Navy Cannons That Do Not Use Gun Powder?

You're kidding right? :confused:

Why would they put an E.M. driven set up in an AR platform? Where do you think they would be putting the power packs?
 
CA DNR already bans the use of energy weapons in hunting... Do you think they knew about this before it was declassified?
 
Declassified? This has been an on going project for years and years, with new footage coming out now and again.

Phased plasma rifle in 40 watt range
Click to expand...
That quote still drives me nuts :p Yes, a plasma rifle that is less powerful than a standard light bulb...

Not sure why we're thinking about a handheld version, since they can't even get a ship to hold the necessary power requirements yet...
 
I'm not holding out any great hopes for a man-portable EM rifle in the next few decades. I was a physics student at the Naval Postgraduate School from 2007-2009. We had a railgun in the basement of Spanagel Hall, and the setup involved probably a thousand pounds of capacitors and wiring, and the projectile that the gun fired had about the equivalent "muzzle" energy of a .50 BMG round.

Much like gasoline, it's pretty hard to beat plain old gunpowder for energy density.
 
ScottRiqui said:
I'm not holding out any great hopes for a man-portable EM rifle in the next few decades.
Click to expand...

If you look at technology evolutions historically, and a few high profile technology revolutions, I wouldn't discount what could be done in 3-4 decades.

The largest capacitor I remember seeing that would fit in a tea cup ~ 1980 was 50-100K uFarads. You can find 100X + that energy density today. For a man-portable weapon in 3 or 4 decades, the primary payload may not be kinetic energy based but potential energy based, ala 'photon torpedo', phaser, maser or laser. The energy density (volumetrically or mass wise) of a laser or photon torpedo is many orders of magnitude greater than that of gasoline or gun powder.
 
Last edited:
The one most important advance needed to make energy weapons realistic is a good room temp. superconductor. w/o it, you won't beable to store enough energy to make it man port. let alone small vehicle port.

Even with the advances in lasers, we haven't got a 100 kw solid state job yet. You should see what the set up in the ABL (YAL-1) looks like. That only gets you about 20 shots.
 
In the Spanish-American War the Navy had the USS Vesuviius, a "dynamite gun" cruiser. It had limited range but the pneumatic guns were almost silent and had no muzzle flash.
 
From time to time the Military Channel has shown some rail-gun testing at Fort Huachuca. Tank-mounted, IIRC, but definitely in a self-propelled rig. I vaguely recall muzzle velocities around 5,000 to 6,000 ft/sec.
 
One of the guys I used to work with was a satellite kind of guy who had worked for the Navy.

Years ago they wanted to know what would happen to a satellite during a high speed, low mass collision (say, a bolt hitting a 3 ton sat at 18,000 miles per hour).

So, they got a sat that had never gone up, got an object of the mass they wanted, and used a rail gun to launch it.

He showed me the high speed film and a few of the "after" stills.

Pretty freaking spectacular. :)
 
Mike, that's what the TASER acronym means, Tom Swift Electric Rifle.

Could be an interesting weapon for land and sea. Definitely an interesting choice for anti missile and anti satellite...
 
Give me a good old

175mm gun - 52 lbs of powder, 147 lb projectile (Spire point, boat tail), to a range of about 20 miles (depending on rotation of the earth, weather data (met), Target above/below gun position, etc., etc., etc.

Problems: Burns out barrels after about 3,000 rounds.
Prone to burst barrels unexpectedly (prior to reaching full service life of barrel.
Range probable error in excess of 100 meters at max range
Slow rate of fire (one round per minute for first (cold tube) 5 rounds, then one round per 3 minutes (IIRC).
Sonic boom, combined with muzzle blast, hard on the ears, even with protection.
 
lrg_electric_machine_gun.jpg


Grabbed that from here, electric-machine-gun

Seems they were playing with smaller designs in the 1930s, but the power generation problems made it not worth the efforts.

So if you have access to a good generator and extension cords, you could probably make an AR upper.

Not sure why you'd bother though.
 
That just has to be from Popular Mechanics.

I remember an issue featuring one-man helicopters with the riders being compared to the old horse cavalry (less than ten years earlier). They were shown flying over North Korean gun emplacements dropping grenades.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top