Comments on: Look Out, Pyongyang? Rail Gun in the Works

By: Fredricksburg

Fredricksburg — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 23:27:17 +0000

Not even the distant marches of our home could mask a terror like this for long. I’m afraid even of your brief comment here in this obscure little media, ages from the humanity you have seen. Remember Oppenheimer. Learn from what demons you have already created. Do not bring them with you. There is violence enough among the stars, and anyway they are not fitting dreams of such mysterious children.

By: James M. Essig

James M. Essig — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 04:24:17 +0000

A really interesting ultimate kind of rail gun would entail a system capable of accelerating charged particles to an energy at which they would become black holes based on the particle

By: Barton Foley

Barton Foley — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:07:07 +0000

Use of now retired battleships has come up a few times below.. I went through and figured some basic costs on it. Pretty interesting: Refitting the USS Missouri, for example, with suitable equipment to be an effective rail platform [nuclear plants, necessary electronic suite, native defensive systems, and three large turret systems] came out to somewhere in the range of $2 billion dollars. With systems bloat and the turret design figured an actual project would probably exceed $3 billion. Worth it? This is the United States Navy were talking about; you bet your ass.
With several Iowa class boats being maintained in decent condition we could theoretically have 3 or 4 very large rail equipped battleships in service late 20’s or early 30’s for $20 — $40 billion. As for the cost effectiveness; as stated below the R&d is the major outlay and is already attached to other projects. With maintained hulls readily available, I think the return on investment would be very high and very secure, especially since these old boats were designed to take a major pounding by extremely heavy ordinance.
Speaking of that, not included in the cost is a servicing or possible refit of the various armor belts. It might be worth the expense if a next generation weapon system were mounted, but I have no idea what the actual work would entail.
Drawbacks would be antiquated hull design [though I think it was fast for its day], general age of core systems [B-52] and massive crewing requirements. Also, we’d have to retrain everyone on proper maintenance of a beautiful and historic wooden deck.
Silly idea; one can dream. If me and five or six hundred friends win the lottery, you now know where the money will go.

By: James M. Essig

James M. Essig — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:24:44 +0000

Hi LtSmith 82nd;
That is an interesting conjecture considering that even non-classified public daily newspapers often made reference to the brilliant pebbles concepts. Once the hardware were to be fully designed, assembled, and lofted into orbit, I can see that such a program could be very cost effective for the defensive purposes it would serve.
Regards;
Jim

By: LtSmith 82nd.

LtSmith 82nd. — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:38:26 +0000

I would not be so surprised to find the US Military in contoll of such kinetic weapons on platforms in orbit already. The brilliant pebbbles program was in progudtion in the mid 80’s, and has not since been heard from. So what are the odds?? Pretty good. Have we used them??? thats a good question.

By: noodle

noodle — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:44:19 +0000

Rail guns? I don’t think Amtrak should posses offensive weapons.

By: James M. Essig

James M. Essig — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:27:05 +0000

Hi Jim;
Thanks for the info on re-entry weapons with impact velocities of 6.5 km second. Also, it never occurred to me that the material out of which the projectile was made could be used as a component of a fuel air explosion upon vaporization.
One can imagine numerous 1 million metric ton space darts assembled in orbit over long periods of time made from such materials having a diameter of less than 100 meters. The kinetic energy of impact would be around 5.25 megatons of TNT. Add to this the fact that fuel air explosives typically have peak yields of up to ten times greater than traditional conventional explosives and one obtains a yield per vaporized dart at about 15 megatons. For a single 10 million ton dart, the resulting yeild could be a staggering 150 megatons. However, both of these yeild values probably represent overkill since the typical yield of a modern strategic nuclear warhead is in the 100 kiloton to 450 kiloton range.
Perhaps the material for such darts could be more economically derived from the surface or subsurface mineral deposits on the moon or from near Earth orbiting asteriods.
Another option would be to develope numerous space dart interplanetary orbiting stations with orbits that are antiparallel to that of Earth. The resulting collision velocity would be about twice the orbital velocity of Earth (about 30 km/sec) around the sun thus yeilding a collision velocity of 60 km/sec.
A one million metric ton dart with this collision velocity would yeild about 500 megatons. A 10 million metric ton dart would yield about 5,000 megatons or 5 gigatons which would probably be more than overkill. Very hard facilities buried underneath 2 or 3 miles of the Earth’s crust would perhaps be the only concievable targets for impactors in the several hundred megatons to 5 gigatons range. A 5 gigaton surface burst nuclear explosion would be expected to blast a crater about 7/8 mile deep in solid granite and so I can imagine that the directed kinetic energy effects of a 5 gigaton kinetic energy range impacter would demolish any such very deeply buried sites.
Note that the NORAD facility under Cheyenne Mountain is only about 1,700 feet below the mountain’s surface.
If additional velocity was required, perhaps non-nuclear rocket options for accellerating such huge projectile could entail deployment of huge solar sails made of very high mass specific solar energy reflecting membranes while the projectiles are a ways off in order to allow significant mass specific kinetic energy gains of the impactor(s).
At any rate, impactors with kinetic energy ranges of one megaton are probably sufficient to hold any deeply buried hard targets at risk. In fact, impactors with 100 kilotons of kinetic energy may be all that is required to hold any deeply buried hard targets at risk becuase of the directed energy effects of such impactors and also because of the sheer power of the shockwave transmitted by such impacts to the subsurface material of Earth’s crust.
Best Regards;
Jim Essig

