The rail gun is one of the most exciting Naval technologies to come along in years. The Navy hopes to fit the gun to the DDG 1000 destroyer sometime around 2020, and if the technology delivers as promised, it would be capable of firing a guided projectile up to 267 nautical miles, which would put all of North Korea into range from either coast of that peninsula (or, to take another theoretical example, allow the Navy to bombard Paris from the English Channel). InsideDefense.com reports that the concept has moved on to the next phase of development with the delivery of a “lab launcher” to the Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Dahlgren Division Laboratory. According to the project manager, Elizabeth D’Andrea, the device was “designed for us to be able to open the inside of the gun and put in new rails, put in new materials, insulators, put in testing equipment [that are] able to analyze what’s going on inside.” If work proceeds without any “show-stoppers,” the Navy will take delivery of two prototypes in 2011, each “capable of 32 megajoules of muzzle energy”–just half the power that an operational gun would draw to “fire a metal projectile at high speeds, between Mach 7 and 8, before its hits a target at around Mach 5.” That’s a whole lot of power, so much, in fact, that the ship’s propulsion system would have to be temporarily switched off in order to fire the gun, and then power would be redirected to the screws once firing had ceased. The rail gun will be able to fire faster and farther than anything in the current arsenal. It will also deliver a lot more bang for the buck. Military.com has an excellent online guide to the technology. They explain, “for the same amount of time it takes a Tomahawk to reach a target, an EM gun can deliver twice the destructive power to the same target, while operating at about 6-12 rounds per minute. At a fraction of the cost per round, tremendous volume fires could be delivered.” There are still some significant hurdles to making the rail gun work, but the technology will also mark the first time major leap forward in gun technology in nearly a millennium.
Experimental rail gun, courtesy of Sam Barros’ Powerlabs.
