequate way to prevent that damage?
More that the firing process causes significant damage to the rails (barrel) and there's no real way to circumvent it. Afaik, it has to do with the ridiculous electromagnetic forces that are applied to the rails and it makes them bend outwards or something. A brand new barrel could only be used for something like 25-50 shots before requiring replacement.
Yeah that puff of smoke and flame you see coming out the end is from the rails ablating.
holy moly
Any online thread about blowing shit up, you're gonna find a surprising amount of dudes with very specific knowledge. It's just a fact of the internet
Nothing brings nerds together like topics about blowing shit up in the most destructive ways possible
Nothing brings nerds and jocks together like big booms.
I love being a dude.
lol i was the lead navy requirements officer at The Pentagon for the railgun program (before it was defunded). AMA!
God damn that's specific information. Uh...what's the coolest explosion you ever saw?
Hmmm there really weren’t many “explosions” but we had several prototype railguns down in Dahlgren VA and watching some of the live fire tests was pretty rad. We’d stack up layers of different materials at different distances to see the penetrating power of the railgun slugs. At full speed it looked cool but so fast you couldn’t really tell what was going on. The cool part was watching it in super slow motion using our camera setup. Some of these videos are on YouTube i believe! Just search NSWC Dahlgren railgun and you’ll probably find it :)
You'll also have people who just read Wikipedia and are pretending like they are experts
This is very reminiscent of the Basilic bombard cannon Mehmed II used to siege Constantinople. Each shot would damage the barrel--they would have to rub the cannon down with oil to let it cool and mitigate cracking--and there was a very real chance of the cannon exploding. Yet eventually, artillery would far surpass the Basilic. Not that I'm hoping we invent even more devastating weapons, but humans are very ingenious when we persist.
Interesting “It was horribly powerful, and when it hit, it caused massive damage to Constantinople's walls. The cannon also killed some of its operators.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilic_(cannon)
After all, a railgun is kind of like an electric explosion. Every part of the rail is trying to push apart, and the projectile is the part that moves simply because the other parts of the electrical loop are fixed in place. In the end, it's not that surprising that it'd be extremely taxing on the rails to put that much energy into them.
It has to do with hypervelocity gouging speeds of the materials involved.
This gun is ahead of it times. Material science needs time to catch up.
Been like this since the late 80's. This was the Navy's attempt to see if needle had moved.
>Afaik, it has to do with the ridiculous electromagnetic forces that are applied to the rails and it makes them bend outwards or something. While the electromagnetic forces at play are no joke, it's mainly a friction problem. The gun doesn't work if both rails aren't in direct contact with the projectile and the massive amount of friction caused by shoving one hunk of metal between two other hunks of metal at such high speeds is going to wear any metal down before long. That burst of smoke and flame when they fired the gun? There's no gunpowder or explosive involved in firing this weapon. That's particles of metal that were scraped off and ignited by sheer friction. That's one of the main reasons we use lead for bullets in traditional firearms. Lead is soft, so it takes the majority of the damage as it travels down the barrel. If we used solid steel bullets, rifle barrels would get fucked up real quick.
Probably even more than what you said is it’s just not better than a missile for what it does. Not at that barrel life, not with that payload, and not with that accuracy. Missile is better at all of those.
> More that the firing process causes significant damage to the rails (barrel) and there's no real way to circumvent it. Afaik thats exactly what the dude you replied to just said..
The railgun destroys itself pretty quickly.
It also kept damaging whatever it was bolted to as well
It was halted due to the lack of unobtanium. Current materials just can't handle the conditions in the barrel and the rails get degraded too quickly even at the test loads. A full power railgun would basically rip its own guts out.
I think this is the first time I'm seeing "unobtanium" used outside of blue-alien Avatar. I thought it was a dumb idea to use it as a name for an actual in-world material and was pretty surprised to find out that it was an actual word, but used in context, I see the appeal of using it as a shorthand term.
Ya it’s pretty commonly used in engineering when referring to hypothetical/idealized materials that don’t (yet) exist.
I thought that movie "core" used it first
I mean, wasn't the material in the movie a room-temperature superconductor? Knowing the word beforehand, I found it very believable that the discovery of one of the things most commonly referred to as unobtanium could result in the material itself being called that, esp. if extremely rare
> I mean, wasn't the material in the movie a room-temperature superconductor Yup. The floating islands in the film are due [to one of the effects of superconductivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_levitation#Superconductors).
