Photos Suggest China Might Have a Hypersonic Railgun

Khahhblaab said:
I say let them make it. If actually understanding technology has any impact, they might make a faster bullet, but as soon as they put some explosives in it, it will surely explode upon firing. talk about collateral damage and friendly fire!

Let them take them out themselves. I cant imagine them being able to make a firing mechanism that can survive being shot out of a rail gun and still explode when it reaches the target.

FIRE: (Another one of them bites the dust because the firing-pin thought it hit something.)

N.Korean firing officer: Ah,Shi-bal, I think I will defect now.
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rail gunn ammo is kinetic energy based no explossive round is required, similar to gravitational bombardment.

still, not enough energy and no material being sturdy enough to actually use it in any sensible form makes it inviable.
 
The gun in question is a coil gun, not a rail gun. (There are differences.) It is mounted on a landing craft. This is a test installation.

Amazing how far and how quickly you can advance when you don't respect intellectual property and engage in cyber spying by flooding the market with your hardware. Bravo to China.
 
What is the range of such a gun? I recall the 16in shells from battleships could go about 25 miles.
 
aaronspink said:
All hyper velocity projectile utilize an exoatmospheric flight profile to maintain velocity. When fired fully through low earth altitude they rapidly lose velocity (and possibly structural integrity) due to friction. For line of sight applications, they would still be effective with direct fire, but to reach out to 50+ miles, and maintain any significant energy, they need get out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible.
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I would think reentering the atmosphere would also rob it of energy, first it's going to lose energy going up both atmospheric drag and gravitational potential energy to go 50+ miles up, then the slower bullet will now lose more energy going down into the atmosphere, and unless they have some sort of spinning mechanism (which to date, I thought all rail guns were simple slugs) the accuracy would be fairly poor as the slug tumbles through the air
 
Zareek said:
Talk about an overreaction. There is no known defense for artillery shells either; you can harden stationary installations, install some armor but moving around and staying beyond range is your best defense. This type of weapon like any dumb weapon is about targeting and anticipating your targets next move. This is a cannon that fires with higher velocity rounds and doesn't use gunpowder as propellant not a super weapon that can win a war with one shot.
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Actually, there are defenses against conventional artillery now. C-RAM is just one of several.

CRAM_Night_Fire.jpg
 
pavementeater said:
This is a prop it's not a Hypersonic Railgun i doubt is even a real weapon.
The weight of something this huge on the forward / bow of a ship alone if real would cause issues for stability and the forward part of the ship would be farther down into the water. Also if something that huge and power full would cause major issues with the class of ship they currently have this Hypersonic Railgun installed and mounted on.
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I wasn't aware it was that heavy.

But the real issue for railguns is power delivery. The current design nuclear reactors can't deliver enough juice to fire them with any kind of real usable speed. It would require a whole new class of ship and reactor.

So not really abandoned. Just on sleep till phase 2-new ships to make it practical, from what I read.
 
Brian_B said:
I'd imagine it's trajectory with regard to gravity would be exactly the same as the WW2 shells, and bullets from a gun, and baseballs from a pitching mound - gravity being fairly consistent and all. But I'm not a physics or math guy to back that up.

Battleship cannons, Army artillary, hypersonic rounds, gun bullets - They all travel ballistically - they can certainly go beyond the horizon, and navies/armies have been pretty darn good at doing that for a while. Just a matter of calculating out the arc.
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And one of the primary reasons for the first computers. They were to calculate trajectory based air resistance and charge to find the solution to hit the target.
 
I just wonder what this technology provides that modern navies can't already do between either missiles or artillery.

Maybe it's a cost thing? Each projectile is likely much cheaper than a cruise missile.

Or maybe safety? Carrying less explosive ordinance on board is probably a good thing.

I don't think it really adds anything from a "capability to strike" perspective though...
 
NeghVar said:
What is the range of such a gun? I recall the 16in shells from battleships could go about 25 miles.
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In 2010, the United States Navy tested a BAE Systems-designed compact-sized railgun for ship emplacement that accelerated a 3.2 kg (7 pound) projectile to hypersonic velocities of approximately 2.4 kilometres per second (8,600 km/h), or about Mach 7, with 33-megajoules of kinetic energy. At those speeds the math puts it at over 350km range (220 miles).
 
