Japan Becomes 1st Country Ever To Fire Electromagnetic Railgun From An Offshore Vessel::Japan has successfully test-fired a medium-caliber maritime electromagnetic railgun from an offshore platform, as it continues to advance its defenses in the face of burgeoning regional security threats.
Of course the country that makes games, anime and manga full of giant mechs with railguns does it first
Nanomachines, son!
Played college ball ya know!
Stop asking for a grey goo incident or we’re going to have a grey goo incident
wake me… when you have railguns
I hear that there is no other way to kill Godzilla.
They fired a certain scientific railgun. Nice.
Hey look out for a certain scientific accelerator and a magical index as well.
I could have sworn that the US navy has had experimental railguns on carriers for a while. I don’t think they ever intended them as actual functional weapons, but I was pretty sure they had at least done some tests with them.
The U.S. Navy hasn’t declassified their tests so there is no official record. Japan was the first to openly do it.
Uhh, I dunno how much declassification you’re looking for but here’s the US Navy’s Youtube channel with a video of some test firings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSce3nEY6xk
IIRC, the problem wasn’t that it didn’t work but that the barrels wore out too quickly to be useful. I suppose they could have put this on a Zumwault like originally intended but that would just be a PR stunt when the main problem was throwing the gun away after 10 shots.
I think there was an episode of Evangelion where they posed the same problem and solved by having multiple guns to switch to. I guess it’s common knowledge of thermal dynamics? IDK
If the JMSDF has gotten to this phase of development, I’m gonna have to assume they’ve either made some advances in material science that deal with the extremely accelerated corrosion/ablation in the rails/barrel, or have come up with a reasonable way to quickly swap the wear components out. Who knows - maybe it’s as simple as a spool of conductive wire/metal strip runs down the length of the barrel and gets refreshed with every shot?
Maybe they just a ton of lube, butter that bad boy up before a big battle and let a rip!
This is talking about firing from an off shore vessel though. They declassified the test firing on land years ago.
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From what I see, it looks like they never actually put the thing on a boat. All the testing was on land.
And after years of R&D the US Navy put the project on ice recently. Apparently they don’t think it’s worth the cost.
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We have on land. They just suck up a lot of power and missiles do the same job but better
I think I’ve only ever seen tests from land, but I’d be shocked if a ship didn’t have one, but I wouldn’t be if they were quiet about it
You’re thinking of EMALS. It’s a catapult for aircraft, not a gun. Pretty close in concept though. Had some teething issues, turned out larger than expected, but works just fine now.
The GAO says it still has reliability issues that won’t likely be ironed out for about a decade.
yeah transformers rise of the fallen featured a navy ship with an EM gun… but none that we have today are unclassified. Japan’s was first!
It was classified there too
Damn, I was just researching EM based weaponry for a fiction book. Didn’t expect to see this kind of news for a few years based on what I found.
Here, this’ll probably make your day: MARAUDER plasma railgun. The first simulations were done in 1990, the first real-world test was done in 1993. They estimated that by 2000, their prototype would be capable of firing a plasma toroid at 3% of the speed of light.
My understanding is that the little we know about it is a result of someone either not taking the project seriously, or forgetting to classify the research. The result was that the early research got leaked to the public while the later research is believed to have become classified, which is why the otherwise successful project suddenly disappeared.
Edit: removed a redundancy
Top secret = classified…
I thought I’d heard that “classified” and “top secret” were levels of classification for info, but after looking it up it looks like you’re correct.
That’s what I based a different weapon on in my table top rpg world :)
Been possibly for a long time. Whether or not it’s a practical solution is another story.
Eh, I could hand wave the important bits behind “war-time research and development in a universe where physics isn’t exactly the same”, but it wouldn’t really work for the story I want to tell. I want it to highlight a bit of an important side character, so if I’m hand waving their area of expertise, it falls apart.
Sad Zumwalt noises.
My mate in high school used to make these. He’d wind his own electromagnetic little tunnel thing, apply current, and the little metal projectile used to shoot through walls. Was pretty amazing.
That’s a gauss gun, not a railgun. Still cool, though.
I assumed they were synonyms ? how do they differ ?
They’re pretty similar, in that both use electromagnetic forces to launch a projectile.
Gaus cannons use a field around the projectile, applied by wires wrapped around a tube, whereas railguns use two rails touching the projectile to conduct the magnetic field through the projectile.
From a video someone posted in this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTDcFxTq1Fw&t=127
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Ahhh ok. He’d do them with the capacitors from disposable cameras that the local camera store would give him.
That’s pretty cool, and dangerous
The Venn diagram for those two things is just a single circle
Did you go to high school with the Hacksmith team?
They should try getting info on whatever they can about MARAUDER. Might be better at intercepting missiles than a railgun that fires physical projectiles.
