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Discussion: Rail guns and Iowas
11. 02. 2011 20:35
DeCLeviathan
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Do you think that advances in rail gun technology could possibly lead to the eventual refit and recommissioning of the Iowas, or has guided missile and aircraft technology come too far to ever allow the battleship to reclaim it's role as the primary naval warship?
I understand that current rail guns can fire projectiles around 7-10 lbs, but imagine if they could be built bigger and mounted in place of the primary gun turrets and fire the same size projectiles (around 2000 lbs) at the current rail gun muzzle velocity of about 5k mph. Wow.
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Re : Discussion: Rail guns and Iowas
12. 20. 2011 07:30
SylverXI
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Originally Posted by Stormvanger
Originally Posted by AlexCaboose
A point that hasn't been mentioned is the sheer destructive force of an object weighing 2,000lbs at those sorts of speeds. There'd be plenty of collateral damage
Except you're not going to see a rail gun lob a 2000 lb payload. The rail guns they're using today are using 20kg or less. E =mc^2, and to get 1000kg to do the same thing that they can do with 20kg would take 500 times as much energy. And energy (storage and transmission) is the main limitation of the technology at this time.
The correct formula to calculate "kinetic energy" would be Ek= (1/2)mv^2. Which is why the usage of E=MC^2 here is meaningless. To get a 1000kg round at 2.4km/s, you will need--> (1/2)1000kg*2.4E3m/s^2= 2.9 millions KJ(2.9 GJ)(which is 80-90 times more energy compared with what the current most powerfull rail-gun now can produce) I guess I will have to do this from scratch. Am not sure how a reactor works, but I know in theory at least. Let's say we use plutonium-239 fission which produces around 207.1MeV which is 3.318E-11J per reaction. 2.9GJ/3.318E-11J= 8.7E19 nuclear reactions needed. 8.7E19 nuclear reactions*239.05216u*1.66054E-27Kg= 3.5E -5 Kg(35mg) of plutonium spent for 1 barrel shot. All of this assuming a 100% efficiency. Most reactors have around 30-35% energy efficiency and all of this energy may have to be stored before the shot, which will further reduce the energy efficiency. Also, only 3% of the plutonium is spent as fuel, before the plutonium rods needs to be recycled or becomes nuclear waste(or cool depleted uranium armor!) So, for a full salvo shot, at best you will need about 100X more plutonium which is about 3.5-4 grams of plutonium. This is not "impossible", but highly unpractical. Not to mention you will need a HUGE(emphasis on huge) capacitor to store a HUGE amount of electric charge for a single shot. Not to mention it will take some hours to recharge, even if they use a large "molten salt battery"(about 9-12 tonnes of it needed to store 1 shot worth of energy) to store the energy when the guns are not being used. So the USS Iowa(or USS Wisconsin) will need to be refitted with a large and powerful nuclear reactor, a molten salt battery, a HUGE capacitor to store a HUGE amount of electric charge and 2-3 rail-guns at most. The amount of repulsion and heat produced between the rails alone would probably rip the rail-gun or the Iowa itself apart. They might as well just design a whole new battleship from scratch. They might as well just fit it with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N0Balj2tLw Which reminds me of the gun on the new "Double Yamato Beast" ship. :P
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Re : Discussion: Rail guns and Iowas
12. 20. 2011 07:43
joshmon999
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Originally Posted by evsNOTeve
Originally Posted by joshmon999
Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, etc own missile tech. Every bomb, missile fired makes a ton of money for some politician-owning board of fat cats. For example: During Operation : Cast Lead in which Israel occupied gaza and rooted out the terrorists firing random missile to the tune of 30-80/day, they used 118 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles in 24 hours. Those have a 200k+ price tag, with over 100k in profit. We rushed a bunch over from the US (i.e they unloaded them from the CV task force in the gulf and ordered more.) Lol, in fact, the people who cry about 'foreign aid' or our '439+ military bases' are deluded. We rarely give CASH to anyone. The US Govt buys weapons from US manufacturers, then marks them up and sells them to other nations, or GIVES them to other nations as aid. So for every "dollar" we give in foreign 'aid' we are handing most of it to US arms manufacturers. Those military bases? Lol, those are weapon storage and sales depots. Now, on the other hand, the US military actually manufactures every single canon barrel themselves. How are the fat cats going to make mad money if the US starts making/using those awesome barrels? We can't have that. Why use an AT gun for static antiarmor defense, when we can sell them a bunch of one shot weapons? If they use guns, the ammo is cheap. If they use LAWs etc, then even TRAINING is very very expensive.
