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Bankrupted Beggar USA cut funding Magnetic Rail Gun 2019, No$No$Gun! PCC!

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http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...the-us-navys-super-weapon-might-be-dead-23553

RIP Railgun: Why the U.S. Navy's Super Weapon Might Be Dead
railgun.jpg

Task and PurposeJared Keller
December 7, 2017

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It can fire a solid metal slug at speeds of up to 4,500 mph, or Mach 6. It can hit targets up to 100 nautical miles away. It’s capable of defeating incoming ballistic missiles and liquefying even the most durable enemy armor, the equivalent of a weaponized meteor strike fired from the world’s most powerful gun. After more than a decade of research and development and more than $500 million, the Office of Naval Research’s much-hyped electromagnetic railgun prototype is finally capable of flexing its futuristic muscles — but despite the swirl of science-fiction excitement surrounding the muscular new cannon, it will likely never see combat, Task & Purpose has learned.

According to interviews with several congressional and military sources, the much-hyped supergun has come under scrutiny from lawmakers and military planners thanks to the Strategic Capabilities Office, the once-classified department created in 2012 to fast-track new tech languishing in the DoD’s sprawling bureaucracy, and develop, as then-Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter once put it, “game-changing capabilities to confound potential enemies.” With SCO’s interest drawn to other weapons systems, ONR may end up without the necessary funding to push the exceedingly complex railgun toward a critical testing milestone — a delay that, with increasing budget pressures and the DoD’s shifting strategic priorities, could condemn the decade-long project to an inescapable limbo of research and tinkering far from any ship.

‘They’re simply not buying it’

Over the last decade, the Pentagon has funneled money into the development of several next-generation, directed-energy weapons through the Navy’s Research, Development, Testing and Evaluation (RDT&E) appropriations: The electromagnetic railgun, which has been in development since 2005 in conjunction with defense contractors General Atomics and BAE Systems; the hypervelocity projectile (HVP), a super dense, low-drag tungsten projectile designed as specialized ammo for the railgun; and solid-state lasers, long-time fixations of every service branch and a near-term short-range missile defense for surface vessels. As of a Nov. 30 Congressional Research Service update, electromagnetic railgun research was progressing in line with the ONR roadmap that once envisioned installing the completed weapon on a destroyer like the USS Zumwalt by the mid-2020s.

In recent years, however, SCO has turned its attention to the HVP: once developed explicitly for the railgun, the super-dense shell’s compatibility with conventional powder artillery, offering a cheaper and less technically complex alternative to the Pentagon’s incomplete supergun for not just the Navy, but the Army to rapidly equip.

“SCO shifted the project’s focus to conventional powder guns, facilitating a faster transition of HVP technology to the warfighter,” SCO spokesman Chris Sherwood told Task & Purpose. “Our priority continues to be the HVP, which is reflected in the program’s budget.”

Researchers and policymakers confident on the system’s potential now fear that the reallocation of railgun funding at SCO’s behest will end up forestalling the successful installation and demonstration of a tactical rig aboard a naval vessel. According to multiple legislative and military sources, insufficient funding for the railgun in the current defense budget will grind any meaningful progress to a halt, condemning efforts to R&D purgatory. As one defense contractor with direct knowledge of the project recently told Task & Purpose, underfunding railgun now would effectively render the decade-long supergun project “dead in the water” by 2019.

“People at SCO don’t want to fund the railgun because they’re simply not buying it,” one senior legislative official with direct knowledge of the project told Task & Purpose. “They are imparting that priority on to Big Navy, which is pulling the money away from ONR.”

One last push

n the year since publishing the jaw-dropping footage of a tactical electromagnetic railgun demonstrator at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division’s Terminal Range in Virginia in November 2016, ONR has been working diligently alongside defense contractors BAE System and General Atomics to bring the supergun closer to combat readiness. A second video released in July showed the rig firing off multi-shot salvos on Dahlgren’s 25-mile Potomac River test range. Through massive, repeated pulses of energy over a short period with minimal cooldown time, the railgun managed to fire 4.8 shells a minute, inching closer to the requirements laid out by Naval Sea Systems Command in a 2013 call for demonstrators that could fire 10 shells a minute and store up to 650 shells.

While ONR’s rep-rate demonstrations at Dahlgren represent a major leap forward for the railgun, the system still faces major technical hurdles that make the HVP a relatively inexpensive alternative. Generating the electromagnetic fields necessary to accelerate a shell to tank-liquefying velocities without chemical propellants requires an energy farm or capacitor base significantly larger than what most Navy surface vessels can generate currently. Next-generation “electric warships” like the Zumwalt can channel 78 megawatts from their generators through its power-distribution network, making them ideal for all manner of directed-energy weapons, but other surface vessels would require a major overhaul of their electrical infrastructure for the “pulsed-power architecture” required for multi-shot salvos.

