Railgun Tank

Better batteries. The answer to most present day engineering problems is always better sources of power storage.

there's a lot of research into new battery tech (thank you smartphones) as whomever figures out how to mass produce the next highest energy-density battery will be rich rich

>>no charge so no ammo detonation
detonanus

Not batteries, capacitors. Railguns operate on capacitors because they require all of the stored power to be discharged very rapidly.

how you gunna charge those capacitors?

Ummm... Engine?

Now this is just turning into a shadowsword

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Giant problem of railguns is short barrel life. With current technology you have to replace rails after like 10 shots

Extreme vulnerability to EMP.

>Mammoth Mk. II

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How much energy do you think a railgun needs? State your answer in Joules.
How much power will your turbine produce?

>>electronics designed to safely and frequently handle currents of millions of amperes are susceptible to EMP
really bro?
A railgun would probably be the only thing that *survives* an EMP.

We already have tech right now that can store enough energy for a railgun inside a tank--instead of using batteries or capacitors you store energy in a magnetic flywheel. You still have the problems of generating enough energy in the first place to "charge up" the spinning wheel.

>muh EMP

is there even a functioning stand-alone EMP device in the world?

>Nuclear powered tanks
>We fallout now
It's too comfy, lads.

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Currently, the line of research is trending towards dumping batteries entirely, and trying to create a sort of rapid charging, slow discharging capacitor. So I'm sure somewhere along that line, we'll come up with higher density capacitors. Though I don't know how, because we've basically hit a materials science wall.

>>way less recoil compared to convetional guns
You really think the gas adds that much recoil?

>magnetic flywheel
I don't think that's correct. The most energy dense options we have is petroleum based fuels. Second to that is lithium ion cells. I don't know of anyone using magnetic flywheels, but maybe I'm retarded.

Plenty but they are short range (~100m) and use a decent about of explosives to drive a slug though a coil so you might as well just use explosives to take out the target.

>I don't think that's correct.
Read more.

I wasn't claiming that was an ideal solution, it certainly has a lot of its own disadvantages too. Good capacitors would be far superior in every way. But it can fit inside a tank and it can store enough energy to fire a railgun; that was the extend of my claim.

The railgun they have now compared to the railgun they had 5 years ago uses less energy, more reliable, and far more efficient. Tracked rail guns will definitely happen in the next 15 years. You just have peanuts for brains.

The current tech has just about reached the limitations of what's physically possible. There won't be another battery leap like the one we did for lithium. At least until we can fit a fusion reactor into a smartphone.

>You really think the gas adds that much recoil?
It absolutely does. The mass of the gas ejected from the barrel contributes to recoil just as the mass of the bullet itself does. The mass of the gas is the same as the mass of the powder which was burned to produce it. For a large round that is a non-trivial amount of mass.

Refer to Hatcher's Notebook for the math if you care about the details.

L I V E F R E E
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Not true. The rail gun darpa has been testing can fire way more than 10 shots now. That was like 5 years ago.

I just looked up the weight of propellant in a tank round, it's a whole lot more than I realized.
>Hatcher's Notebook
Thanks for the reference user.

>>Hatcher's Notebook
>Thanks for the reference user.
No prob. It's a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in hunting, shooting, ballistics, etc. It's easily one of the best gun-related books ever written.

>Shadowsword baneblade

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That's fair, I misunderstood. It's an interesting approach, and it could be a good enough stop gap to get the idea off the ground until adequate capacitor tech catches up. I'mma look into this.

the 120mm rheinmetall is already overkill for whatever the ruskis or chinks weld up in the next 100 years. the key is coming up with a battlefield role and platform that would do more than we are already doing.

my guess would be an urban fighting vehicle proof against nearly most IED and rpg attacks yet could put Gau-8 Avenger volumes of fire in support of infantry actions.

This is sorta short sighted, desu. I understand what you're saying because of energy density constraints, but it's difficult to imagine we're just going to accept this wall we've hit and go "welp, I guess we stop here". There are promising lines of research, and we're still plumbing the depths of metamaterials.

>GAU-8 Avenger
....why haven't we built a tank around that? We built a plane. But not a tank.

Kek. Good one

The 120 may be overkill, but a rail gun still offers a huge advantage in that you can carry a lot more ammo because you're not having to carry powder.

Good question. IIRC there have been smaller rotatry cannons mounted on armored vehicles. And there's the famous ZSU-23-4. They may not be very good at AA roles anymore but they could certainly support infantry. And a modernized version might even be able to do double duty as a CIWS.

Yeah, my point was that it's possible, not that it's the best idea (or even a good idea).

A flywheel can store an amazing amount of kinetic energy, but it has problems too. One is that the flywheel acts like a giant gyroscope, another is that it's incredibly dangerous if the bearings fail and the flywheel gets loose.

Because it’s useless for killing tanks and massive overkill for anything else?
It’s also fucking huge

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If you used a different sort of ammo which was optimized for light AP but packing explosive/incindiary would make it a lot more effective as an infantry support weapon. Firing DU anti-tank rounds would be silly for that application for the exact reason you stated. But a 30mm shell can have quite a large blast radius, meaning you would expend fewer rounds to attack a given area.