Lakados said:
In 2010, the United States Navy tested a BAE Systems-designed compact-sized railgun for ship emplacement that accelerated a 3.2 kg (7 pound) projectile to hypersonic velocities of approximately 2.4 kilometres per second (8,600 km/h), or about Mach 7, with 33-megajoules of kinetic energy. At those speeds the math puts it at over 350km range (220 miles).
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0.5 * 3.2 * 2400^2 gets me about 9 megajoules. And as I said before, I've seen no design involving any rotation for stability, at most they get a sabot type round to fire which doesn't really put any rotation, which puts it more in the category of shotgun for range as opposed to sniper rifle if you care at all about accuracy

DigitalGriffin said:
But the real issue for railguns is power delivery. The current design nuclear reactors can't deliver enough juice to fire them with any kind of real usable speed. It would require a whole new class of ship and reactor.
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Some sort of large scale capacitors would be a must I would think. That said, who knows what the charging time would be.
 
Zareek said:
Talk about an overreaction. There is no known defense for artillery shells either; you can harden stationary installations, install some armor but moving around and staying beyond range is your best defense. This type of weapon like any dumb weapon is about targeting and anticipating your targets next move. This is a cannon that fires with higher velocity rounds and doesn't use gunpowder as propellant not a super weapon that can win a war with one shot.
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Artillery shells don't travel at Mach 5 and don't travel hundreds of miles.
 
MrDeaf said:
Well, if I did my math right, a 7800km/h projectile, assuming it doesn't ever lose velocity, will travel 150km in 68.4s.

I don't know if such a projectile can travel along the curvature of the earth to reach its destination when the target is beyond the horizon.
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Computers... they compute stuff.
 
sfsuphysics said:
0.5 * 3.2 * 2400^2 gets me about 9 megajoules. And as I said before, I've seen no design involving any rotation for stability, at most they get a sabot type round to fire which doesn't really put any rotation, which puts it more in the category of shotgun for range as opposed to sniper rifle if you care at all about accuracy

.
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I used to watch the smoothbore cannons on M1A1 tanks firing sabots hit targets dead center from 1200 meters away traveling at 5200 fps.

I'd say they were plenty accurate.
 
atarione said:
china's whole economy is based on figuring out how to build stuff for $1.90 that use to cost $100 to build in America... perhaps they did figure it out?
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That is based on cheaper labor, not design and components.
 
[QUOTE="aaronspink, post: 1043469449, member: 81181"} It is the same reason you don't see any sea skimming supersonic anti-ship missiles...[/QUOTE]

Umm... there are a few super and hyper sonic anti-ship missiles.
 
MrDeaf said:
The railgun does 7800km/h (2167m/s) and what I'm not sure of, is if its trajectory is flatter than the curvature of earth
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I believe your question effectively asks if 2.167 km/s is oribital speed at sea level. ISS orbits some hundreds of km above earth at about 30km/s, a lower orbit would require, if anything, a faster speed than that. So no, at 2.167km/s the bullet will still "fall" to earth along the entire trajectory if shot horizontally.

EDIT: Im dumb. ISS orbits around 30,000 km/hour, not 30km/s. More precisely, it orbits at around 7.6km/s. So above logic still valid.
 
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Zareek said:
Talk about an overreaction. There is no known defense for artillery shells either; you can harden stationary installations, install some armor but moving around and staying beyond range is your best defense. This type of weapon like any dumb weapon is about targeting and anticipating your targets next move. This is a cannon that fires with higher velocity rounds and doesn't use gunpowder as propellant not a super weapon that can win a war with one shot.
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But the extreme velocity means you have an extremely flat trajectory. It means your gun is not an over the horizon weapon system and that's a limitation relative to weapons like anti-ship missiles or long range torpedoes.

Even in WWII, the Japanese Type 92? long lance oxygen fueled torpedo had twice the range of the 8" guns mounted on the same ship. In one of the opening battles of the war, a mixed force of US, UK, Australian, and I think a New Zealand vessel, were steaming along obviously out of gun range of a Japanese force of Cruisers and Destroyers and didn't realize they were actually under attack until Japanese torpedoes began destroying their ships.