The crucial railgun component that may threaten the entire effort is the “common mount.” A universal system for equipping sea or land-based platforms with a mass-produced tactical electromagnetic railgun, a 2016 House Armed Services Committee report noted that lawmakers were increasingly worried that SCO’s newfound HVP fetish “[had] left the Navy with a funding gap in developing the requirements and design for a common mount, which is a necessary prerequisite to getting this capability into operational use.” No mount, no tactical demonstrations — and, in turn, no railgun.

Without actually mounting a working demonstrator on a surface vessel, sources say, the electromagnetic railgun could land in a “valley of death” between R&D and procurement that may prevent the ambitious, decade-long project from ever going to war. As with most technological moonshots, success and failure are a matter of optics: If the ONR can’t show off something with a Tony Stark-level “wow” factor for the military planners and lawmakers who pull ONR’s purse strings, researchers risk letting their political capital on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon E-ring slip away.

“Promising technologies fall into the ‘valley of death’ all the time,” a legislative source told Task & Purpose. “Testing is great, but unless you want to put money into transitioning that tech into an actual weapons system then what the hell are you doing? We’re afraid to take a risk and try to get things moving.”

The railgun’s advocates know the supergun is in trouble. In July, Rep. Jim Langevin, a Democrat from Rhode Island and co-chair of the Congressional Directed Energy Caucus, recommended an additional $26.4 million SCO outlays in the House Armed Service Committee’s version of the 2018 defense budget explicitly earmarked as “transition funding” for a shipboard tactical railgun demonstrator program, the second legislative boost to the project alongside an additional $15 million added to the Innovative Naval Prototypes line item by the Senate, according to an amendment justification obtained by Task & Purpose. According to the Navy’s 2017 strategic program guide, the bulk of the appropriations already designated under that item line are for developing the thermal-management techniques that both the launcher and pulsed-power architecture require for that target sustained firing rate of 10 shells a minute.

The three-month continuing resolution passed in September offered a brief reprieve for advocates to make the case for an additional millions in transition funding to achieve a successful shipboard demonstration, and as of late November, lawmakers had authorized just $15 million of Langevin’s $26 million railgun amendment, funding the congressman told Task & Purpose would likely boost R&D efforts on the common mount.

“Our Navy must be given the ability to test this weapon’s lethality, range, and power at scale, and it must continue to develop the common mount prototype to take this technology to the next level for a shipboard demonstration,” Langevin told Task & Purpose.


But even though the NDAA is now in President Trump’s hands, the coming appropriations fight looming represents yet another uphill battle for the railgun program, putting ONR researchers who have devoted a decade to the project “in a constant state of stress,” as one legislative source put it. “We’ll take it,” they told Task & Purpose of the $15 million approved by Congress, “but nobody has any idea what will happen after Dec. 8.”

Changing priorities

Despite the pleas of devoted researchers and congressional allies, the electromagnetic railgun will live and die at the whims of high-level decision-makers at the Department of Defense. According to legislative and military sources, the legislative uncertainty and ONR’s resulting year-long charm offensive surrounding the supergun are shaped by changing strategic priorities within SCO, which wields considerable clout when it comes to developing next-generation weapons systems.

In 2015, SCO realized that the HVP, originally conceived as a specialized shell of the railgun, was just as effective when fired from a conventional powder cannons like the Army’s 105mm and 155mm M109A6 Paladin self-propelled howitzers and the Navy’s deck-mounted Mk 45 5-inch guns. A May 2016 report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment found that large caliber guns could fire an HVP between 10 and 30 nautical miles at Mach 3, faster than conventional unguided rounds.

“We thought railguns were something we were really going to go after,” then-Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work stated at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. in May 2016. “But it turns out that powder guns firing the same hypervelocity projectiles gets you almost as much as you would get out of the electromagnetic rail gun, but it’s something we can do much faster.”

The potential for rapid fielding across both the Army and Navy proved an alluring prospect for SCO’s mission, one that trumped the railgun’s hype. When asked about the organization’s priorities, SCO spokesman Chris Sherwood confirmed to Task & Purpose that the office is focused on “developing the [HVP] for use in existing powder gun systems to give the Navy and Army near-term, cost-effective long-range fires and missile defense solutions.” Translation: Why invest in an expensive gun if the bullet alone can get the job done?