By: Jim DiGris

Jim DiGris — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 16:47:43 +0000

1.If you have something in orbit, a simple retro rocket will cause it to re-enter the earth

By: Professor Tanhauser

Professor Tanhauser — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 06:08:34 +0000

Actually during WW2 they developed crude proximity fuzes that used miniature vacuum tubes, for god’s sake!
They survived the shock of being fired from explosively propelled cannon, I’m certain modern electronics could survive the shock of firing from a gauss accelerator!
BTW, don’t forget that some countries would build even more massive versions of these to keep out battleships away from their shores.

By: James M. Essig

James M. Essig — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 22:40:28 +0000

Another notion occurred to me regarding the usefulness of electromagnetic guns.
Suppose that there existed 1,000 electromagnetic guns sights located within the continental U.
S. and that these electromagnetic guns were capable of launching 1,000 10 metric ton projectiles each within every one hour period on an emergency basis. Further, suppose that each projectile was composed of a dense refractory high strength core surrounded or encased in an even more refractory shell or coating and that the target collision velocity was on the order of 6 km/sec and the projectiles functioned as ICBM kinetic energy projectiles. That works out to be 40 megatons of collisional explosive energy in one hour or about 1,000 megatons delivered in 1 day or about 7,000 megatons delivered in one week of continuos firing. Bear in mind that 7,000 megatons is roughly 1/2 an order of magnitude greater explosive energy then our currently on active alert strategic nuclear stockpile. Moreover, the deploying of such a large number of smaller warheads would mean that at least for soft targets, the explosive energy would be distributed much more efficiently such as against general military base infrastructures, naval bases, population centers, economic targets, factories,etc.
How might the electrical power be generated and/or stored to power such a huge kinetic energy round stockpile? The energy could in theory be stored in one 10,000 metric ton electrodynamic turbine with a rotational velocity on the order of 3 km/sec at each of the thousand stations wherein the turbine can be recharged with kinetic energy every 15 minutes upon firing of the salvos. This would yield 40 kilotons per hour of energy release per station. The turbines might be maintained in a spun up condition so that they can be utilized in an emergency situation.
The turbines could be resupplied with kinetic energy by electrical motor drivers ultimately powered by vast gas turbine mechanisms which could utilize vast reserves of liquified natural gas whether the natural gas is extracted geologically or whether it is produced from our vast coal reserves, oil shale etc.. The turbines might alternatively have their electric motor drivers powered by coal, gasified coal, petroleum, alcohol or other biofuels, nuclear power, and/or solar energy to electrical energy conversion facilities.
Now, granted, all of this is a little far out, but in theory, with proper economic incentive and the political will to move the backbone of our strategic defense away from a virtually entirely nuclear weapons based mode to a mixed mode utilizing kinetic energy based ICBMs and perhaps a couple of thousand nuclear warheads, some of which could be robust earth penetrating single nuclear warheads (preferably clean) of very high yield perhaps approaching 100 Megatons each for very hard, very deep target destruction if required, we might begin to shift our strategic deterent from the dangerously high nuclear stockpiles that we now maintain and for which the effects of radioactive fallout could still be far more destructive causualty-wise than the immeadiate effects of blast, thermal pulse, immeadiate ionizing radiation etc.
The kinetic energy ICBM bases could be maintained in secured arrangements just as current U.S. Airforce based strategic assets are maintained.
If we need stategic defense and we probably will require such for several to many decades to come, it is better that we reduce our ability to kill our own countrymen through radiation plumes generated by the impact of our nuclear weapons on the territories of our opponents. In the end, the survival of the human race may ultimately be at stake.
Best Regards;
Jim Essig