Navy Railgun Test at Dahlgren

[Tuffybnt]

Omfg this was my simpleton sisters account.I despise her with every physical part of my bieng

[Tuffybnt]

For all who think its some sort of laser...there must be something deeply wrong with you. You can clearly see the projectile bieng loaded and shot in the high speed recording...get some commom sense cmon now.

[calangel]

the reason they're using that flat-nosed projectile instead of a standard one is so that they don't have any over penetration

[charliebarosio]

Can Murka do anything besides build murder machines for its endless obscene corpo wars? This is one sick psychotic freeking "society". Get a life you fucking ghouls!

[milyandrovky]

imagine what that would fo to a human body

[Gramra]

@milyandrovky What body? lol.

[LDxFTW]

My last name is dahlgren

[munglay]

Tired of the boring shit? Skip straight to 3:25 for the action.

[justmenixon]

i actually live here.

[hello43231]

are they gonna put rail guns on tanks like in command and conquer :O

[cycoboy817]

@hello43231 No.... the size of the vehicles you would need would be like a destroyer class vessel it won't be put on anything that small for a while... but I think they'll be able to put this on a ship easy

[thescatman347]

dont these things shoot like over 200 miles r sumthin crazy liek that?

[cycoboy817]

@thescatman347 I'm not sure about the distance but it has a shit load of energy so I wouldn't be surprised if that were achievable

[TheArbiter138]

@thescatman347 yea

[NexAngelus405]

Nikola Tesla was an inventor from Serbia. He is most widely recognized as having invented alternating current (AC power). However, he is rumored to have made several other inventions that never became adopted, such as the death ray I already mentioned and a method of wireless power transfer, which was basically sending electricity through the ground so people could get power by sticking a wire in the dirt.

[bumsdrums]

doesn't seem to be very effective

[TheBigTittyTwister]

Not yet...

[anguyen4564]

what is it call when a gun shoot pure energy not plasma or laser

[NexAngelus405]

A directed energy weapon. It's rumored that Tesla had built one during the 1900s.

[nalgasux]

There isn't really "pure energy" in that sense; it's a measure of how much work can be done by something. Energy has to be transferred or converted in some way. A "normal" gun shoots bullets with a lot of kinetic energy. A laser shoots photons with electromagnetic energy. They both transfer energy to their target, just in different ways. There isn't some kind of discrete "energy" you can magically shoot out of a gun; there's always SOMETHING carrying/transferring it, even if you can't see it.

[nalgasux]

(That said, Tesla was awesome and came up with all sorts of cool stuff.)

[TheGGES]

electric gun

[paronfisk]

Electron cannon? like in the tv?

[DarkNylo]

shoot energy?? you've been watching too much star trek ^^

[SolomonJonesIsBack]

@DarkNylo You'd be surprised, it's possible.

[DarkNylo]

as far as i know energy is not really something, but it is contained by things like atoms, photons etc. but ofcourse I don't know everything :P

[chrislaf89]

I can't see this as being part of the Navy, these are all civilians

[jay812]

there are THOUSANDS of civilians that work for the navy on naval bases

[MisterHougy]

Because civilians develop it, duh.

[mrpieman11]

I agree with EnigmaHood. The only problem is that there might be a piece of space junk/fragments to get in the way and alter the lazers path, alas destroying something it wasn't meant to, or just send it into a desert, or some parking lot.

[railgap]

Does anyone have any info on the cylindrical white device on the cart (above the o-scope) at 1:23? I assume it's some variety of cavity antenna or b-probe, but I'd like to know more. I've seen them used for TEMPEST emission testing, but the fellows using them weren't willing to tell me much.

[Skurgefaust]

Depleted uranium rounds? Makes sense, would go through anything.

[makyme]

Completley daft idea now..but....

Asteroid defence ??... this thing looks perfect for knocking the crap out of something heading for us....

Recoil wouldnt be a problem as it would be ground based ( bigger scale then ? )

Hey dont knock it... we arent told everything yah know !!...

Have none of yah ever watched the Movies ??

[EnigmaHood]

If you can build one powerful enough, sure. But I think it would make more sense to make one on the moon, so it doesn't have to fight as much gravity, and there's no atmosphere in the way.

[pratt123]

but you have to make sure that the asteroid doesn't shatter into multiple pieces. Plus it takes way too much power to reach orbit and it is very hard to aim accurately. A missile does a better job.

[darkslurpee]

I'd like to know what those metal targets are made of and what they are filled with, to get an idea of the power behind that slug

[thouarttim]

The power? It's range is 250 miles. I mean damn.

[roachmobile]

No volitile explosives to have on your ship. Good idea.

[64Martin]

Except for, you know, cruise missiles, SAMs, Phalanx ammunition and fuel.

[Anaraziel]

yeah but i heard they wanna exchange phalanx by railguns and build some kind of long-range-railgun-missiles (or something)

[bagrym]

phalanx wont be replaced by railguns, phalanx have the bigger fire-rate and thats the important thing on an anti-missile-defence-whatever.­..

the Railgun will be used as an long range artillery.

[Anaraziel]

whatev, they'll face serious engineering problems before putting one of these things on a ship.

[EnigmaHood]

Actually, in theory an e-mag cannon like a railgun can have a higher rate of fire, since there's no casing to worry about. Just a solid metal projectile which your shoot out the front.