SCO has publically emphasized that it’s not abandoning the electromagnetic railgun outright. SCO chief William Roper insisted during a July 2016 conference that months after Work’s dismissal of the railgun, the new focus on the HVP would not jeopardize ONR’s work on the fearsome cannon. “[It’s] not that we’re not interested in railgun — we are,” he said. “But if you look at the delta between fielding in quantity — we have [more than] a 1,000 powder guns, we have very few railguns.”

But according to military and legislative sources, SCO already squandered a shot at helping ONR achieve its critical shipboard installation milestone. In the internal justification memo obtained by Task & Purpose, Rep. Langevin’s office attributed the cut to transition funding under the 2017 defense budget to SCO, “[the] initial entity responsible for work done on the railgun mount, which they subsequently never undertook, leaving the responsibility to the Navy.”

Budget crunch

The problem of transition funding facing the electromagnetic railgun isn’t totally unique. Congressional budget anxieties frequently kill ambitious weapons development projects; consider the 7.62mm Interim Combat Service Rifle, the extra-lethal combat rifle solicited by the Army to defeat enemy body armor that ended up dead on the vine. As one congressional source put it, “the greater question of uncertainty is: Just how much priority will the Navy and DoD give on the railgun in the coming years?”

An analysis of the Navy’s 2018 RDT&E funding request by Task & Purpose reveals significant changes in the line items that govern directed-energy systems. Appropriations for Power Projection Applied Research fell from $88.94 million in FY 2016 to $13.6 million in FY 2018 due to a reallocation of funding from railgun barrel testing; similarly, appropriation for Future Naval Capabilities Advanced Technology Development fell from $251.17 million in FY 2016 to $205.6 million, although this was partially due to the ramp-down of additional HVP research & development under that specific line item.

This isn’t to say the railgun is now completely without funding — Congress appears poised to fund a new Innovative Naval Prototypes line item to the tune of $163.1 million for a demonstrator, but the shifting funds reflect the SCO’s desire to separate the HVP from ONR’s existing suite of directed-energy programs.

“Money is being put into HVP, and not railgun projects, which is why the two are being split,” as one senior legislative official told Task & Purpose. “We’ve been able to rescue some of this funding, but Big Navy sees different opportunities, and because [the railgun] is a major challenge, they don’t want to explore it.”

As far as the Navy is concerned, the focus has remained on the core of the railgun project: the pure science and research that could, in time, put the futuristic weapons of tomorrow within the Pentagon’s grasp.

“ONR’s intention is to continue working on the system, continuing to maturing the components, and moving towards demonstrating a full-scale 32 megajoule launcher and pulsed power system capable of high repetition firing,” ONR’s electromagnetic railgun program manager Thomas Boucher told Task & Purpose, declining to comment on funding decisions. “The S&T has continued to make great technical progress and there have been no show stoppers to date to prevent the Navy from having a railgun in the future.”

Jared Keller is a senior editor at Task & Purpose and contributing editor at Pacific Standard. Follow Jared Keller on Twitter @JaredBKeller.

This article originally appeared at Task & Purpose. Follow Task & Purpose on Twitter.

More Articles from Task & Purpose:

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- Here’s How Marines Fared On The New Physical Fitness Test

Image: U.S. Navy
 
http://taskandpurpose.com/navy-electromagnetic-railgun-ship-defense/

railgun-840x420.jpg

Gear & Tech


The Electromagnetic Railgun May Not See Action The Way The Navy Originally Planned

By Jared Keller
on June 27, 2017
T&P on Facebook



As part of its proposed $171.5 billion fiscal year 2018 budget request, the Navy carved out a hefty $2 billion for a suite of futuristic weapons systems ripped straight from the pages of a science-fiction flick. And a good part of that cash is going toward the service’s much-touted electromagnetic railgun: According to a new report from the Congressional Research Service, the service is on track to equip guided-missile destroyers and cruisers with the fancy launcher within the next 10 years. But despite this progress, it appears that the next-generation cannon won’t immediately see combat the way the Navy originally planned.

Recent reports indicated that the Navy has made “significant progress” in developing a tactical railgun prototype that can muster the energy to fire repeatedly in short intervals of time, a necessity during combat engagements downrange, Office of Naval Research Electromagnetic Railgun Program chief Tom Boucher told National Defense magazine on June 15. ONR weapons contractors BAE System and General Atomics are currently developing and testing new barrel designs and sufficiently devastating pulsed power systems that can fire five specially engineered shells with 32 megajoules of muzzle energy each minute.

Sounds arcane, sure, but it means that the next-generation weapons are closer than ever to seeing full integration into Navy vessels. BAE, currently at the beginning of year-long multi-shot tests at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division in Virginia, plans on delivering its prototype to the Navy for branch testing as early as next year; General Atomics plans on testing its cannon at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and “[hitting] a surrogate cruise missile” by 2018, National Defense reports.

