The U.S. Army is pushing ahead with plans to field railguns on the battlefield of tomorrow, awarding a leading railgun developer a contract to mature a ground-based railgun system. Rapid progress in miniaturizing railguns technology has transformed the hypersonic weapons from laboratory curiosities to potential weapons that promise tremendous increases in range and energy.

According to National Defense, the Pentagon’s Defense Ordnance Technology Consortium awarded a contract to General Atomics, developer of the U.S. Navy’s railgun system, to “evaluate and mature railgun weapon system capabilities in support of U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Command.” The contract specifies the construction of railgun prototypes that could be used by the Army in the ground combat role.

Railguns, once relegated the realm of science fiction, involve using powerful electrical currents to generate a row of magnetic fields between two rails. Objects placed between those rails and the fields between them are accelerated parallel to tremendous velocities. Railguns can send objects flying at speeds of up to Mach 6, much faster than traditional guns that rely on explosive force.

The Army envisions using railguns in two ways. The first way is as a means of lobbing projectiles very long distances, beyond conventional artillery such as the M777 towed and M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzers. This would enable the Army to strike targets deep behind enemy lines, while also staying out of the range of enemy counter-fire.

The railgun’s second potential use is much more sci-fi. They could be used as a hypervelocity gun on a main battle tank. A tank-mounted railgun would likely dominate the land battlefield of the future, smashing through even the thickest of enemy armor at impressive ranges.

Making a railgun a practical land weapon still requires plenty of technological innovation. The railgun’s footprint, although reduced at least eightfold over the years, must be made even smaller to fit on a thirty foot long, sixty ton tank. Railgun weapons must be durable enough to withstand cross-country travel. The railgun “barrel” currently lasts for just a handful of shots. The armed services would like that number to be up around a thousand to be comfortable. And the artillery projectiles, particularly if they have guidance systems or a complex fuse, must be able to withstand powerful electromagnetic fields and the shock of going from sitting still to hitting Mach 6 virtually instantaneously.

Still, as the technology is increasingly refined, the more it seems inevitable that gunpowder-based weapons will eventually give way to electricity-based ones. We might not see railgun tanks in the next five, ten, or even twenty years, but all signs point to it happening eventually. The U.S. Army just wants to make sure it’s first.

Source: National Defense

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