Navy Cannons That Do Not Use Gun Powder?

Back in the 80's a rail gun was good for a couple of shots. The electrical rails were eaten up due to high temperature and high currents.

When you push things up the speeds they want, you can send a pencil eraser through armor plate.
 
Willie, I thought it was stated to be a rail gun, but I could be wrong. Been too long since I saw that particular show.
 
I was just wondering, what would happen if the power went out? No offense to the designer of the electric machine gun but a 20mm cannon from WWII (any of them) looks positively svelte in comparison.
 
Me and a guy at work were just talking about this actually... Reminds me of the rail driver from the game Red Faction (if anyone here also video games a bit) except blown up about 20X it's size... So awesome it hurts...
 
CA DNR already bans the use of energy weapons in hunting... Do you think they knew about this before it was declassified?
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Not sure what would have been classified here. The original idea for the railgun goes back at least to Louis Villeplee's electric cannon idea in 1918... and has been revisited by many over the years, including the Nazis and a couple others. As far as CA banning it - what haven't they banned? They are probably just being proactive... if you get the law out in front of the technology, there's no period of gray area as the new technologies become available.
 
back in the 90s there was an arnold movie called the erasor where good ole arney had to fight off a bunch of guys who had shoulder fired rail guns, funny that in the 90s they expected these guns to be on every ship in the navy by 2000 and they are still considered experimental and not even common knowledge that they even exist. it's a sound design for big guns and they are even experimenting on aircraft catapults using the same design. the principle has been used on public shuttle trams for years, just high powered magnets and very precise material composition.
 
the principle has been used on public shuttle trams for years
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Quite right. The biggest difference is speed. Trams certainly do not need to acheive the speed a rail gun needs. One of the biggest factors in making the rail gun technology impractical for hand held use is the lenght of the rails. Getting a projectile up to the required speed before it leaves the weapon requires a fairly long track, which is one of the reasons for the current focus on warships - they can accomodate the necessary size of the weapon.
 
OK, I got lost by something really simple - I thought a Gauss gun and a rail gun were either the same or similar, someone clue me on what I missed?
 
Here's the Wiki entry for a Gauss gun, complete with useful animation.

With a railgun, an electrical current is passed from one rail, through the projectile itself (or a 'sled' that the projectile rides in), and then into the other rail. The current sets up a magnetic field around the rails that acts on the projectile. Since the projectile has a current passing through it, this magnetic field acts to push the projectile away, launching it.
 
that's interesting, I had always thought that guass rifles and rail guns werethe same as well, I guess I learned something new today. makes me feel better that my comments weren't complete jibberish due to ignorance :D
 
Does anyone really not expect technology to advance that much in 30-40 years? Let's take a look at a few things. Smokeless powder was invented in 1884, heavier than air flight in 1903 (along with the beloved Springfield rifle), the Nazi's had jet aircraft at the end of WW II, the UNIVAC computer in 1950, and Al Gore invented the internet right after that... Look at the pace of advancement in computing power and miniaturization. I don't know if we'll be around to see it or not, but unless Christ returns or we destroy ourselves as a planet I don't see why it isn't at least possible that man-portable energy weapons may be developed within a few decades.

Phased plasma rifle in 40 watt range, anyone?
 
Does anyone really not expect technology to advance that much in 30-40 years? Let's take a look at a few things. Smokeless powder was invented in 1884, heavier than air flight in 1903 (along with the beloved Springfield rifle), the Nazi's had jet aircraft at the end of WW II, the UNIVAC computer in 1950, and Al Gore invented the internet right after that... Look at the pace of advancement in computing power and miniaturization. I don't know if we'll be around to see it or not, but unless Christ returns or we destroy ourselves as a planet I don't see why it isn't at least possible that man-portable energy weapons may be developed within a few decades.

Phased plasma rifle in 40 watt range, anyone?
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a lot of this technology has been around since WWII and earlier. if it was going to be a huge technological craze, it would have hit it's apex by Korea or Vietnam. even if the whole energy weapon thing were to take off, how many lithium ion batteries do you think it would take to make that phased plasma rifle lethal instead of giving the guy with an antique AK47 a mild sunburn? unless they can find a way to shrink the average battery down to a 1000th of their current size I would forsee the first energy weapons requiring a 50lb backpack full of batteries in order to operate and that's optimistic.

also that phased plasma rifle with 40 watt range was supposed to be invented by 1998, along with flying cars, mind control, and teleportation.
 
Grabbed that from here, electric-machine-gun [blog.modernmechanix.com]

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.
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rburch, I see you found Virgil Rigsby's pet project. He was a Texan who was trying to find interested buyers for his design in 1936 when he brought it to Dallas for the Texas State Fair.

The gun was suggested for a vehicle mounted platform or guard emplacement. Apparently the US was not too interested in it. At the time, his most likely clients were, get this, the Japanese according to a Dallas newspaper at the time. Imagine if dury WWII that the Axis powers used Rigsby's guns to protect their beaches from invasion. Fortunately, if they did buy the design, they never implemented it.

http://thefiringline.com//forums/showthread.php?t=284127&highlight=rail+gun
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/qf/c/ModernMechanix/9-1934/med_rail_gun.jpg
 
Friend of mine, and electrical engineer, has said that the ONLY thing that is going to make the gauss and rail guns light weight and portable practical will be room-temperature (relatively speaking) super conductors.

Otherwise, the power requirements will simply be, and remain, too huge.
 
I had read somewhere years ago that the army used pneumatic dynamite field guns in the Spanish American war but I hadn't heard of the USS Vesuvius until this thread. Then this morning I was looking through a pile of old magazines (this family never throws anything away!) and ran across an article about it.

The magazine was St. Nicholas magazine, June 1893.

The weapons were referred to, accurately I suppose, as air-guns. The projectiles were called darts and they were in different forms. Apparently the air-guns were entirely below the deck and were not moveable. There were three such guns and from the looks of the illustration, there were no other guns on the ship, which was described as a "torpedo cruiser." Torpedo boats were all the rage at the time and larger ones (destroyers) were thought to spell the end of the big battleship, which was only coming into use. The range was reported to be a mile and a half, not that far as naval guns go, but the explosive charge was 500-pounds.

I thought it was funny when the article said "it will not always be the object of the air-gunners, however, to destroy a vessel completely, for it is often more desirable to disable a vellel and to capture her and her crew."
 
Then this morning I was looking through a pile of old magazines (this family never throws anything away!) and ran across an article about it.

The magazine was St. Nicholas magazine, June 1893.
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Wow - and I thought I had some "pack rats" in MY family!!
 
I am sure at some point some bell makers were sitting around talking about the newfound technology of cannons and someone said 'Someday every soldier will carry a small one of these into battle,' and all the other bell makers laughed. They probably told him it was foolish to think one could be made without something much stronger than bronze as the weight required in a bronze gun was prohibitive and such technology was decades or centuries away. 100 years later or so shoulder fired rifles and even some handguns were in limited use. A trained archer was could still out do a rifleman for about 400 years, but they started to pop up. I would say technology improves faster these days.
 
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