In war rendering things unusable is as good as completely destroying them. Also, secondary explosions set off by the impact/spaulding can be a Very Bad Thing: https://youtu.be/750jAbdf-I8
Re:A First Look at America's Supergun
by GunboatDiplomat on Saturday May 28, 2016 @04:34PM
(#11793348)
I'm pretty sure that giant fireball is by design. The ammunition stowage is designed to blow out vertically like that in the case of a hit.
Do the occupants survive? When I first saw this video, I assumed they got roasted.
Re:A First Look at America's Supergun
by abstractbeliefs on Saturday May 28, 2016 @05:42PM
(#11793674)
The occupants don't survive, but it's better for munitions to burn out slowly and upwards than quickly and outwards, turning the tank into a grenade.
Other tanks, infantry, passers by will be glad for it.
Re:A First Look at America's Supergun
by GunboatDiplomat on Saturday May 28, 2016 @08:37PM
(#11794247)
In an American or western tank? Maybe, those are heavily designed for crew survival. In a Russian/Soviet design? Who knows.
Never, more speed is good because they can program the projectiles to break apart before impact with soft targets. The limiting factor is air resistance, greater initial speeds result in more energy wasted.
Also, I believe they are (were?) looking at the Zumwalt destroyer for this weapon, which actually only has 78 MW of power output.
Does power really matter? 25MW instantaneous power vs continuous/average power are different things. With modern clever power electronics you could get pretty high instantaneous power from a lower powered source. The exact energy vs time curve and desired fire rate has to be utilized to make any effective prediction I think.
The article does mention advances in supercapaciter design as one of the enabling technologies, but I suspect just charging the things requires a ton of power. Let's do some back of the envelope physics with what we know (and reasonable ball park guesses when we don't)!
It's traveling 4K mph or about 1800m/s, let's assume since its 24in long and largely tungsten it has a mass of around 60kg. 1/2 * mass * velocity ^2 means it needs 97.2 megajoules of power. That's about 4 seconds for a 25MW reactor, so I guess you're right something smaller could fire it less rapidly, though the one every 6 seconds they cite as desired would require that much power.
A typical US navy marine propulsion reactor puts out 250 MW. This railgun would require about 10% the energy output of such a reactor. A large aircraft carrier might have several cores.
From the 9/11 attack scenario below, impact speed matters (kinetic energy scales with the square of velocity), but chemical reactions pack a great deal of energy. The fuel of the airliners crashed into the World Trade Center towers released some 370x more energy than the impacts themselves, though as thermal energy delivered over roughly an hour, rather than the instantaneous impact.
As an alternative to missiles, the railguns would likely allow for increased firing -- a typical vessel carries fewer than 100 missiles, but could probably carry far more shells (and be capable of firing them).
I'm wondering at what point increased speed means you're simply punching holes through things without actually inflicting damage -- it's the transfer of energy from shell to structure that matters. If you're targeting a deeply buried concrete bunker, this is appropriate. Residential or commercial buildings, cars, etc., will to a large extent simply get very well ventilated (though you might not want to be in the immediate enting area when this happens). Matching shell structure to target likely matters.