All of this bodes well for a much-anticipated (and much-hyped) railgun project as Congress dives into the Department of Defense’s fiscal year 2018 budget request. But the recent CRS report suggests that the prototype weapons systems the Navy will eventually mount on Spearhead-class expeditionary fast transports, like the USNS Trenton, won’t be used downrange to defeat enemy armor and wreak havoc on critical infrastructure. Instead, they’ll likely focus on a less dignified task: intercepting incoming missiles.

In the June 9 report, Naval Affairs Specialist Ronald O’Rourke checks in on the status of three of the Navy’s most futuristic weapons that have been under development for years — solid state lasers, the deliciously destructive hypervelocity projectiles, and our beloved railgun. The report, compiled to help Congress assess elements of the DoD’s budget request, doesn’t just detail the systems’ operational status but provides a window into how the Navy is framing its moonshot weapons systems before those cost-conscious lawmakers who have final say into how the fleet goes to war.

Related: The Army Just Test-Fired A Frickin’ Laser Beam From An Apache Attack Helicopter »

To wit, there are no fearsome visions of the tank-shredding, bunker-busting, hull-puncturing carnage that usually accompanies footage of the electromagnetic railgun at work. Instead, the report focuses on the technologies’ strategic application as additional surface defenses against anti-ship cruise missile and ballistic missiles. “The Navy originally began developing EMRG as a naval surface fire support (NSFS) weapon for supporting U.S. Marines operating ashore, but subsequently determined that the weapon also has potential for defending against ASCMs and ASBMs,” explains O’Rourke. Sure, ONR is still thinking about fire support, but for lawmakers the issue is missile defense.

This narrow presentation doesn’t just understate the railgun’s offensive potential but supersedes it totally in favor of most cost-effective systems. As a result, the document focuses primarily on solid state lasers, which currently have the beam power to destroy unmanned aerial vehicles and small boats that, with the appropriate power source, counter incoming munitions without the excessive costs of the $976,000-a-missile Navy SAM — or even the $25,000 HVP loaded into a state-of-the-art railgun. And with the Pentagon’s E-Ring already in the midst of a laser craze, the remaining engineering challenges of the electromagnetic railgun — barrel life, power systems, and ship integration, per the CRS report, all of which require costly new materials and extended energy efficiency — may simply dissuade lawmakers from pursuing the latter.

This may, of course, be totally fine with the Navy. In recent years, branch officials have slowly walked back the rising hype surrounding the futuristic cannon, especially since the realization that the railgun’s specialized HVP shells are just as deadly out of the barrel of, say, an M777 howitzer on a Marine firebase downrange. “We thought railguns were something we were really going to go after,” Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work stated in May 2016, “but it turns out that powder guns firing the same hypervelocity projectiles gets you almost as much as you would get out of the electromagnetic railgun, but it’s something we can do much faster.”

Related: The Pentagon’s New Super Weapon Is Basically A Weaponized Meteor Strike »

But something tells us that, with more than a decade of research and development under their belt, Pentagon planners are more inclined to couch the railgun’s terrifying power in the more utilitarian packaging of missile defense — and lawmakers may respond to the Navy’s wink-and-nod in its fiscal 2018 budget request in kind. Just consider HASC chairman Rep. Rob Wittman’s praise of the system following a visit to Dahlgren back in February.

“The resiliency of the gun, the barrel, the ability for … multiple fires without having to replace the barrel, the projectiles, the pulsed power units, the size of the pulsed power units, the size of the batteries, all those things … are getting smaller [and] are getting more efficient,” Wittman told National Defense in June. “The key now is to make sure that it goes through its testing regime, make sure we understand what it can do, put it onboard a ship [and] operate it onboard a ship. All those things are on track.”

On paper, the Navy’s railgun seems doomed to a pedestrian life of knocking missiles out of the sky. But if the ONR and its contractors can keep lawmakers enthralled with the futuristic vision of the terrifying murder cannon long enough to rival other systems in power and firing capacity, who knows what the future may hold.

WATCH NEXT:
 
http://taskandpurpose.com/navy-electromagnetic-railgun-budget/


The Navy’s Much-Hyped Electromagnetic Railgun May End Up Dead In The Water

By Jared Keller
on December 4, 2017
T&P on Facebook




It can fire a solid metal slug at speeds of up to 4,500 mph, or Mach 6. It can hit targets up to 100 nautical miles away. It’s capable of defeating incoming ballistic missiles and liquefying even the most durable enemy armor, the equivalent of a weaponized meteor strike fired from the world’s most powerful gun. After more than a decade of research and development and more than $500 million, the Office of Naval Research’s much-hyped electromagnetic railgun prototype is finally capable of flexing its futuristic muscles — but despite the swirl of science-fiction excitement surrounding the muscular new cannon, it will likely never see combat, Task & Purpose has learned.

