Energy Density: The Railgun Problem

It seems that the bottleneck to electromagnetic-kinetic weapon development is the power source. Must we wait for batteries to get smaller, or will a novel power source be adapted for use? Perhaps miniature fusion reactors?

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Yeah, if only there was a powerplant that could be mounted in a cruiser sized ship capable of enough power to supply a railgun

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Nuclear reactors are more than dense enough if you’re talking about ships.
As far as portable ones, there isn’t anything.

Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves man

for naval use, power source is not an issue
gas turbines already produce a surplus of power to the ship, while nuclear engines aboard carrier produce enough energy to power an entire town

battery power isnt quite there yet, since current lithium ion batteries are pretty inefficient
but battery sizes half halved in size since the 90s while also halving in price, a few more doublings and it might get there
but railguns are so huge that any where you can put them, you have forms of energy generation rather than storage

Should have mentioned that I'm thinking of more portable weapons, but it's worth noting that our naval prototype is still fuckmothering huge.

capacitors and nuclear power plants
simple as

compared to the ships they would be mounted on it wouldn't be much of a problem, the real problem is degradation of the barrel

Just build more ship.

Which is why we need to focus our research efforts into coilguns.

Coilguns become more inefficient as velocity increases. They're not serious weapons.

Energy density isn't really a problem. Accumulators can store energy from a gas turbine or other power source in order to fire the weapon. Batteries are, in fact, a pretty terrible option for this. A small gas and fuel cell brings a lot more kilowatt hours per kilogram.

Armature erosion is a problem, Disposable rails that can be replaced quickly are one solution, the other would be tougher rails. It's solvable.

Coilguns are kind of a solved problem. They'd be an interesting replacement for machine guns or automatic cannons and have very compact ammunition with minimal cooling problems.

I never understood why a rail gun would just have a magazine of rails.

how did you type so much and say nothing
do you work at the pentagon

Their bottleneck is barrel wear. Capacitors solve the energy problem.

friction is the projectiles enemy, not the energy source to launch it. back in the 70's and early 80's according to a college professor I had, the UFO's people saw a lot in northern nevada, were railgun projectiles that lost the dry ice jackets and literally ricocheted from hitting updrafts and from air turbulence

this isn't even the cutting edge shit, that required fancy royal pain in the ass bespoke hipster alloys that we got in, according to him, 1987 that opened up the ramjet game. once you got it cast, and finish machined, you tempered it, hoped to god it didnt crack or warp, then fired it at mach 200 at mountains 150 miles away instantly.

American Railgun tech is dead, they are just waiting for China to make a breakthrough and then copy the design.

Currently China and Russia are developing ElectroChemical Guns which are more efficient and effective.

Since railguns need to use batteries of capacitors to get a fast enough discharge time, you'll just see pre charged magazines of capacitors for portable use. It'll pretty much be the same system we use at the moment with capacitors replacing gun power

no

this but also spontaneous welding of the projectile to your magnets and general arcing issues.

that explains all those hikers that were mysteriously blown to bejesus and back

Your problem isn't energy density. It's power density. Battery technology doesn't need to improve to make rail guns feasible, but capacitor technology does.

Not really, though. As other anons have pointed out, producing, storing, and discharging the power necessary to make a railgun function has been shown to be workable. Most of the issues that have prevented operational adoption come from erosion issues with the rails and projectile.

but why not coilguns though? i get that the magnetic saturation point of a ferrous projectile is too low for weapons generally, but what about a non-ferrous round with a symmetrical armature that's vaporised by current like a railgun armature? Wouldn't this reduce the heat and friction on rails (by avoiding contact with the coilguns's "Barrel")?

fusion is less power dense than fission reactors

coilguns suck at accelerating projectiles to mach bajillion which is what's so intriguing about railguns
there's no point in using a coilgun when a regular nitrocellulose machinegun would work better

>I never understood why a rail gun would just have a magazine of rails.
How would you make that work? The electromagentic forces that act on the rails are just as strong as those which force the projectile forward. In a way they are even worse because the rails are so much larger than the projectile and thus give more area for the electromagnetic forces to act on. Even building the rails in a stationary configuration so that they are strong enough not to self-destruct when the gun fires is a huge problem. Maintaining that strength while also being able to quick-change the rails makes the problem even worse.

imagine your rails warping in the micrometers after one shot with the sorts electrical field precision & ultra high speed you need to make that stuff work.

