Navy’s Magnetic Super Gun To Make Mach 7 Shots At Sea In 2016 [View all]

[Jgarrick]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/04/navys-magnetic-super-gun-to-make-mach-7-shots-at-sea-in-2016-adm-greenert/

NATIONAL HARBOUR: 23 pounds ain’t heavy. But it sure hurts when it hits you going at seven times the speed of sound. That’s what a prototype Navy weapon called a “rail gun” can do, and it does it without a single gram of gunpowder or rocket fuel — just electricity. For many missions, a rail gun is better not just than current cannon but than the laser weapons the Navy is testing this summer in the Persian Gulf (I’ll explain why in a minute). And, after years in development and hundreds of test shots on land — see the video for a small sample of the destruction — the rail gun is finally going to go to sea.

“We’re beyond lab coats, we’re into engineering now,” Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the Chief of Naval Operations, told the audience at the Navy League’s annual megaconference here, Sea-Air-Space 2014. “It’s going on a Joint High Speed Vessel in 2016.” Just in time for the Navy’s biggest gathering of the year, the Sea-Air-Space conference, the Navy released this video and issued new details of the test plan. Both rail gun prototypes will be shown off to the public in San Diego this summer, aboard the new Joint High Speed Vessel USNS Millinocket. Then the Navy will install either the BAE Systems prototype or the General Atomics one — that hasn’t been decided — on Millinocket for at-sea test shots in 2016.

It’s a crawl-walk-run approach, however. The 2016 tests will only involve one shot at a time. Firing multiple rounds in a row will wait for another series of tests in 2018. Actually installing a rail gun permanently on a combat ship — Millinocket is a transport with a civilian crew — is even further in the future. Meanwhile, while one prototype or the other is doing the tests at sea, BAE is already working on a “Phase II” rail gun with such improvements as an automatic multi-loader for rapid fire and better heat control so rapid fire doesn’t melt the barrel. (General Atomics didn’t win a Phase II contract).

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials have been impressed with the Navy’s tests and are exploring the idea of a land-based version of the rail gun for missile defense, a mission currently performed by expensive and often unreliable anti-missile missiles. So why do rail guns matter, besides generating cool clickable video? Three words: impact, range, and reloads.

(excerpt, remainder of article at link)