After spending more than $500 million, the Department of Defense is moving away from its railgun project and instead leaning towards a mixture of new and existing technologies.



The U.S. Navy’s highly touted electromagnetic railgun weapon system, which can fire a projectile traveling 4,800 miles an hour at distances of up to 100 miles away, will likely never see combat in its current form. The half billion dollar project has not led to a combat-ready system, and instead the Pentagon is looking at combining brand new hypervelocity railgun technologies with “powder” gun technologies hundreds of years old.

In 2005, the Pentagon gave defense contractors General Atomics and BAE Systems a mission to create a working railgun that could arm the U.S. Navy’s next-generation warships. Railguns were meant to lead shipboard guns away from gunpowder-based propulsion to electric propulsion. Railguns use a series of high-powered magnets and powerful electromagnetic fields to fling a projectile at tremendous speeds.

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Unlike traditional naval guns that ignite gunpowder or some other powder charge to send a projectile down a tube, railguns don’t rely on explosions. This means the railgun could fling a projectile faster and farther without storing dangerous and bulky powder charges, and the guns weren’t subjected to the extremely high pressures involved in a powder explosion. Power would be generated by a ship’s integrated power system, which is designed to generate, store, and release huge amounts of electricity.

Now, twelve years later the Pentagon is reluctant to field the system. Although the railgun works, it is behind on the number of shots per minute it can fire, firing only 4.8 rounds in one minute instead of the required 10 rounds. The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, designed to fast track new technologies critical to keeping America’s technological edge on the battlefield, has also began favoring the hypervelocity projectile, or HVP. According to Task & Purpose, the railgun system could be “dead in the water” by 2019.

HVP takes the projectile technology from the railgun program and adapts it to fire from existing U.S. navy 5-inch guns. HVP doesn’t get the same speed and distance railguns do—at Mach 3 they travel at about half the speed and at about 30 miles they only travel a third of the range, but they’re still a considerable improvement over existing 5-inch shells. But U.S. Navy cruisers and destroyers each have at least one 5-inch Mark 45 gun, meaning the firing platform for the HVP is already in widespread service across the Navy’s surface force.

All in all, it’s unlikely the railgun will find its way onto a Navy ship by the early 2020s, as some experts originally predicted. Still, the Navy’s railgun technology isn’t going away. The service may be looking for a cheaper, less challenging, more modest leap in tech as it tries to grow the size of the fleet, but eventually railguns will become standard on warships. The advantages—some still theoretical at this point—outweigh the disadvantages. The electric revolution in naval warfare that sweeps away chemically powered weapons may be deferred, but it isn’t going away.

Source: Task & Purpose

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