That said, I don't think you need anywhere near the rate of fire for a land vehicle. When you're shooting at planes, or from a plane, your window of engagement is very short so you need to saturate the area with bullets. An infantry fighting vehicle doesn't need that, unless you were aiming for the dual-role support/CIWS sort of thing that user mentioned above.

Yeah, it's big, but so is a tank cannon.

>if the bearings fail and the flywheel gets loose.
More than likely the flywheel just fucking explodes
The higher the specific energy, the closer you are getting to the flywheel material's breaking point

I can't think of much of a reason to put something like a railgun on a direct fighting vehicle like a tank.

What about railgun artillery?

EDF! EDF!

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That is a different mode of failure which could happen if you spun the wheel too fast. The same thing would happen to a battery or capacitor if you charge it with too high a voltage.

So what you’re saying is, that you need a gun in the same caliber, but slinging HE. In a smaller package, with a similar ammo capacity but a lower rate of fire. All this in order to optimize it for infantry support from a tracked vehicle.

HMM, you know that is an excellent idea. I wonder why nobody has ever thought of it?

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>What about railgun artillery?
There are many problems with that:
-making sure the shell isn't accidentally set off by the massive electrical pulse which fires it
-making sure the shell doesn't fail due to atmospheric friction
-some railguns have too high a muzzle velocity, the projectile doesn't fly in a ballistic arc, it leaves earth's gravity
-most railguns fire tiny projectiles. Making one large enough to contain a reasonable amount of explosive is an even more massive undertaking than rail guns already are.

>the famous ZSU-23-4
I love that the Russian army had to keep getting told not to waste their Shilka ammo on ground targets but today that is mainly what they are used for.
Also RIP M163 VADS, you where too pure for this world.

Yep, that was my point exactly.

Stormlord baneblade when?

But my point was, “Hurr durr. What if Gau-8. But a tank?” is fucking retarded.

I agree with that point 100%.

The GE proposal for the Sgt York used a shortened GAU-8

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Solar panels cant produce enough power to launch a projectile at mach 7. the projectile actually sets the air behind it on fire for a short period, it's pretty neet.

well need scaled down versions of existing technology, more than likely nuclear.

First off
>no charge so no ammo detonation
Sort off. Your capacitors can short out but that's WAY, WAY less dangerous than an ammo cook off. Also, the fuel for the generators might catch fire but that's less dangerous.
>incredible ranges
Yes. Just Yes.
>way less recoil compared to convetional guns
Not really. Newton's Third Law still applies so a railgun may have more recoil if the railgun is more powerful.

>It's way better than some BS like a plasma or laser cannon anyway.
Lasers actually make good secondary weapons. I'd use one as a co-axial or cupola mount.

And as for your actual question
>Ok, do you guys think as technology moves on we can actually produce a railgun tank?
Yes...but we don't have a power supply to make it worthwhile. Yet.

You'd need a Perfect Storm of events to knock out a Railgun with an EMP. Hell, worst that will happen is that the capacitors overload and that's something that all Railguns have to deal with every day.

>One is that the flywheel acts like a giant gyroscope
That actually sounds really useful.

And you can gimball it if you don't want gyroscopic effects/want to selectively exploit them like a reaction wheel

You don’t have to carry charges but now you have these energy dense batteries just waiting for an excuse to catch fire

Um...yeah actually. I was thinking you have the flywheel perpendicular to the barrel but it actually makes more sense to have it parallel with the turret ring.

Or a petroleum generator. Like the engine you need to carry anyway. Fuel is a lot less dangerous than high explosives though.

>mammoth tanks and the Mk2
>Not going for the more robust and effective railgun Predators

>>capacitors can short out
Do you have any experience whatsoever with high-voltage electronics? When a high-voltage capacitor fails it's basically a giant bomb.

You can't cheat physics. That capacitor contains energy equal to 1/2 C x Vsquared. If it is shorted out then all that energy has to go somewhere.

What about train based artillery railguns, where the main guns, capacitors and power generators are stored in separate rail cars.

That would be doable with current tech, sure. You can fit a fucking huge turbine generator in a rail car.

If you are already on a train where weight is less of a concern, have you considered flow batteries?
The electrolytes are relatively inert, the power output scales with catalyst area allowing for fuckhuge continuous power outputs in the size of a boxcar, and the electrolyte itself can be used as a coolant. The disadvatage is that the specific energy is really fucking low, so you need literal tons of electrolyte.

Latest figure I can find for the Navy railgun is 32 MJ. An Abrams turbine makes 1500hp=1118550 Watts=1118550 J/s, so provided there was a big enough bank of capacitors in the tank, a railgun powered by an Abrams turbine could fire once every ~28 seconds.

That being said, M829A3 (4th gen APFSDS round) had a muzzle energy of around 12 MJ, so scaling the hypothetical railgun down to this would mean it could fire once every 10-11 seconds which isn't far off the current standard which I believe is one round every 7 seconds. That's with the old turbine and recent railgun tech though. Turbines get more powerful, and as someone else pointed out it keeps getting more and more efficient.