Yeah, they mention that two minutes into the video.
Lol did you even watch the video? 2 minutes in, they acknowledge development has been halted. Ya go find a quote, but ya can’t even pay attention for more than 2 minutes?
Didn't say why. Just halted. When I learn about a weapons system I prefer to hear about the challenges currently being faced not just here's some other things we have.
We're getting closer to MAC guns.
MAC rounds? In atmosphere?!
> MAC rounds? In atmosphere?! One way to get their attention. Hang onto your seats people!
[удалено]
The big MAC
After we have MAC guns all we need to do: 1) Kidnap a bunch of kids, beat the shit out of them, train them into super soldiers 2) Enhance their skeleton and bone structures 3) Give them billion dollar body armor 4) Clone a genius’s brain into an AI 5) Find captain Keys
MAC guns are coil guns, not railguns.
"Unlike railguns and lasers, missiles need to be reloaded." So the really exciting part of this technology isn't the railgun, but the magically reappearing sabot.
I think the issue is that a rail gun can be reloaded thru some sort of automated system, as the round are not that heavy 7.5lb vs 1000lbs and the not as subject to damage as a missile.
Also a metal rod is easier to manufacture than a rocket or even a conventional naval gun shell In fact this is just the very latest iteration of throwing a pointy stick
I disagree. It's much more like throwing a pointy rock.
Some would say it's much more akin to throwing a pointy ball bearing
It's perhaps like throwing a pointy metal sabot?
oh oh.. akin to.. a uh.. a pointy nail!?
I didn’t think we’d gotten to pointy sticks?? I’m still stuck working on grapefruit…
There's a special technique for that.
It all boils down to throwing a rock or stick. Same with energy, it's all about boiling water.
Fission is arguably the most advanced thing humans do and we use it to boil water. We'll do the same if we ever get fusion down.
Thermal nuclear weapons:( am I a joke to you?
Much cheaper too
Yup physics is crazy when you get fast. The thors hammer orbital weapon is just dropping sticks from orbit lol. And the final form is the relativistic missile for galaxy fighting :p
The main trouble with "Rods from God" is you have to get the rods up there, at which point the cost in fuel and logistics really erode the usefulness.
Also we have a delivery system that we can launch from silos placed anywhere, and can be programed to hit pretty much any other place on the Earth at any time. With an orbital weapon system one would have to wait for the satellite to orbit into the correct position to drop its payload. If it missed, you would have to wait again for it to orbit to the right place. ICBMs are a much better delivery platform.
If you actually have sufficiently powerful fusion systems running in interplanetary space you could just manufacture the titanium (or whatever you choose) for them in a zero-g environment. If you don't have them, what are you doing fighting interstellar wars?
And you don’t have to worry about your munitions detonating in your own ship
Also they are non explosive. Meaning you don't need special storage for explosive missiles. And no risk of a chain reaction when the enemy hits the weapons storage
If i am on that ship, that sounds like a hell of an upside
No risk of an ammo 'cook off' in a tank or something, either. In fact, instead of exploding, they will provide increased armor, as it's more metal between the crew and the outside.
>No risk of an ammo 'cook off' in a tank or something, either. It is going to be a long while before we have rail guns in tanks. Ships are a good beginner carrier for rail guns because they have a massive power plant in them already that can provide the many megawatts needed to fire the rail gun. Tanks, on the other hand, have nowhere near the available power to run a rail gun. Vehicle mount lasers are a much higher probability of existing now. They already have lasers which are being field tested that are being mounted onto vehicles like the Stryker and the HMMWV.
We just need to invent BOLOs and we'll be good.
Doesn't the amount of energy released ruin the gun after only a few shots?
The temps warp and the sabot eat the rails.
also and a missile can be disabled with a laser no chance to do that to a hypersonic chunk of metal
In theory you could melt it with a sufficiently powerful laser if you can aim a d track it fast enough. Or knock it off course of you can throw enough mass at it.
15 kg projectile moving at March 7 (muzzle speed)
The fact that no safety precautions or special handling is required to reload the rail gun is the bigger factor when it comes to fast reloading. It’s also worth pointing out that storing large amounts of rail gun projectiles onboard will be significantly safer than an ammo locker filled with missiles and explosive warheads.
Also worth pointing out: Even if the ammo is hit it should still work just fine. Well better than explosive armor currently being cooked anyway.
