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RailGunShot

It's been near a decade since the US Navy conducted its start sit-in of a epitome electromagnetic railgun, and the engineering has advanced significantly in the last x years. The Navy is currently considering whether to proceed with at-sea tests of its railgun engineering science, or canceling those tests in favor of funding increased R&D and expanding the number of platforms that might one day adopt the weapons.

Equally with a number of cutting-edge armed services technologies, in that location's some degree of controversy over whetherthe Navy's Hyper Velocity Projectile (HVP) and electromagnetic railgun (EMRG) are worth the price and expense of their own development. While the HVP is intended to be used as ammunition for the EMRG, it's non a requirement — in fact, the HVP is designed to exist fired from a wide range of platforms already and can be fired by conventional guns. The table below, courtesy of The Strategist, shows the various combinations and costs of various weapons. AGS stands for Advanced Gun Organisation (currently mounted on Zumwalt-class destroyers) while LRLAP is the Long Range Country Set on Projectile.

Development on the HPV seems to exist proceeding adequately smoothly, and while the projectile would take to be integrated into the weapon systems of existing Navy cruisers, that task does non seem to present any unusual challenges. The larger question dogging both the railgun projection and its ammunition is whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

ECMG and HPV: Potential game-changers

Price, ironically, is at the centre of the ECMG and HPV development programs. In the past, nosotros've talked about how guided missile systems face high barriers partly because the technology and expense of building a missile that can hit some other missile is much higher than edifice a missile and launching it at someone to begin with. If it costs $i million to block a $ten,000 missile, y'all've got a serious trouble. The second issue is the express number of SAM (surface-to-air missiles) that any unmarried send can comport. These two problems are referred to equally the cost exchange ratio and the depth of magazine.

RailgunPrototype

Big gun. Biiiiiiiiig gun.

An HPV round fired from a railgun leaves the barrel at Mach seven.5 (Mach 3 if fired from a conventional gun) and is theoretically fast enough to counter a anti-ship cruise missile. Replacing expensive SAM batteries with projectile weapons could dramatically cut costs and amend the chance of a ship surviving a pitched battle. Meanwhile, an ECMG, once fully functional, could deliver rounds at distances far larger than any other projectile — and a twenty-32MJ railgun could deliver a serious dial.

HPV1

One significant question about railguns, however, is whether the Navy can really retrofit its current cruiser lineup to employ them. The power requirements for the Navy's next-generation weapon system crave a 25MW power capacity. The Navy's Zumwalt-class destroyers can supply this, having been designed with 58MW of spare electrical capacity and the ability to chop-chop shift its distribution between propulsion and other on-board systems. Unfortunately, price overruns led the Navy to aggressively downsize its plans for the Zumwalt class from 32 ships downward to 3. This means the Navy would have to notice a way to shoehorn a 25MW weapon into the Arleigh Burke class of destroyers — and they currently only provide 7.8MW of power total. Retrofitting them for railguns might prove extremely difficult.

Information technology'due south unclear if railguns will prove to be decisive battlefield weapons, a fringe capability carried by just iii US Navy vessels, or an expensive boondoggle. Then once more, the program seems to exist in absolutely pristine condition compared with the F-35 — and so I guess information technology's all in how y'all choose to compare.