>railgun barrel harmonics
That's it boys, pack it up

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>>People don’t think it be like it is, but it do

speak english, please.

think of holding two magnets, one in each hand and positioning them so precisely that you can move a projectile straight down the middle without pulling it to one side or the other at the speed of sound.

Precision isn't the point here. It doesn't really matter; the electrical currents are so high that they will be forming arcs to jump gaps anyway. Instead it's just plain brute force that is the problem. Simply keeping the rails strong enough that the entire assembly doesn't explode is a major problem. Nobody is worried about precision, they're just worried about it not blowing up.

Nah arcs will fuse the projectile to the rail. There's a lot of force but it ain't brute, shit's delicate.

>Nah arcs will fuse the projectile to the rail.
That can happen, yes. But every rail gun that has ever fired has had arcs between the projectile and the rails; the currents involved are far too high for any alternative.

Works better in a vacuum, obviously.

No, they are testing it at White Sands.

Another problem is that the barrel corrodes completely after a single shot. All the heat from electrical arcing and friction not only cause the rails to deform but it instantly causes a thick layer of oxides to build up within the barrel rendering the gun unusable until you replace the rails. You might be able to mitigate this if the barrel was purged with some inert gas.

>Disposable rails that can be replaced quickly are one solution, the other would be tougher rails. It's solvable.
Why not make the rails part of the ammunition package? Each round comes with its own rails. That way, the rails only have to last for one shot. Existing VLS cells could be repurposed to hold and feed railgun ammo assemblies. Alternately, rail assemblies could be mated with projectiles just prior to firing. That would probably be a faster, simpler solution.

note: nitrogen wouldn't work for this, you'd need to use helium or argon
liquid argon would also work for cooling, which is nice

That's some really neat trivia old bro, thanks.

That's the direction I've been thinking, too. I'm sure it's been floated around the labs that work on these sorts of things. My guess is that the whole cost and space benefits inherent to a railgun with permanent rails go out the window when you have to store a set of rails and circuitry for each round.

Railguns make no fucking sense on a planet. The horizon curves away faster than the projectile does. By the time your slug comes back down from Narnia and it's visit to the ISS, it'll be going slow and not be where you aimed it.

I'm sorry, but orbital velocity is around Mach 30 near the surface
Railguns operate around Mach 10 or so (although I think the US Military's experimental one is Mach 6)
so the ballistic trajectory still curves down, not up, relative to the surface

>t. moron

The thinner air is a benefit. Inb4 the next mouth breather claims railguns can't fire guided ammunition.

It's only mach 10. That might get you up to the stratosphere but not into orbit.

Not unless you fire a SCRAM jet out of it and by that point it's an anti-sat weapon.

>the thinner air is a benefit
Yes, especially for firing the railgun, it would work really well in an environment without air. Like space.
>guided ammunition
just fire a fucking missile at that point it's nit going to be cheaper

t. retards that think "space" and orbit are synonymous

Getting a projectile to space isn't even very hard, we've built chemical guns that can do it. Orbit is getting to space, and then adding another 7km/s of velocity.

yes, and you won't get to space firing horizontally unless your gun shoots faster than orbital velocity
dumbass

And at another big testing ground base that I work at.
Railgun testing hasn't slowed at all here.
As a matter of fact they've been extremely busy with it recently.

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>just fire a fucking missile at that point it's nit going to be cheaper

A missile costs a fancy INS, turbine, and fancier airframe. A guided shell takes a cheap INS and goes fast. Literally the fucking point of the program. Nothing with a range over ~40km hits point targets without guidance, because at that point atmospheric interference is a bigger influence than every other error source combined.

Cool tank brah

Has anybody seen any high quality HD video of the Chinese rail gun firing?
Someone post it for me.

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Gatling?

Rail guns require area. 100 meters or more.
Rail guns don't do anything an ICBM can't do better.
Its just a meme.
Sure having a 30 foot long gun might seem nice on paper but its less so during deployment.
Rail guns don't work will in practice.

As if ships don't have enough problems just staying afloat.

>don't do anything an ICBM can't do better
it does direct fire both better and cheaper than missiles
now, it can be argued that direct fire has no place on the modern battlefield, and I'll call you an idiot.

You can build a railgun 10mm long. It's an electric motor, they scale pretty well.

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