Today, extremely long range torpedoes remain a potential weapon for extremely long range attack.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I just wonder what this technology provides that modern navies can't already do between either missiles or artillery.

Maybe it's a cost thing? Each projectile is likely much cheaper than a cruise missile.

Or maybe safety? Carrying less explosive ordinance on board is probably a good thing.

I don't think it really adds anything from a "capability to strike" perspective though...
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One of the main reasons for pursuing weapons like this, is shore bombardment and fire support. If you can equip a railgun with GPS guided projectiles, you can hit targets inland that only missiles or aircraft can reach now. Guided shells cost a fraction of a cruise missile, you can fire over 100 guided rounds for the cost of a single Tomahawk Land Attack missile. and each one of the rounds, unlike conventional Naval gunfire will hit within 10 meters of the target from over 100 miles away.

Aircraft are very vulnerable to modern air defenses. Missiles are expensive. Rapid fire long range railgun fire can land Time on Target salvos able to saturate enemy air defenses with low risk to aircrews
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I just wonder what this technology provides that modern navies can't already do between either missiles or artillery.

Maybe it's a cost thing? Each projectile is likely much cheaper than a cruise missile.

Or maybe safety? Carrying less explosive ordinance on board is probably a good thing.

I don't think it really adds anything from a "capability to strike" perspective though...
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We don't have any modern battleships in use today, the largest guns these days are like 6", maybe 8" guns like on WW2 Cruisers. Of course they are a far more modernized version, but they are not equivalent in power and range to the old BB guns. Missiles require targeting and guidance and are subject to counter measures and their travel time to target don't compare to hyper-sonic projectiles like from a rail gun. In cold war times, anti-ship missile defenses were already mature enough that navies developed mass missile attacks the idea being that if I attack with 60 missiles, you might shoot down 50, but 10 will get through.

But with any weapons technology, you really don't know what you can make of it until you give it a real try. What's more, sometimes while exploring one technology, you discover others you never thought of and sometimes those are real jewels.
 
motomonkey said:
One of the main reasons for pursuing weapons like this, is shore bombardment and fire support. If you can equip a railgun with GPS guided projectiles, you can hit targets inland that only missiles or aircraft can reach now. Guided shells cost a fraction of a cruise missile, you can fire over 100 guided rounds for the cost of a single Tomahawk Land Attack missile. and each one of the rounds, unlike conventional Naval gunfire will hit within 10 meters of the target from over 100 miles away.

Aircraft are very vulnerable to modern air defenses. Missiles are expensive. Rapid fire long range railgun fire can land Time on Target salvos able to saturate enemy air defenses with low risk to aircrews
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I think your overestimating how reliable railguns are, we are no were near rapid fire railguns, US testing has shown that the rails (barrel) needs replacing about every 3 shots, and the weapon itself falls apart after tens of shots. Though one Admiral in 2014 claimed they had increased the weapon reliability to 400 shots, but no confirmation from ONR was ever issued.

At this time it seems that the US navy has abandoned railguns due to power requirements and degradation.

https://www.naval-technology.com/comment/railgun-potentially-cancelled-went-wrong-us-superweapon/
 
motomonkey said:
I used to watch the smoothbore cannons on M1A1 tanks firing sabots hit targets dead center from 1200 meters away traveling at 5200 fps.

I'd say they were plenty accurate.
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Someone here at work thought that they had problems stabilizing the projectiles. I can see them "leaving the rail" a little off and correcting stability in flight, but yea, at really long ranges that translates to a miss.
 
lcpiper said:
Someone here at work thought that they had problems stabilizing the projectiles. I can see them "leaving the rail" a little off and correcting stability in flight, but yea, at really long ranges that translates to a miss.
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I can see that. Battleship engagements in WW2 took weeks due to the nature of hitting a moving target on a moving surface over about 20 mile range. Yes computers make some of that easier but I doubt they are completely accurate.