According to interviews with several congressional and military sources, the much-hyped supergun has come under scrutiny from lawmakers and military planners thanks to the Strategic Capabilities Office, the once-classified department created in 2012 to fast-track new tech languishing in the DoD’s sprawling bureaucracy, and develop, as then-Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter once put it, “game-changing capabilities to confound potential enemies.” With SCO’s interest drawn to other weapons systems, ONR may end up without the necessary funding to push the exceedingly complex railgun toward a critical testing milestone — a delay that, with increasing budget pressures and the DoD’s shifting strategic priorities, could condemn the decade-long project to an inescapable limbo of research and tinkering far from any ship.

‘They’re simply not buying it’
Over the last decade, the Pentagon has funneled money into the development of several next-generation, directed-energy weapons through the Navy’s Research, Development, Testing and Evaluation (RDT&E) appropriations: The electromagnetic railgun, which has been in development since 2005 in conjunction with defense contractors General Atomics and BAE Systems; the hypervelocity projectile (HVP), a super dense, low-drag tungsten projectile designed as specialized ammo for the railgun; and solid-state lasers, long-time fixations of every service branch and a near-term short-range missile defense for surface vessels. As of a Nov. 30 Congressional Research Service update, electromagnetic railgun research was progressing in line with the ONR roadmap that once envisioned installing the completed weapon on a destroyer like the USS Zumwalt by the mid-2020s.

In recent years, however, SCO has turned its attention to the HVP: once developed explicitly for the railgun, the super-dense shell’s compatibility with conventional powder artillery, offering a cheaper and less technically complex alternative to the Pentagon’s incomplete supergun for not just the Navy, but the Army to rapidly equip.

Related: The Electromagnetic Railgun May Not See Action The Way The Navy Originally Planned »

“SCO shifted the project’s focus to conventional powder guns, facilitating a faster transition of HVP technology to the warfighter,” SCO spokesman Chris Sherwood told Task & Purpose. “Our priority continues to be the HVP, which is reflected in the program’s budget.”

Researchers and policymakers confident on the system’s potential now fear that the reallocation of railgun funding at SCO’s behest will end up forestalling the successful installation and demonstration of a tactical rig aboard a naval vessel. According to multiple legislative and military sources, insufficient funding for the railgun in the current defense budget will grind any meaningful progress to a halt, condemning efforts to R&D purgatory. As one defense contractor with direct knowledge of the project recently told Task & Purpose, underfunding railgun now would effectively render the decade-long supergun project “dead in the water” by 2019.

“People at SCO don’t want to fund the railgun because they’re simply not buying it,” one senior legislative official with direct knowledge of the project told Task & Purpose. “They are imparting that priority on to Big Navy, which is pulling the money away from ONR.”

3129757-840x504.jpg

One last push
In the year since publishing the jaw-dropping footage of a tactical electromagnetic railgun demonstrator at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division’s Terminal Range in Virginia in November 2016, ONR has been working diligently alongside defense contractors BAE System and General Atomics to bring the supergun closer to combat readiness. A second video released in July showed the rig firing off multi-shot salvos on Dahlgren’s 25-mile Potomac River test range. Through massive, repeated pulses of energy over a short period with minimal cooldown time, the railgun managed to fire 4.8 shells a minute, inching closer to the requirements laid out by Naval Sea Systems Command in a 2013 call for demonstrators that could fire 10 shells a minute and store up to 650 shells.

While ONR’s rep-rate demonstrations at Dahlgren represent a major leap forward for the railgun, the system still faces major technical hurdles that make the HVP a relatively inexpensive alternative. Generating the electromagnetic fields necessary to accelerate a shell to tank-liquefying velocities without chemical propellants requires an energy farm or capacitor base significantly larger than what most Navy surface vessels can generate currently. Next-generation “electric warships” like the Zumwalt can channel 78 megawatts from their generators through its power-distribution network, making them ideal for all manner of directed-energy weapons, but other surface vessels would require a major overhaul of their electrical infrastructure for the “pulsed-power architecture” required for multi-shot salvos.