wow dude put down the koolaid... (btw no tomahawks were used in cast lead)
Put down the kool-aid? Lol, I got most of the info from TIME magazine, was just reading about it recently, and I'm sorry, it was when they squashed the entire Libyan infrastructure to punish Hezbollah. Yes, they used many many Tommys. I'm just such a huge fan of cast lead I mis-spoke. Kool aid. LOL, kool-aid. Tell you what , I'll put down the kool aid, you put down the catchphrase. They way things are , is the way things are. I never said I was against it, what would the point of that be? I don't really care. It just has an impact on the tech used for war, and how it is chose and developed in the states. Sooooooo sorry you read more into it, but the 'koolaid' comment gives you a certain 'fair and balanced' aroma...... lol. I stay out of politics, both sides and their adherents make me feel like puking.
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Re : Discussion: Rail guns and Iowas
12. 20. 2011 12:55
Stormvanger
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Originally Posted by joshmon999
Originally Posted by evsNOTeve
Originally Posted by joshmon999
Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, etc own missile tech. Every bomb, missile fired makes a ton of money for some politician-owning board of fat cats. For example: During Operation : Cast Lead in which Israel occupied gaza and rooted out the terrorists firing random missile to the tune of 30-80/day, they used 118 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles in 24 hours. Those have a 200k+ price tag, with over 100k in profit. We rushed a bunch over from the US (i.e they unloaded them from the CV task force in the gulf and ordered more.) Lol, in fact, the people who cry about 'foreign aid' or our '439+ military bases' are deluded. We rarely give CASH to anyone. The US Govt buys weapons from US manufacturers, then marks them up and sells them to other nations, or GIVES them to other nations as aid. So for every "dollar" we give in foreign 'aid' we are handing most of it to US arms manufacturers. Those military bases? Lol, those are weapon storage and sales depots. Now, on the other hand, the US military actually manufactures every single canon barrel themselves. How are the fat cats going to make mad money if the US starts making/using those awesome barrels? We can't have that. Why use an AT gun for static antiarmor defense, when we can sell them a bunch of one shot weapons? If they use guns, the ammo is cheap. If they use LAWs etc, then even TRAINING is very very expensive.
wow dude put down the koolaid... (btw no tomahawks were used in cast lead)
Put down the kool-aid? Lol, I got most of the info from TIME magazine, was just reading about it recently, and I'm sorry, it was when they squashed the entire Libyan infrastructure to punish Hezbollah. Yes, they used many many Tommys. I'm just such a huge fan of cast lead I mis-spoke. Kool aid. LOL, kool-aid. Tell you what , I'll put down the kool aid, you put down the catchphrase. They way things are , is the way things are. I never said I was against it, what would the point of that be? I don't really care. It just has an impact on the tech used for war, and how it is chose and developed in the states. Sooooooo sorry you read more into it, but the 'koolaid' comment gives you a certain 'fair and balanced' aroma...... lol. I stay out of politics, both sides and their adherents make me feel like puking.
We're not saying there aren't grains of truth in there, but I don't think it's as bad as all that. The truth is you need both man portable missiles AND tank scale rifles for flexibility and multiple roles. It's hard to infiltrate an M1A2, and adding a pack of missiles to a troop transport is relatively easy, whereas adding a 75mm rifle to one takes a brand new transport.
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