'Velocitas Eradico’ sounds like sort of think Harry Potter might say
when fighting Voldemort which would be quite apt as the translation of
'Velocitas Eradico’ is quickly get rid or in the vernacular speed kills and is
the motto for the no less futuristic US Navy electromagnetic railgun project. Now
before we set the comments on fire about the Latin it seems that ‘Velocitas Eradicat’
would be a better translation of speed kills but I'll leave it to you
latin scholars out there to let me know in the comments. So back to the
railgun now some might be saying why do we need a new gun we have precision
guided missiles that can travel thousands of kilometers and the massive
16 of 18 inch guns used in the world war ii class battleships have been made
almost obsolete by the aforementioned missiles and the rest can be taken care
of by aircraft. In world war ii the weaponry was cheap and easy to make. Tens
of thousands of planes and tanks and millions of bombs and shells were
produced. The U.S. won the war because they could out manufacture the Germans
and the Japanese whilst keeping their manufacturing base safe. Modern warfare
is now about keeping the action at arm's length whilst keeping troops off the
ground where possible. Carpet bombing and massive artillery bombardments of large
areas doesn't always produce victories as was seen in Vietnam. Today precision
weapons reduce collateral damage but remote control drones, high-tech planes
and guided missiles are not only extremely expensive to buy but also to
develop in the first place. The US has a stockpile of around about 3,500 cruise
missiles at about $800,000 each and these can't be mass-produced by the
old style shells the same also applies to things like new planes but at much
higher costs. As a way to provide a lower cost fire support with less reliance on
air power or expensive missiles the US Navy was looking for a way of firing
hundreds or thousands of low-cost guided ordinance reaching up
to 200 miles or 320 kilometers from the beach on to thousands of targets a day.
Conventional large naval guns are limited by the rate of gas expansion
from the explosive used to propel the projectile giving them a range of around
45 kilometers but with muzzle velocities of around 800 meters per second. A
kinetic tank round has a muzzle velocity of up to 1,900 meters per second but has
a range of only a few kilometers. The goal of a railgun is to deliver a guided
projectile which is currently kinetic but could be explosive in the future at
around 2500 meters per second at up to 200 miles or 320 kilometers or over
current technology for range is around 120 kilometers. The current generation of
electromagnetic railguns can accelerate a 10 kilogram projectile from 0 to more
than mach 6 in just 10 milliseconds emerging from a barrel in a plume of fire
these are as close as you can get to man-made meteorites raining down on
enemy targets far beyond the horizon. Railguns might appear to be futuristic
weapons but the idea first appeared almost a hundred years ago when the
French inventorLouis Octave Fauchon-Villeplee submitted a
patent for 'Electrical apparatus for propelling projectiles' in 1919. By 1944
the Nazis had drawn up more advanced plans for an anti-aircraft railgun that
would use as much power as a large city that was however never built but it
caused a great deal of interest when the plans were discovered after the war. The
railgun works because of the Lorentz force discovered by engineers and
mathematicians in the 19th century and named after the Dutch Nobel Prize
winning physicist. The physics behind the railgun is simple enough to be
demonstrated by a home-built railgun. Two parallel electrically conductive rails
are connected to a large power source. one rail has positive
charge the other out a negative charge. To fire the gun
a moving armature or bridge connects the two completing the circuit this armature
can be either a metal projector or a thin film on the back of a nonmetallic
shell that carries the current across a plasma arc. When the electrical energy
travels through the circuit a very strong magnetic field is created and
pushes a projectile down the barrel. In the video the squarish looking object
being loaded into the gun is the sabot with the moving armature and the
projectile is placed inside that. When the Sabot exits the barrel it breaks
apart leaving the projectile which has been accelerated to around 2,500m/s.
The amount of electrical power discharged
during a firing is around five million amps at 1200 volts for about five
milliseconds which works out that around 30 megajoules of power. In theory this
force is scalable and could allow for an on-demand almost limitless acceleration
but in early railgun prototypes for forces was so great but it caused the
rails to move apart creating intense plasma arcing and friction that
destroyed the rails and the barrel making repairs necessary after every
shot. Engineers have continued to work on the technology and the electromagnetic
weaponry and propulsion are looking more and more attractive. For the same reason
laser weapons have also seen significant investment in the recent decades
famously as a way to shoot down incoming ICBMs. A high-power railgun could do the
same job and so in 2005 the American Office for Naval Research or ONR
contracted BAE Systems to produce a prototype. The electromagnetic laboratory
railgun was the result. It uses a 25 megawatt power plant enough to power
almost 19,000 homes to create policies of capacitor based power Phase two of BAE's
contract began in 2012 working towards a railgun with a repeat fire
capability to achieve this BAE's barrel design uses advanced materials to resist
ablation and fire five rounds per minute.
The range of a weapon will be around 125 miles or 200 kilometers firing at speeds
of up to 5,600 miles an hour at 9,000 km/h with high accuracy. Firing this rate
the total power of a weapon will be 32 mega joules of muzzle energy per minute
to achieve the 200 mile or 320 kilometer range the energy required will be around
64 mega joules but as yet there aren't the high-power capacitors or materials
available to survive the multiple firings per minute but this one
undoubtedly be developed as time goes by. Currently only the Zumwalt-class
destroyers of the US Navy were there 78 megawatts of power have enough capacity
to power over 32 Mega Joule rail guns but other ships are looking at being
upgraded. General Atomics have also produced a
version called the Blitzer which is looking to make both land and ship based.
Land bombardments aren't the only use for Navy is looking at because the speed
of a projectile is so high it could intercept an incoming supersonic
anti-ship cruise missile at a distance much farther away than relying upon
traditional anti-missile systems or phalanx guns. This ability could also be
used against planes or even ballistic missiles by having a proximity exploding
projectile it doesn't have to score a direct hit it explodes just before
interception to create a cloud of hypersonic shrapnel to hit a much larger
target area. Another advantage is that the rail guns projectiles are compact a
ship could hold enough to carry out more Shore bombardments than an aircraft
carrier full of planes. With compact ammunition the practical scale of a
railgun weapon becomes more viable and on extended operations gives it a huge
advantage in firepower. Another advantage of kinetic weapons without warheads is
that if the ship were to be hit there is much less chance of a catastrophic ammo
explosion like those which destroyed ships in the past like HMS hood and the
HMS barham. In the future rail guns might be miniaturized
and find their way onto tanks and aircraft but as a ground-based platform
there are non-military uses that could accelerate the development of a useful
working railguns at NASA's Applied Physics Laboratory at the Kennedy Space
Center studies investigating using electromagnetic propulsion to accelerate
a wedge-shaped spacecraft and mac-10 on a trajectory high into the atmosphere.
Then the spacecraft onboard potion would engage to circularise delivering a
payload into orbit for a fraction of a cost of a traditional launch. NASA has a
significant body of existing technology to draw on such as the x43 or the X51
scramjet power vehicles which have been shown to work in the real world.
Whether for peaceful or destructive applications the investment in rail gun
technology is likely to make its way from science fiction into practical use
in the next decade or so without a doubt these machines will put on a spectacular
show as they accelerate into an electrified future. So thanks watching
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