The crucial railgun component that may threaten the entire effort is the “common mount.” A universal system for equipping sea or land-based platforms with a mass-produced tactical electromagnetic railgun, a 2016 House Armed Services Committee report noted that lawmakers were increasingly worried that SCO’s newfound HVP fetish “[had] left the Navy with a funding gap in developing the requirements and design for a common mount, which is a necessary prerequisite to getting this capability into operational use.” No mount, no tactical demonstrations — and, in turn, no railgun.

Without actually mounting a working demonstrator on a surface vessel, sources say, the electromagnetic railgun could land in a “valley of death” between R&D and procurement that may prevent the ambitious, decade-long project from ever going to war. As with most technological moonshots, success and failure are a matter of optics: If the ONR can’t show off something with a Tony Stark-level “wow” factor for the military planners and lawmakers who pull ONR’s purse strings, researchers risk letting their political capital on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon E-ring slip away.

Screen-Shot-2017-12-04-at-1.29.09-PM.png

“Promising technologies fall into the ‘valley of death’ all the time,” a legislative source told Task & Purpose. “Testing is great, but unless you want to put money into transitioning that tech into an actual weapons system then what the hell are you doing? We’re afraid to take a risk and try to get things moving.”

The railgun’s advocates know the supergun is in trouble. In July, Rep. Jim Langevin, a Democrat from Rhode Island and co-chair of the Congressional Directed Energy Caucus, recommended an additional $26.4 million SCO outlays in the House Armed Service Committee’s version of the 2018 defense budget explicitly earmarked as “transition funding” for a shipboard tactical railgun demonstrator program, the second legislative boost to the project alongside an additional $15 million added to the Innovative Naval Prototypes line item by the Senate, according to an amendment justification obtained by Task & Purpose. According to the Navy’s 2017 strategic program guide, the bulk of the appropriations already designated under that item line are for developing the thermal-management techniques that both the launcher and pulsed-power architecture require for that target sustained firing rate of 10 shells a minute.

The three-month continuing resolution passed in September offered a brief reprieve for advocates to make the case for an additional millions in transition funding to achieve a successful shipboard demonstration, and as of late November, lawmakers had authorized just $15 million of Langevin’s $26 million railgun amendment, funding the congressman told Task & Purpose would likely boost R&D efforts on the common mount.

“Our Navy must be given the ability to test this weapon’s lethality, range, and power at scale, and it must continue to develop the common mount prototype to take this technology to the next level for a shipboard demonstration,” Langevin told Task & Purpose.

But even though the NDAA is now in President Trump’s hands, the coming appropriations fight looming represents yet another uphill battle for the railgun program, putting ONR researchers who have devoted a decade to the project “in a constant state of stress,” as one legislative source put it. “We’ll take it,” they told Task & Purpose of the $15 million approved by Congress, “but nobody has any idea what will happen after Dec. 8.”

KEP-header-photo-840x420.jpg

Changing priorities
Despite the pleas of devoted researchers and congressional allies, the electromagnetic railgun will live and die at the whims of high-level decision-makers at the Department of Defense. According to legislative and military sources, the legislative uncertainty and ONR’s resulting year-long charm offensive surrounding the supergun are shaped by changing strategic priorities within SCO, which wields considerable clout when it comes to developing next-generation weapons systems.

In 2015, SCO realized that the HVP, originally conceived as a specialized shell of the railgun, was just as effective when fired from a conventional powder cannons like the Army’s 105mm and 155mm M109A6 Paladin self-propelled howitzers and the Navy’s deck-mounted Mk 45 5-inch guns. A May 2016 report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment found that large caliber guns could fire an HVP between 10 and 30 nautical miles at Mach 3, faster than conventional unguided rounds.

Screen-Shot-2017-12-04-at-1.33.05-PM.png

“We thought railguns were something we were really going to go after,” then-Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work stated at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. in May 2016. “But it turns out that powder guns firing the same hypervelocity projectiles gets you almost as much as you would get out of the electromagnetic rail gun, but it’s something we can do much faster.”

The potential for rapid fielding across both the Army and Navy proved an alluring prospect for SCO’s mission, one that trumped the railgun’s hype. When asked about the organization’s priorities, SCO spokesman Chris Sherwood confirmed to Task & Purpose that the office is focused on “developing the [HVP] for use in existing powder gun systems to give the Navy and Army near-term, cost-effective long-range fires and missile defense solutions.” Translation: Why invest in an expensive gun if the bullet alone can get the job done?

Related: The Pentagon’s New Super Weapon Is Basically A Weaponized Meteor Strike »

SCO has publically emphasized that it’s not abandoning the electromagnetic railgun outright. SCO chief William Roper insisted during a July 2016 conference that months after Work’s dismissal of the railgun, the new focus on the HVP would not jeopardize ONR’s work on the fearsome cannon. “[It’s] not that we’re not interested in railgun — we are,” he said. “But if you look at the delta between fielding in quantity — we have [more than] a 1,000 powder guns, we have very few railguns.”

