Navy Tests 32-Megajoule Railgun

I'm no expert but it you pause the clip there is flame coming from the back of the projectile that looks like a rocket flame. you can only see it when the orange flame is gone

"Black holes are where god divided by zero"

even at the final operating speed of 28800000 Feet = 5454.72000 Miles per hour there is no reason for stone to burst into flame on impact. I am not an engineer or scientist how ever and could be wrong; but whole footage seems fishy to me.

"whole footage seems fishy to me"- 32 megajoules, 200 miles
Anyone who thinks that releasing that much energy isn't going to result in excess heat being released (ie stuff burning) either needs to go back to physics class or do a Wikipedia search on entropy. Air at that speed would burn most anything.

ok.... apparently no one here knows that much about the atmosphere... space shuttles use a heat shield so they dont burn up on reentry the arne moving nearly as fast as the projectile in this story and they are moving through a much thinner atmosphere at hugh altitude.... if the projectile WASN'T burning up would be the only reason to speculate

I don't really care what caused it. But...
Fire...
=D

--
LOL, Limewire
Seth the Giant

So how's about that huge EMP from the weapon firing? Seems like a waste of power considering the potential weight issues for sheilding that might be better spent loading conventional weapons aboard the ship.

waste of what power? a bank of those would have like a .. nuclear power plant each. hmm new battleships anyone? 2 banks,3guns...2nuclear powerplants and you have a modern yamato....

What's a waste of power is the chemical propellant stored in the casings of idle artillery shells in conventional big guns, and this is the primary reason they have been phased out in favor of smaller, high-velocity gunds (see modern Destroyer's and the mothballing of the fire-support fleet of Battleships and Cruisers).

A conventional piece of artillery with an output comparable to this railgun (rated 32MJ) would require a massive artillery piece firing equally massive projectiles. Even the greatest big guns ever put to see ( the 400,000 pound Mark 7 16" guns) only put out about 20MJ of energy at the muzzle. This is a tremendous amount, to be sure, and it is compounded by the potential energy of the large volume of TNT stored in the 2,700 pound shell. Nonetheless, this railgun can accomplish a greater muzzle energy, a greater precision, a shorter time-on-target, a faster reload, and with an INFINITELY SMALLER LOGISTICAL FOOTPRINT. These things are extremely more practical. And let us remember that the Iowa class hit the "law of exponentials" practical energy barrier; increasing the size of the guns and destructive potential of its shells further required increasingly large volume investments for diminishing explosive returns. The Japanese Yamamoto-class super battleship had only a marginally more energetic main gun (approximately 5-10 percent increase) for a 25% increase in mass.

This is the future of warfare. It will make armor obsolete; tomorrow it will be all about speed, stealth, and accuracy. He who fires first will win. Big ships are a liability and a poor investment. The aircraft carrier, the last of the big ships, will need to be superbly well protected by standoff weapons (destroyers mounting their own railguns and long-rang missiles), high stealth, and great speed if they are to remain competitive.

If it's going so fast, how did they videorecord it and still have it look so good?

I seem to remember that Popular Science has run articles before on the rail gun. Mid 1980's, spoke of speeds of 8 miles per second. So, 8000 feet per second seems rather slow. My (Old Now) memory says that 7 miles per second for a 30 pound object is equal to escape velocity. With the advent of the radio shack model 3 computer, it was possible to control a switching mech quick enough to pull push a ball point pen (they were metal those days) to an interesting velocity. Enough to get it through a pine 2 x 4. I would have thought a modern projectile would be a plastic, boron fiber?

think of the horror of having shells fired at you and cant see a ship in sight

i love it

Thanks
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At the "alleged" speed there would be no fire, just Plasma like the shuttle. Those flames are not caused by friction. As you can clearly see the flames are expanding almost as fast as the projectile. So the projectile is not going anywhere near as fast as they claim. This appears to be yet another example of a private contractor bilking the military out of our tax money.

Bring on the nuclear powered battleship with a bank of these!

the 32 Megajoule gun is only half power, can't wait till the full size ones are on a new class of ship. Hope no one has it in their mind to attack us when we have these. Just lower the guns and fire, although my question is, any recoil?

Proud Sailor of the USN