Record Setting Firing of Railgun
US Navy’s Electromagnetic Railgun EMRG Test Fires
The US Navy has tested the worlds largest rail gun making history in the evolution of large gun technology.
The US Navy’s Office of Naval Research made military history when it fired a huge 32 MJ (megajoules) electromagnetic rail gun in tests at its Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) in Dahlgren, Virginia, on January 31, 2008. This was the largest and most successful test to date of the weapon. Previous tests of an 8-megajoule weapon were done last year. This is the centerpiece of a program started in 2005 to create a 64-megajoule device that can be mounted as the main weapon of a destroyer-sized naval vessel. The weapon, a rail gun, fires non-explosive projectiles at incredible speeds, using electricity rather than gun powder. This could increase the range of naval gunfire support from the current 15 miles to as far as 250 miles by as soon as the year 2020. This could prove to be the biggest technological advance in large guns since the advent of smokeless powder in the 1890s made all of the world’s black powder weapons obsolete overnight.
A rail gun works by sending electric current along parallel rails, creating an electromagnetic force so powerful it can fire a projectile at tremendous speed. Because the gun uses electricity and not gunpowder to fire projectiles, it's safer, eliminating the possibility of explosions on ships and vehicles equipped with it. Instead of an explosive charge a powerful generator is used to pulse energy briefly to power the weapon. The projectile had no warhead as the rail gun is expected to destroy things through a massive transfer of kinetic energy. In other words think about a child's marble. If the marble is tossed softly to you it won’t hurt. If it is fired at you at supersonic speeds, you better hope you have burial insurance. New classes of nuclear powered surface combatants, the first for the US Navy since the 1970s, are an ideal end user for such a weapon.
Railguns have been portrayed in the 1980s in Buck Rogers. The fictional weapons again surfaced in the 1996 Schwarzenegger film Eraser, the Stargate television seriesand in many video games, including Quake III and HaloII. .The weapon fired in the test referenced above ramped up to 10.64MJ (megajoules) with a muzzle velocity of 2520 meters per second. Particles of debris are shown igniting due to friction from the test projectile leaving the barrel of the device in high speed navy photos taken shown below. Within a generation the 21st century’s new Railgun armed Dreadnoughts may be plying the waves.
Sources
Railguns-
Press Release, United States Navy PAO January 31, 2008.
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