But according to military and legislative sources, SCO already squandered a shot at helping ONR achieve its critical shipboard installation milestone. In the internal justification memo obtained by Task & Purpose, Rep. Langevin’s office attributed the cut to transition funding under the 2017 defense budget to SCO, “[the] initial entity responsible for work done on the railgun mount, which they subsequently never undertook, leaving the responsibility to the Navy.”

giphy-26.gif

Budget crunch
The problem of transition funding facing the electromagnetic railgun isn’t totally unique. Congressional budget anxieties frequently kill ambitious weapons development projects; consider the 7.62mm Interim Combat Service Rifle, the extra-lethal combat rifle solicited by the Army to defeat enemy body armor that ended up dead on the vine. As one congressional source put it, “the greater question of uncertainty is: Just how much priority will the Navy and DoD give on the railgun in the coming years?”

An analysis of the Navy’s 2018 RDT&E funding request by Task & Purpose reveals significant changes in the line items that govern directed-energy systems. Appropriations for Power Projection Applied Research fell from $88.94 million in FY 2016 to $13.6 million in FY 2018 due to a reallocation of funding from railgun barrel testing; similarly, appropriation for Future Naval Capabilities Advanced Technology Development fell from $251.17 million in FY 2016 to $205.6 million, although this was partially due to the ramp-down of additional HVP research & development under that specific line item.

This isn’t to say the railgun is now completely without funding — Congress appears poised to fund a new Innovative Naval Prototypes line item to the tune of $163.1 million for a demonstrator, but the shifting funds reflect the SCO’s desire to separate the HVP from ONR’s existing suite of directed-energy programs.

Screen-Shot-2017-12-04-at-1.35.39-PM-840x543.png

“Money is being put into HVP, and not railgun projects, which is why the two are being split,” as one senior legislative official told Task & Purpose. “We’ve been able to rescue some of this funding, but Big Navy sees different opportunities, and because [the railgun] is a major challenge, they don’t want to explore it.”

As far as the Navy is concerned, the focus has remained on the core of the railgun project: the pure science and research that could, in time, put the futuristic weapons of tomorrow within the Pentagon’s grasp.

“ONR’s intention is to continue working on the system, continuing to maturing the components, and moving towards demonstrating a full-scale 32 megajoule launcher and pulsed power system capable of high repetition firing,” ONR’s electromagnetic railgun program manager Thomas Boucher told Task & Purpose, declining to comment on funding decisions. “The S&T has continued to make great technical progress and there have been no show stoppers to date to prevent the Navy from having a railgun in the future.”
 
After the Bankrupted Beggar gave up funding the expensive toy they suggested to China to also give up say that idea is flawed and full of pit-falls.

:D

Lost the game then tell opponent to stop playing it?! CB Beggar!

http://mil.news.sina.com.cn/jssd/2017-12-28/doc-ifypyuvc8915753.shtml



美主动发提醒 暗示中国电磁炮等高端装备存致命缺陷
美主动发提醒 暗示中国电磁炮等高端装备存致命缺陷

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  曾经被美国人划定为21世纪最有前景的超级武器,现在可能要面临”夭折“的风险了。

f4H9-fypyuvc8913824.jpg
美军电磁轨道炮至今没能实际海试
  电磁轨道炮可能要被美国海军放弃了。根据美军的战略能力办公室的评估,电磁轨道炮的效能并没有设计指标那么高,同时持续发射能力和小型化能力都存在瓶颈,因此计划在2019年不予核发后续发展经费。

  美国的战略能力办公室发言人克里斯·舍伍德说:“目前电磁轨道炮不符合美军现有发展技术能力,所以我们将会把着眼点放在传统火炮上。”这似乎在暗示,连全球技术最强大的美军都没有能够完全搞定电磁轨道炮的核心战斗力,更不要说其他国家了。要知道美军是花费10年的时间,投入了超过5亿美元的预算,最终却要下马了吗?真的有什么不可告人的“致命缺陷”吗?美国不是一直自诩敢当吃螃蟹的人,怎么现在突然谨慎起来了呢?