I'd think the real problem with railguns is a combination of the difficulty to make them work, the fact that ballistic ordnance is mainly effective against stationary targets, and ultimately having the ability to threaten more targets across a broader spectrum of battlefields is better than having specific use weapons and thus specific use units.
 
lcpiper said:
Someone here at work thought that they had problems stabilizing the projectiles. I can see them "leaving the rail" a little off and correcting stability in flight, but yea, at really long ranges that translates to a miss.
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sfsuphysics said:
Yes but 1.2 km is a tad closer than 350 km
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All that is necessary is sufficient accuracy to keep a guided projectile "in the basket" of where it can guide itself to the target. No one is seriously considering using unguided projectiles in these weapon systems. at the ranges that are being considered your CEP for an unguided projectile will be measured in kilometers, not meters. in other words, aim at a bunker 200 km away, and hit somewhere within a 1000 meter circle around the bunker.


Aireoth said:
I think your overestimating how reliable railguns are, we are no were near rapid fire railguns, US testing has shown that the rails (barrel) needs replacing about every 3 shots, and the weapon itself falls apart after tens of shots. Though one Admiral in 2014 claimed they had increased the weapon reliability to 400 shots, but no confirmation from ONR was ever issued.

At this time it seems that the US navy has abandoned railguns due to power requirements and degradation.
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I never mentioned how reliable they are now, only how potentially useful they are, and why the technology is worth pursuing.

The Navy has been looking for a way to boost its fire support capabilities, and the Railgun was at the top of the list for promising technologies.

The Rail gun project was originally slated to be deployed on the DDX class ships, they were build from the ground up to have the necessary electrical power generation requirements. when the DDX program went off the rails, and the Rail gun program didn't pan out the remaining ships in the class, USS Zumwalt and 2 others, were being armed with the Advanced gun system, a 62 caliber 155mm water cooled gun that can fire up to 83 nm. Unfortunately that program is being canceled as being to expensive on a per shot basis (Up to $1 million per round!) Modifying the gun system to use the Army's 155mm family of guided ammunition is expected to be expensive, around $250 million but the cost savings per round are immense. The Army has deployed a "budget" 155mm guidance kit (M1156 PGK) that replaces the fuses on normal cheap 155mm ammunition and gives it GPS guidance capability for less than $10000 each. it's not as accurate as the Excaliber round, at $70000 each, that the navy is considering as the replacement round.
 
Apparently their current range testing for the US rail gun is averaging 10 rounds per minute, at just over 100 miles with a 10" MOA, so that is pretty dammed accurate, granted that is from a fixed firing platform but that part is also being improved on a regular basis.

Edit: changed the word stable to fixed in describing the firing platform as it is a more accurate description
 
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lcpiper said:
Someone here at work thought that they had problems stabilizing the projectiles. I can see them "leaving the rail" a little off and correcting stability in flight, but yea, at really long ranges that translates to a miss.
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Both fin and spin stabilized projectiles have what appears to be instability/upset on leaving the barrel but actually isn't. You can see this in standard rifles with ultra high speed video.

Gasaraki_ said:
[QUOTE="aaronspink, post: 1043469449, member: 81181"} It is the same reason you don't see any sea skimming supersonic anti-ship missiles...
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Umm... there are a few super and hyper sonic anti-ship missiles.[/QUOTE]

But those aren't actually sea skimming which was exactly what I said.
 
sfsuphysics said:
0.5 * 3.2 * 2400^2 gets me about 9 megajoules. And as I said before, I've seen no design involving any rotation for stability, at most they get a sabot type round to fire which doesn't really put any rotation, which puts it more in the category of shotgun for range as opposed to sniper rifle if you care at all about accuracy
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They are fin stabilized like all other high speed projectiles.

sfsuphysics said:
I would think reentering the atmosphere would also rob it of energy, first it's going to lose energy going up both atmospheric drag and gravitational potential energy to go 50+ miles up, then the slower bullet will now lose more energy going down into the atmosphere, and unless they have some sort of spinning mechanism (which to date, I thought all rail guns were simple slugs) the accuracy would be fairly poor as the slug tumbles through the air
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They rather quickly hit the upper atmosphere where they have significantly less air resistance and the great thing about gravity is that it is a net zero (what goes up must come down).
 
MrDeaf said:
I do know that, but WW2 shells traveled at around around 762m/s - 1000m/s and could be lobbed over the horizon.