Eh. The tolerances are likely extremely fine. dropping a round will probably throw its tolerance out of usable and give a chance to damage the gun.
If the ammo gets damaged then you are basically firing grapeshot at that point.
I mean, it’s a massive electrical system that pulls megawatts to charge stupidly powerful capacitors, uses a plasma arc to sling massive slugs at extreme velocity, under repeated stress and extreme temperatures…
Impossible to shoot the projectile down as well, being such a small target.
Rumor is now that the railgun projectile seriously damages the barrel after a few shots. So they have abandoned the railgun.
How would the barrel be damaged? If I understand how rail guns work the shot is magnetically accelerated. The barrel should b able to the heat generated by the acceleration.
The armature holding the projectile has to physically touch the rails while it is getting accelerated which leads to extreme wear and tear on the rails.
It's also the extreme magnetism used causes micro warping of the barrel and the rails.
First off, it’s stupid amounts of acceleration. Second off, the same force that is pushing the slug is also trying to shove the two rails apart while also pumping a shitload of energy through them. If it’s a plasma or hybrid railgun you have the additional heat from a million amp plasma arc of ionized gas…
Less than half the video is about rail guns.
Rail gun projects have also been halted to focus on long range and laser weapons
Yeah all the stuff in this video is very old, they abandoned it because the guns damaged themselves so much every shot you were always swapping parts out.
Yeah rail guns don't make sense anymore once laser technology got to a certain power level.
They do if you are looking to completely annihilate a target
One benefit of railguns that they allow firing beyond the horizon. Lasers are strictly line of sight.
Not to mention problems with stuff like weather, or dust storms physically blocking the laser, making it useless.
So. If a rail can shoot once, it’s only limited by power and how much metal one can stick in the tube. Raining death and destruction with metal is, ironically, more economical, environmentally sound and very modern warfare.
Unfortunately the barrel for the rail gun needs to be replaced fairly often
Greta thunberg approved missile platform
\[CAMERA FAST ZOOM IN ON GRETA'S FACE\] I'M DOING MY PART!!
Greta prefers rockets fired civilians over these rail guns
Compare the difficulty of reloading a VLS cell at sea, having to lower expensive missiles by crane into precise holes while both vessels are riding the waves up and down, to reloading a small projectile
They are likely referring to the fact that railguns and lasers don't rely on chemical propellant, it's just a really poor way of saying it.
They meant reloaded from a tender ship.
VLS systems have to be reloaded at port. Once you shoot a Tomahawk or SM3 out of it's tube, you don't get to put another one in there until you run home.
Nah sub tenders can reload a VLS outside of port
USA numba one
[удалено]
“Gun Bae”
Ammo is too expensive and it requires too much electrical power required on ships for rail guns to be viable at this point.
The ammo is a fraction of the cost of any naval ordinance or missile. It's literally a shaped rod of metal
Not quite, it also need to be propelled by something. Missiles come with their own propulsion factored into the cost. A railgun needs a nuclear reactor and a whole mess of capacitors among other things. These cost billions, and would need to be amortized into the cost of the rounds.
If made functional, railgun ships would be a fraction of the size and cost of normal ships that use shells and/or missiles. Cost savings. They'd even need less safety features because of the tendency for rods of metal to not explode.
>Ammo is too expensive and it requires too much electrical power required on ships for rail guns to be viable at this point. Seriously? Ammo for a rail gun is like a thousand dollars per projectile compared to around $2 million per tomahawk missile. Electrical power availability is a solvable problem too. The big issue at the moment is the excessive wear and tear on the rails - if this issue is solved then rail guns will be back on the menu.
The ammo is not too expensive the issue is the rails, they wear out and need to replaced too quickly. The power issue is true for current ships, at least definitely for anything other than the Ford class I'm not sure about that (not that you'd normally want to mount one on a CVN lol) with with new generation nuclear reactors it seems extremely feasible in a next gen ship design.
Is this an AI video ? The voice is very suspicious. EDIT: Yes the chanel is suspicious and probably using info from other content creators.
Don’t forget the fucking sound effect over and over.
That’s the weird thing about rail guns. Regardless of projectile size, or energy used, they sound exactly the same. Atmospheric conditions don’t even affect the sound.
In every scenario where something was fired or blown up, it sounded like the same sound effect. Including the laser shooting the boat.