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预计原型炮安装方案,没下文了
  按照美军2016年的规划,电磁轨道炮的原型机应该在2017年一艘远征快速运输船(EPF)上进行测试。但是已经到了2017年年底,仍然没有看到电磁轨道炮实际装船的动态。还有一点不容忽视,那就是电磁轨道炮尽管地面射速已经做到了每分钟4.8发的程度,可距离美军提出2013年、每分钟10发、650发备弹量的要求仍然差距很远。

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美军电磁轨道炮试射画面
  目前,电磁轨道炮面临的问题还是在能量密度和持续性方面的难题。哪怕是美军现在已经进行靶场打靶的电磁轨道炮仍然体积硕大,堪比传统的战列舰3联装460毫米主炮的炮塔,这对于现代舰艇简直不可接受。同时我们还没有计算供电系统。在现有储能材料(电池或者飞轮)的物理限制下,要满足电磁轨道炮一次发射所需要电池组或者电容组的空间,至少需要上百平方米的空间。类比下,或者055这样的万段舰或许能有机会,但是到了052D上几乎就是不可能了。所以,千万别以为美军这是“主动善意示警”,其实是自己遇到了难题。

Z6Lg-fypyuvc8913871.gif
能拦截东风导弹的电磁轨道炮
  但是,这并不代表电磁轨道炮的终结。美军当年把电磁轨道炮划分为“上打弹道导弹,中打反舰导弹,下打地下掩体”的三栖精英装备,甚至认为一艘装备了电磁轨道炮的驱逐舰,战斗力甚至可以媲美航母,因此是“绝对颠覆战场规则”的武器,从前景来看是无限光明的。美国《大众科学》网站甚至把电磁轨道炮划分到“远比东风这类核弹道导弹更致命“的武器行列当中。所以,中国在这一领域也从来没有放慢过自己的脚步。

matr-fypyuvc8913882.jpg
电化学炮的体积会小很多
  中国在研发电磁轨道炮项目,开始于2006年,当时项目立项为“超高速动能电炮”,由于中国在超导技术上的独树一帜,使得中国在研发电磁轨道炮上占据额一定的先机。西方估计,解放军在2010年左右研制出电磁轨道炮样机,但此后发展方向可能转向与“电化学炮”,它也是电磁轨道炮的一种,但是利用电能转化成热能推进弹头,效果是需要电量少,弹头初速高,而且容易小型化,是战术武器的理想平台。预计将会在中国国产的第四代主战坦克上作为主炮使用。

FD3f-fypyuvc8913907.jpg
只要中国想造的 肯定能造出来
  不过,中国既然已经研发出了可以实战化装舰应用的电磁弹射器,那么研发电磁轨道炮是不存在任何难度,剩下的问题是是否有必要现在就研发进入到实际样机检验阶段,或者等待更多的新技术的突破。比如说,中国近些年在薄膜电池领域的快速重放技术上着力较多,近期已经在理论阶段有所成就,那么未来实际量产后如果能够应用到电磁轨道炮领域,无疑将会极大的降低能量系统的空间和体积。所以,对于这类高技术兵器,我们要有一定的耐心和恒心,相信中国想搞的东西,最终一定能做的出来!(作者署名:无名高地)
 
http://slide.mil.news.sina.com.cn/h/slide_8_203_60654.html#p=1

原来这么牛!中国电磁轨道炮细节及炮管结构展示
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近日,中国电磁轨道炮上舰测试备受关注。有高手绘制了中国电磁轨道炮的外貌与细节,以及电磁轨道炮炮管结构展示,并注明存在创造性加工,纯属臆想,如有雷同,纯属巧合。(图片来源:微博网友@堂吉丶诃德)






原来这么牛!中国电磁轨道炮细节及炮管结构展示
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图为电磁轨道炮炮管结构展示。


原来这么牛!中国电磁轨道炮细节及炮管结构展示
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新浪军事深度:近日,中国海军首次展示在公众场合的舰载电磁炮,成为大家关注的焦点。在一片欢呼声中,不难想到一个问题:到底为什么中国电磁炮值得大家如此兴奋?原因很简单:电磁炮的研制实在太难了!能够成功上舰测试,已经是世界顶尖的成就!


原来这么牛!中国电磁轨道炮细节及炮管结构展示
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电磁炮的研制难点相当的多,能进入实炮测试阶段,说明了中国军工取得了巨大的突破。但这还只是中国电磁炮初步的胜利而已,还有下面这四大世界级的难题,拦在发展前路上。把这个四个“拦路虎”都打掉!中国电磁炮就将全面实用化、服役使用:



原来这么牛!中国电磁轨道炮细节及炮管结构展示
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一、储能供电太难。在目前典型的电磁炮设计中,想要将电磁炮实用化,需要把具有实战意义的重量的弹丸,加速到约2000米/秒的巨大速度。这对电磁炮以及舰艇的电源系统储能能力提出极大的要求。预计至少需要为百兆焦级,这已经是大型航母的电磁弹射装置的储能规模。
 
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