The Navy's Giant New Electric Railgun

a reply to: Forensick

The magnetic field that drives the projectile forward drives the coil windings and the stator backward.

a reply to: Bedlam

Cool.
Use the recoil to spin up a flywheel.

originally posted by: Bedlam
a reply to: Forensick

The magnetic field that drives the projectile forward drives the coil windings and the stator backward.

Of course!!! The same kickback you get trying to push a positive magnet against a negative.

Google didnt find it but my grandmum had a donkey with a turnip on its tail with opposite magnets and one in the donkeys mouth, one side it would eat it, the other it just rocked its head away!

New 32-megajoule railguns have been installed and fired in Virginia and New Mexico.

...

Once they’ve reached the 10-round a minute rate then they will work to make the railgun barrel last for 1000 shots or more.

The current railguns fire a 16 kg slug at 2,000 meters per second (Mach 5.8), which takes 32 megajoules of energy per shot.

10 shots minute would need 20 megawatts of power.

Only 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and three Zumwalt-class destroyers currently have the power for a railgun.

nextbigfuture.com, May 2017 - US Railgun is being test fired a few times per hour now and by the end of the year at 10 shots per minute.

Mach 5.8! No wonder I couldn't see it!

Ten shots a minute would be something to see. The one in New Mexico is at White Sands where they are testing distance. The other is at Dahlgren, Virginia. 20 MW will be no big deal if Lockheed would get their T-4 fusion reactor up and going.

a reply to: Phage

the impulse is to short and abrubt to spin up a flywheel effectively, and that would add a whole other layer of mechanical complexity, which is one thing they are try to get away from.

But, the british are going at flywheels for kinetic storage over capacitors in their version of the rail gun, lifted directly from F1 KERS. They are planning on using overlapped banks of flywheels to get ROF up to 10/min.

a reply to: punkinworks10

That strikes me as extremely not brilliant.

Hey I know, let's put a crap ton of high energy precision flywheels in a naval vessel which could be SHOT AT in the course of firing it's flywheel powered gun!

Because, why make the enemy bring his own shrapnel to the party when you can instead pack your ship full of handy dandy shrapnel generators which only require a hard enough knock to upset the flywheels in order to transition into shrapnel generators!

a reply to: roguetechie

Think very carefully about what you just said.











and what of the 20 tons of high explosives this will replace?

a reply to: punkinworks10

I have thought very carefully about this, and I also know what project was killed and shelved to make way for this one...

Do you?

I highly doubt it because if you did you'd realize we had a BETTER solution that was actually ready and could have equipped ships like the Zumwalt from day one out of it's construction slip!

Guess what?

The GOOD solution which was ready and actually viable would have equally got rid of said explosives in an even better way that would have allowed for a very important secondary use that would have served us well if we have to fight inside the "first island chain"!

Telling people that have a better grasp on the issues than you to think about something just makes you look stupid BTW.,.