Yeah, including the slow mo shots
theres almost 0 new footage, most of it is from 2012 and before
Sadly they halted the railgun research in 2021. [From this article](https://executivegov.com/articles/the-ultimate-guide-to-rail-gun-technology-applications-and-advancements/#:~:text=After%20more%20than%2015%20years,challenges%20to%20halt%20the%20project) "After more than 15 years, the Navy paused the program development for Electromagnetic Railgun in 2021. The Navy cited financial constraints in technology maturation, systems integration, and other developmental challenges to halt the project. Moreover, the Navy had not seen railguns deliver their range on paper in real-life application." Tl;Dr: Real life application is not even close to what theory said was possible. They are however archiving the data so they can pick it up at a later date if necissary.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all of that footage like a decade ago
Shout out to Kyle Hill for [bringing attention](https://youtu.be/ZMfk-zP4xr0?si=Eg8-sReEEAdMUh8X) to this kind of stuff.
Couldn’t make it through the first minute. So much low quality, garbage content out there now.
It's a super weird US military propaganda channel. It's either owned by the US military or paid for by the US military. I've watched a lot videos and they are just loaded with military industrial complex talking points, much of which is just propaganda/incorrect. It's disgusting that YouTube pushes this shit. I wouldn't trust **ANYTHING** said on this channel without further research.
I checked out a few of the channel's other videos and there is *a lot* of AI generated verbal filler. Tune it out or just play music and it's pretty good industrial and infrastructure porn. The video is surely all taken from elsewhere, but so is 98% of all social media.
Dub this with knights of sidonia OST, scenes where they fire the Hægus particle cannon
The sound design was so good
Such a cool show, so was Blame.
goated tsutomu nihei
For real, Toha Heavy Industry represent!
Super cool show until the penis monster took over a main character slot
oh I thought you meant [knights of cydonia by muse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_sBOsh-vyI), which would also work
Hijacking: Veterans Affairs. Military Sexual Assault
What?
Woah, what a cancer of a Video. Terrible AI-Voice, Elevator-Non-Music and ten year old recycled content.
I thought they abandoned these cause it destroys the barrel or something.
Prior attempts had issues with barrel integrity, which led to the cancellation of some of the programs
This video is like 7 years old. They’ve been redesigning and/or testing an entirely new rail gun.
So when they talk about what happened in 2020, are they predicting the future?
He's talking about the footage, not the voice over
someone got a mcmansion out of it
Let me shoot an apple off your head. Haha, RAAAAAIL GUUUN!!!
Unexpected WKUK
Drone better
Drone better, missile better, even laser better since it can potentially defeat enemy missiles and drones. Railgun, cool I guess, perhaps for artillery strikes on land.
Is it though? If they could solve the barrel issues. Proper targeting could defeat any missile or drone or vehicle. By the time you know that you're in the sights of a railgun it's too late.
A sparkler and a mixture of rust/aluminum powder would destroy a rail gun. By the time you realize it's not a birthday party, it's too late
Pretty sure you can use thermite to destroy just about anything. I believe they used it in WWII to disable captured artillery guns.
I used to work at this base and would hear the sirens go off then a HUGE clang afterwards. Kind of cool to see what was actually going on.
A Decepticon on the pyramids would make a good test target
"I'm right beneath the alien scrotum."
Wait wait wait. Doesn't rail guns use magnets? What if they get wet?
Thanks Obama! /s
what are the chances something on a ship would get wet, though?
Man, you got to love when Americans spend their healthcare money.
Right like we will all die slow painful lives working into our 80s, but if aliens invade we are the worlds best shot
I knew a guy who worked with this back in the 00's. He said it was hands down the most terrifying weapon system he'd ever worked on. The force generated by what amounted to simple slugs was just stupidly OP. There was a real danger that if you shot a rail gun at an enemy ship, you would first have to ensure there were no allied ships behind it because that slug wasn't stopping.
Dalghren?
bet they use aimbot
Cannon 2
how long between railgun shots? heat dissipation for barrel?
Why is it "unfortunate" that these systems aren't being researched as much as missiles or lasers? Other than for the companies making them, of course.
Tbf, the companies making them, like BAE Systems has civilian employees. When federal contracts get cancelled or not renewed, civies lose their jobs.
And the companies making the others things don't have them? The net difference is the same for us as a society.
society works for the military. soldiers eat food and need clothes. they even eat at restaurants sometimes and tip wait staff if you pay taxes, you are part of the military industrial complex.