[JustAnotherGaian]

the idea behind the railgun is simply to make a big magnet which proprels a metal slug & it doesnt require explosives because of the immense kinetic damage it deals, however, it is meant as a direct-fire or arch-fire weapon, which is why they cant replace guided missiles with railguns

[Irontygre]

Actually, it's a Gauss gun or coilgun that required the metal slug. Depending on the railgun design, you don't necessarily need a metal round. Furthermore, railguns are *not* high arch weapons, unless you want to do reentry physics. Railguns are easily powerful enough to put rounds into orbit.

[gamebushido]

I would like to reinforce irontygre, and add that the railgun is electro-magnetic, not by itself magnetic. You're thinking of a Gauss, or coilgun.

The Railgun can easily fling a slug 20km per second, which is pretty freakin fast. Its not too difficult to calculate trajectory at that speed.

Main problems are the heat generated from the reaction, and the forces working against the components of the gun. It requires a large ammount of maintnence to keep the gun working right now.

[kdraper2007]

Phalanx is already been replaced by the rolling airframe missile on U.S. Navt ships.

[MisterHougy]

No, it is not.

[DoctorFist]

I think the idea is to replace the missiles, SAMs and other missiles with railguns.

[JustAnotherGaian]

@doctorFist

they cant replace guided missiles because the railgun will be used as a giant arch-firing howitzer, the projectile will not be guided so it would be near impossible to hit a moving target at the distance they plan on firing it from which is why they still need the other munitions, plus they absolutely CANNOT replace SAMS. seriously, a railgun as an AA gun?

[DoctorFist]

My reasoning for that is that a railgun obviously fires projectiles at extremely fast speeds. So, I thought if you could somehow track the missile with a mounted cannon (I can see how this isn't working), then you could blow it out of the sky. Kind of like the Star wars missile defense system, I guess, but with no satellites. Meh

[kinga303]

what if they put the railgun on the satellite?

hehehe i just think it would be funny as the satellite would fire it, and knock itself out of orbit with the sheer recoil that i'd imagine a railgun of that size would have

and it would look like a shooting star as the slug would disintegrates on re-entry right?

[DoctorFist]

Yeah, I imagine it would. Anyways, I think I realize that the only effective STAR WARS defense system could work with lasers. Although I also like Tesla's death ray idea..

[EnigmaHood]

You could use a railgun to shoot aircraft, but lasers would be better. Airplanes don't have much armor anyway, and the laser hits at the speed of light, so it's naturally a better option. Railguns are good at killing stuff on the ground.

[Geoxile]

Technically no, light only travels at the speed of light in a vacuum like space. In an environment with high concentration of obstruction, such as the atmosphere, light moves considerably slower but technically it is still very very fast.

[EnigmaHood]

I already knew that, trust me, I know a lot more about physics than you do. I wasn't more precise because it just wasn't very relevant to what we were talking about. If you want to be technical and pedantic, then you could say the laser hits at the speed of light in an atmosphere, which is different than the speed of light in a vacuum, but it's not really helpful in context to what we are talking about.

[mlinvt16]

considerably? no stfu. It's like the difference from 1 to .9997

[Geoxile]

1.0005 about, anyway relative to itself it's not a huge difference since you can just round up but to us it is, about a 160,000 m/s for that matter. Nearly 360,000 mph if you want to keep some stupid standard. So next time, before you disturb a 8 month old post go look things up.

[Geoxile]

Oh btw, getting defensive? "stfu" - I can tell your insecurity from my seat, overly defensive troll/ jumper who tries to attack anyone he thinks he has an edge over. Dully noted, you may leave the internet now.

[rhino145]

they reckon they could get them to fire at mach 5 and up to a 200 mile range :O

just gotta make a autoloader

[MisterBlabby]

It takes that long to load it? Boy, are we in trouble!

[mbridgmon]

probably by the time they become standard it wont take as much time. at least I hope not.

[AJM5K6]

There is no way the miltary would employ a weapon that would take that long to load an fire.

The 16 inch gun on the Iowa class battleship had a rate of twice a minute and that was 50 years ago.

[mbridgmon]

well yeah, but now they take less time to fire then they did back then. What I mean is, by the time they do employ them, they will make the operation and reloading more stream lined. and these guys weren't in a battle situation where speed is imperative. it make take a long time now, but by the time its stream lined, it wont take nearly as long I'm sure. just my opinion though

[kdraper2007]

this is a laboratory gun. it is used to work out theory, when they have ironed out the theory, then they'll produce a practical battle field weapon

[jammybizzle666]

wrong.

the theory was proved years ago by the british gun.

this is just them trying to develop it into an actual naval gun.

[TacereM]

First of all, this is simply a test of the railgun. If it ever gets in combat, it will NEVER take that long. Hell the guy even measured something before they shot it.

[Jabulon88]

they have built it that way because they want to change variables, for testing. surely, compared to regular munitions, these projectiles wouldnt leave half the amount of debris in the barrel. cant see why they couldnt make a clean, autoloading version of this.

imagine ten of these lined up, with a fire rate of like 10 per minute, that would be awesome, and hell, just build the parts and pay someone to rig them. cant be that difficult when the chinks are sorted out.

[Bluppers]

A long way aways from Quake but still cool! They said by 2020 they want them on their ships to replace the 5 inchers!