I could be wrong in this so feel free to correct me. I guess the biggest hurdle right now is the size of the capacitor bank needed to store 32 MJ.

>fires straight into the air

Nope. Unless you want to hit targets 30 minutes beyond the horizon, at which point good luck hitting anything mobile.

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I don't know much about flow batteries. That said, I'm not sure what advantage they might offer.
You would want to carry a generator of some sort, that way you can "recharge". If you only carry batteries then you're limited to however many shots your battery can give you. So all you really need is enough battery capacity for a single shot, or perhaps enough for a handful of shots. It would be silly to treat the train like a "magazine" and fill it with nothing but battery. A smaller (relatively speaking) batter plus a generator makes more sense. Fuel has much better energy density than a battery does, and it's much safer.

We can do some real simple math to see if this feasible. Most rail guns that have been currently tested are around 10 megajoules. If we take a big locomotive engine as a power source, those are roughly 6000 HP or 4.5 megawatts. Thus, if we had a suitable battery or capacitor, an engine/generator of that size could fire the gun roughly every 2.2 seconds.

Of course that assumes perfect efficiency which is never the case, but even if we assume things are horribly inefficient you can still fire, say, one round every 10 seconds.

The US Navy is developing a much bigger 64 MJ railgun. That could fire roughly once a minute using the same rough calculations. Of course, you can always have bigger or multiple generators too.

>well need scaled down versions of existing technology, more than likely nuclear.
>Fallout nuclear powered cars FINALLY a reality

lol, we just hiveminded similar math.

>. I guess the biggest hurdle right now is the size of the capacitor bank needed to store 32 MJ.
Yep. Capacitors are funny things, there are all different sorts of them. We could easily store 32 mj with off-the-shelf electrolytic capacitors but the problem is that they cannot handle the crazy high peak currents involved. Because those currents are so high it greatly limits what kind of capacitor designs we could use. An old-fashioned parallel plate capacitor would work, as would a suitably built wound film capacitor, but those have awful energy densities.

Far as I'm aware navy has rail guns mounted on ships or is at least testing them. One shot from those and the target is destroyed.
To get it on a tank you either need to make the tank bigger or the rail gun smaller.
If you make the rail gun smaller you lose potential destructive output.
The longer it is the more time the projectile has to accelerate.
Have to build it for purpose.
Plus if you fully discharge it with a shit you have to wait for it to charge again.
A lot to consider I guess

Railguns can only really be used for firing in a straight line.
Use it for bombardment and the projectile will lose Alot of the momentum that makes it dangerous.
Essentially be left with a large object just falling from the sky that wouldn't do much.

Why even type if you don't know what you're talking about?

Zoomer detected

What the fuck are you on about? Every single infographic about railguns depicts them firing in a parabolic trajectory

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Some numbers to compare:
USN Experimental railgun from 2006: 8mJ
Prototype from BAE (2010): 33mJ
USN design goal for ships: 64 mJ
5 kg C-4 explosive: 32 mJ
Tomahawk Missile (conventional warhead): 3,000 mJ
16" gun from Iowa-class battleship: 355 mJ kinetic energy alone, plus another 480 from the explosive inside
5" /38 caliber naval gun: 7 mJ kinetic + 32mJ explosive

Flow battery would just be a power converter recharged by some powerplant with enough storage capacity for a few shots like you said. Benefit is mainly safety due to inert electrolytes, it won't burn or release its energy rapidly when damaged. It also has a constant output voltage whereas a capacitor bank would decrease in voltage. The electrolyte reservoirs would still need to be large and you do need a really large electrolyte area to get a reasonable current level.

I'm not that guy, but I suspect he heard that it's possible to build a railgun which can reach escape velocity, and therefore mistakenly believes that all railguns do that.

A single rail car carry up to 40 tonnes, if I am not mistaken. That's a lot of batteries.

tonnes
It's much higher. In the US a 268,000 lb railcar is considered low enough that it can go pretty much anywhere. Higher weights are possible, though that limits where you can go (mainly because of bridges). That's 130 short tons, total. Of course the rail car itself weighs a lot, roughly 25-30 tons, so you can carry about 100 tons per car before you have to worry about bridge weight limits.

And yeah, it is a lot of batteries!

>you do need a really large electrolyte area to get a reasonable current level.
The advantages you list are fantastic. But that is a real sticking point. A railgun requires incredibly high currents and extremely high voltages. Both of those are problems for batteries.

Why won't we just put a few of those in the orbit and call it a day

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The trajectory can be adjusted you dingus

Easy to shoot down, laws about non militarization of space

>laws about non militarization of space
Which other nations don't follow.

What is a capacitor, Alex.

Best suited for a fort defending a port city.
>Citizens, we will be expecting a short brownout following a firing of the Main Cannons, thank you for your cooperation.
MFW

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Reminds me of the fucking lasers in factorio browning out your grid when the attacks start to get bigger

For now

Infantry railguns when?

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*shoots at your panels with small arms*
Nothing personnel.

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>Implying other nations are capable of militarizing space.

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Chinese money and Russian aerospace might be able to nigger rig something functional enough to pose a threat to us.