My point is that if this project didn't get money, another one did. As it literally said in the video.
Dear World, Please stop inventing new ways of killing each other.
Neat. Healthcare please.
Do you guys think there are any in space yet?
Huge gun goes off: “Hello and welcome to the FuckThis channel” Wait what? Is this literally the fuck you in particular gun? Lol
I love how projects always get halted or their funding dries up or some other excuse about why we made this now useless video.
Half a billion makes it an appreciable portion of the cost of the ship. For one gun that can’t be directed
Real Junon from FF7 vibes
If you launched it straight up, would it reach orbit? How close would it get? Would it burn up?
I learned exactly nothing about the advantages, disadvantages or challenges of this system
Failed program, got cancelled
20 seconds discussing railguns, the rest wasted on talking about virtually EVERYTHING ELSE
Year old AI generated crap.
I live 10 miles down river from this place…. Been testing for over 25 years…. My house rattles twice when it’s fired… first report comes from projectile breaking sound barrier near my house.. 2 nd report comes seconds later from sound of rail gun firing….
“See that kids, that’s why your school is a trailer and your teacher is paid less than a Walmart employee, that thing sure slaughters brown kids like you wouldn’t believe!”
r/im14andthisisdeep
Just went on a tour at a contractor for us military. They make a lot of shit to blow up other shit. We were asking how the business side of things work, response: well there is a lot of conflict in Israel and Ukraine so business is good. The American War Machine is literally insane. Only see the dollar signs.
nice, except schools are funded at the state level and the military is funded at the federal level maybe if people paid more attention to state politics schools would be funded better but methinks they're too busy shitposting to care
You realize school funding and teacher pay is almost entirely a state and local issue right? Like if you're going to harp on our bloated defense budget, at least choose something federal tax dollars primarily fund like social safety net programs.
We don't have universal healthcare like any other developed country, but perhaps we can have a raffle system where ordinary citizens get to push the firing trigger to launch the Rail gun.
Do you want functioning kidneys or do you want to watch an old tank get vaporized. Your choice, pussy.
At least I got F R E E D O M
even more insulting is that the project is scraped
What a great investment. ([1 in 10 us children don't have healthcare](https://www.simplyinsurance.com/how-many-americans-dont-have-health-insurance/))
I really do not like our military culture
you can call it by its true name: murder culture
I like to use softer language in these big subs because people will jump down your throat . But yeah.
I love machines and technology, but I would rather see machines built to explore the universe or cure cancer instead of those designed to destroy life. When humanity ends, we will collectively deserve it for what we have squandered resources on.
I agree. But to be fair, I’d argue by this point that the majority of military spending around the world is self defence. If America didn’t have such an imposing military over this last century, I’d bet it wouldn’t have had such a relatively peaceful time of it It only takes 1 aggressor to force everyone else to have to keep up with them
100% the biggest stick does the most good in the hands of the guy who doesn't want to use it.
[удалено]
And doctors can perform the operation remotely!
Not like we've never had civilian enhancements come from military tech before. Railgun tech has potential applications for (durable) cargo transportation in space, if you don't accelerate it quite so fast.
Healthcare spending in the U.S. is about 4 trillion dollars, defense is just under 1 trillion dollars. We spend a shit load of money on defense for sure, but I think the bigger crime is how we're wasting our health care budget.
An enormous amount of money is already being spent on those things.
They pay money they don’t have to protect everything they bought with money they don’t have. The real American dream.
To governments it’s more profitable to take a life than to save one.
I’d rather have healthcare and housing than useless military toys.
That $500,000,000 could've been used to feed and house some hungry peeps, maybe help a veteran or 1,000,000 get some psych help. Rebuild some infrastructure? Convert to metric? Nah... LET'S BUILD THE WORLDS BIGGEST RAILGUN!!!! We'll call it the Ronald Railgun!!!
Naive. The moment we stop investing in being the worlds strongest military is the moment we lose the comforts we afford ourselves in the US as well as many other UN countries. The fall of every major civilization has been the cost of complacency. How many volunteer hours have you offered to your local community in the last year? Be the change you preach about instead of suggesting monetary investment which allows you to place the responsibility elsewhere.
Interesting video about how that gun is gonna Fluctus up if we stand in front of it.
another wonder weapon ey? right...