The railgun does 7800km/h (2167m/s) and what I'm not sure of, is if its trajectory is flatter than the curvature of earth
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Escape velocity is 11.2 km/s. The railgun is not even reaching 20% of escape velocity.

BloodDonor said:
Only takes a few well placed shots to cause serious damage to a carrier... you dont have to be good, just lucky
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The US Navy knows how important their carriers are, and any attack will have to go through multiple destroyers and cruisers to successfully hit a carrier. Remember, a carrier does not need to get close to the action, and neither does its fleet.
 
does that mean the USA will just wait till the Chinese perfect it then outsource their gun manufacturing to China?
 
aaronspink said:
Both fin and spin stabilized projectiles have what appears to be instability/upset on leaving the barrel but actually isn't. You can see this in standard rifles with ultra high speed video.



Umm... there are a few super and hyper sonic anti-ship missiles.
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But those aren't actually sea skimming which was exactly what I said.[/QUOTE]

Are you forgetting about the AGM/RGM/UGM-83 Harpoon? What about the Frenchies' Exocet? It travels 1-2M (yes meters) above the sea to stay under the Radar Horizon. I have played 1000s of hours of Janes ATF back in the day and I loved modding the B-2 to carry the Exocet and using it to destroy carrier groups.

On topic, the railgun concept is intriguing if the power requirements can be figured out. I always envisioned them being mounted in a pair on some large battleship sized vessel, since the cooling and electrical requirements are so high.
 
ccityinstaller said:
Are you forgetting about the AGM/RGM/UGM-83 Harpoon? What about the Frenchies' Exocet? It travels 1-2M (yes meters) above the sea to stay under the Radar Horizon. I have played 1000s of hours of Janes ATF back in the day and I loved modding the B-2 to carry the Exocet and using it to destroy carrier groups.

On topic, the railgun concept is intriguing if the power requirements can be figured out. I always envisioned them being mounted in a pair on some large battleship sized vessel, since the cooling and electrical requirements are so high.
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Harpoon is subsonic. Exocet is subsonic. Basically physics lets you choose: sea skimming OR supersonic.

Power requirements haven't really ever been an issue with railguns (a single LM2500 or MT30 provides more than sufficient power). We have multiple ways to get the required power, not exactly rocket science. Endurance and rate of fire have always been the real issues.
 
Lakados said:
Apparently their current range testing for the US rail gun is averaging 10 rounds per minute, at just over 100 miles with a 10" MOA, so that is pretty dammed accurate, granted that is from a fixed firing platform but that part is also being improved on a regular basis.

Edit: changed the word stable to fixed in describing the firing platform as it is a more accurate description
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10 minute of angle (MOA) at 100 miles equals a CEP of roughly 5 kilometers. 1 MOA is roughly equal to 1 inch at 100 yards, 10 MOA is 10 inches at 100 yards. this is why you need guided projectiles.
 
spacecowboy863 said:
yes because we're tired of seeing democrats taking it up the rear end. wth does this have anything to do w/ politics?
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Well lets see, there's this recent thing going on right now where there's a stalemate with the budget, and ummm one of the big sticking points (one of many I'm sure) is that the republicans want to increase spending in the military, now you see here comes this story about a foreign military with a "workable" "high tech" weapon platform.... so ummm my comment is less about politics and more of a topical joke/comment.

Where as your comment "hur dur! Democrats taking it up the ass!!! HA HUR!" actually is "political" in nature.
 
Tsumi said:
Escape velocity is 11.2 km/s. The railgun is not even reaching 20% of escape velocity.



The US Navy knows how important their carriers are, and any attack will have to go through multiple destroyers and cruisers to successfully hit a carrier. Remember, a carrier does not need to get close to the action, and neither does its fleet.
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Don't remember the battle of Midway do ya?
 
atarione said:
china's whole economy is based on figuring out how to build stuff for $1.90 that use to cost $100 to build in America... perhaps they did figure it out?
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There are only so many things slave labor and US & China government subsidies can make $1.90. High tech rail guns are not one of them.
 
Tsumi said:
You don't think we have learned and technology has advanced in the last 60 years do you?
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Even though there's sonobouys, radar, sonar, and satellite tracking, it's still easy to lose a ship. That's especially true if it's a sub.

Nothing worse then getting caught with your pants down.
 
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