The US Navy reinvents itself and weapons to

From The Belmont Club

Another great article by the Belmont Club.

Here is a sample but be sure to read the entire article.

The notional problem was to project the fleet's firepower hundreds of miles inland on a 24x7 basis and to make it available at a few minute's notice. Part of the solution was to bring extra-long range manned and unmanned aerial strike assets into the Navy's inventory. The other was to reinvent, almost exactly a century later, the 21st century equivalent of the HMS Dreadnought. The electromagnetic rail gun [PDF file] which is being developed for employment in the Navy's next class of destroyers, the DDX, allows the entire ship's power output to be directed into an acceleration device which will shoot a projectile at anywhere from Mach 7 to Mach 16 clear out of the earth's atmosphere onto targets hundreds of miles away. They will be devastating.

To put things in perspective, our current 5-inch gun has a muzzle energy of 10 megajoules. ... In contrast, naval rail guns will achieve muzzle energies from 60 to 300 megajoules. ... Research indicates that a notional first-generation naval rail gun could deliver a guided projectile with an impact velocity of Mach 5 to targets at ranges of 250 miles at a rate of greater than six rounds per minute.

... An important advantage of rail guns is the ability to exploit the high kinetic energy stored in the projectile ... One test demonstrated that the release of the rail gun projectile's kinetic energy alone would create a 10-foot crater, 10 feet deep in solid ground, and achieve projectile penetration to 40 feet.

Since the shells will be solid darts, a destroyer will carry 10,000 rounds in its current magazine space, without ever again facing the danger of a powder explosion. The DDX, in common with the other new generation USN vessels, will be all-electric warships running an Integrated Power System (IPS) that will enable the ships captain to transfer the entire energy output of the vessel at need, to defensive lasers, propulsion or to offensive darts which will eventually range out to thousands of miles. If the new carriers (CVX) will provide the remote sensors, the manned and unmanned attack aircraft to range over the enemy, the new dreadnoughts can provide a rain of kinetic darts. Unlike aircraft which must be held ready on deck or prepared for flight, the rail guns can fire at very short notice.

A first-order analysis comparing the 200-mile volume of fires capability of a single hypersonic naval rail gun to the ordnance delivery capacity of a carrier air wing of F/A-18s is instructive. In the first eight hours of conflict, a single naval rail gun could deliver twice the payload, three times the energy, to ten times as many fixed aim points as carrier aviation.

One word - awesome!
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