if I'm doing the math correctly. That should have a pretty flat trajectory, and make a pretty good hole in things.
However:
“I can’t conceive of a future where we would replicate Cold War forces
in Europe,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work, one of the
weapon’s chief boosters. “But I could conceive of a set of railguns that
would be inexpensive but would have enormous deterrent value. They
would have value against airplanes, missiles, tanks, almost anything.”
Anybody else get the feeling these idiots are looking at it as a magic wand? "Gee, put a few of these around and we can get rid of all those troops and vehicles and equipment!"
Well, a 25-lb projectile moving at 6000fps does make a pretty sound deterrent against any kind of non-infantry asset. The problem, of course, is that you can't just remount these on an MBT in place of the 120mm smoothbore (at least, not -yet-.) If I'm not mistaken, the initial first-gen deployment is going to be on destroyers.
ReplyDeleteLots of generator capacity needed, which makes ships good: if you don't need the magazine for the conventional gun, you can put the things there.
ReplyDeleteIt'd have great possibilities, I just get the nasty feeling the idiots are going to think all we need are some of these spotted around and they rule the world.
An artifact from the 1983 "star wars " program. So is the "news" story. Word for word from 1985. It is the same size as a 1944 16 inch battleship gun and has HALF the useable range of that same 16 inch gun. The same performance it had in 1986. The only thing it ever did was suck one trillion dollars down a hole and propagandize the Russians. That is what it's for. PROPAGANDA. The only place rail guns CAN work is in a Vacuum, and until the navy gets space ships.....Ray
ReplyDeleteAs I recall, the battleship gun was good for 24 miles and the rail gun can do 124. The rail gun is a hog for electrical power so each one would need its own power plant. This could be built into a series of small nuke plants in a string across Europe in a sort of 21st century Maginot line as long as we remember how well that worked.
ReplyDeleteStar Wars was a fun time and it should be noted that it worked. We built prototypes and the Russkies tried to build countermeasures. In the end they went broke and collapsed. Lowest cost war we ever fought.