The Navy Thread

@ Tom: Is this your favourite CIWS?

IIRC there are plans to slap 5 MW lasers on the Zumwalts and 5 MW is a shitload of power.

Railguns for air defense are probably going for the hardkill on larger threats, at the velocities involved even a cloud of small sub munitions will fuck anything.

Not to mention giving the Marines naval gunfire and putting the hurt on enemy SHORAD (SHort Range Air Defense)....

What if the air defense railguns were used more like the big ol' anti air artillery back in the day.

Like a modern Flak-88 or something.

Zumwalt's pretty much, hehe, dead in the water at the moment. 29 out of 31 boats in the fleet ending up as cancelled orders says as much. Scuttlebutt says that it sucked so much they had to modernize far more of the Arleigh Burke class than the navy had planned to, and even then realised that that wasn't enough - they'd have to buy a whole new flight of them (Flight III).

If the Blitzer works as advertised, it will shower the area with hyper velocity shrapnel. So a flakk gun going up to eleven.

The Zumwalt got canned because it is a bit tad expensive and the congress didn't really see the need for a new fleet moving around when the Burkes are still fine.

The whole "Zumwalt sucks" comes from that it isn't built around the AEGIS ABM like the Burke, but as far as I know it was never intended to.

Well, it also has worse sea keeping than your average paper yacht in anything other than flat calm seas because of that tumblehome hull. The French were big into that kind of design but eventually they got rid of it and went on to the conventional cruiser-type prow and hull builds.

...

Wouldn't an AA rail-gun be more useful for the fact there is no moving parts and you can just dump thousands and thousands of rounds into it as fast as you can feed it?

No need for a big fuck off shell like the 88, when you could saturate the air with thousands of BB's and just reduce any thing incoming to Swiss cheese.

Also I think modern military lasers are pulsed, which is way more destructive then just a beam due to how the physics behind it works, and I don't think heat shielding helps with that one.

Would doublecheck if I was not busy right now.

Would those tiny BB's survive the mach whatever flight to however many thousands of feet those planes are flying that though?

That is a very good question, you could just use whatever the smallest round to survive would be though.

And wouldn't that kill the barrel life?

That's the biggest problem with got with railguns right now and I can't imagine that'd help things.

Because you can't feed it very fast, especially compared to a missile system.

Rate of fire for VLS: something like three missiles per second; many are faster.

Rate of fire for railgun: projected to be one per six seconds, at best.

When it comes to modern air defence, rate of fire is the name of the game. You can't count on a railgun initiation to reliably knock out more than one inbound at a time (given that they'll be spaced out over a wide expanse of sky).

edited 14th Sep '15 11:14:16 AM by SabresEdge

Unless you do the big fuck off shell Flak-88 thing. Maybe.

Would that work anymore?

No, because even an 88mm shell is very small compared to a missile warhead.

The modern AA standard is the 127mm shell, remember; it's bigger and a hell of a lot more lethal than the 88. (A lot less portable, though, which is why it became famous as a shipboard weapon but not as a ground weapon.) It's regarded as marginal at best for air defence. The total shell weight of the USN five-inch was less than 60 pounds.

An old SM-2 missile has a 137lb warhead, and as far as I know that hasn't changed for the SM-6.

A fragmentation 6-inch railgun round would have an impressive shotgun effect, but I highly doubt it'd cover much more airspace than the explosion of a SAM.

edited 14th Sep '15 11:20:21 AM by SabresEdge

That is for a hypersonic slug of fuck huge though.

Smaller projectiles would take less energy and thus less charging.

Charging the capacitors and barrel wear is still a huge issue with railguns, smaller ordnance has the problem with limiting the amounts of guidance systems they can use and they are important with railguns projectiles moving at mach 7.

A single railgun projectile goes around the problem by breaking up and spreading a cloud of shrapnel on the path of the incoming hostile, due to velocities involved and accuracy of the projectiles there is no really need for a huge blast and firing a single shell should be a lot less costly and takes a lot less magazine space than a VLS.

Just remember that "it goes fuckfast" doesn't automatically wash away all problems. For example, depending on how the slug breaks apart to form shrapnel, you might have difficulty actually producing a cloud of shrapnel, instead of a narrow cone of the stuff traveling very much on the same path or have fragments tend to shed their energy too fast and lose effectiveness. Flak worked because there was high explosive facilitating the creation of shrapnel and making sure it was going fast and in all directions, but to my knowledge, all planned railgun munitions are purely kinetic energy weapons.

Thats only because at that speed, and the current designs, a KKV is more effecient.

If a high explosive forms a better shrapmel cloud, nothing is there to physicaly stop them from stuffing a railgun slug with high explosive.

Sounds plausible, given that HEAT can survive being rapidly accelerated to mach 5.15 or so by the Abrams's M256 smoothbore.

Att least that is what I have heard.

But it does make me question why there is not some airbursting ones already.

Hypervolocity shrapmel seems like a nightmare for soft targets, even if your using it as surface to surface, it is hard to imagining something more frightening for the elemination of infantry and light vehicles.

As it was shown on the video I posted, the Blitzer (supposedly) does that.

Ahhhh, nevermind then.

I can not video currently due to being in class.

Why the fuck are you people talking about basically beehive rounds? Did you learn nothing from the San-Shiki-dan?

The big railguns would be poor AA systems. Something with a smaller caliber (say 40mm) and a higher rate of fire would be better off.

So railguns can make something move fuckfast and fuckfar, so what? If you miss, that's a long time to wait in the case of the big guns. The smaller stuff has more margin of error because said railgun system can shoot those fuckfast and fuckfar but much fucking faster in ROF.

Need I remind folks that the German 88 was craptacular compared to Soviet and American AA guns? The American 90mm M2 and the 5"/38 caliber big guns were a hell of a lot better than any 88.

The South Korean defense minister is here in the Philippines for a bilateral visit. He also confirmed that the transfer of the Pohang-class corvette to the Philippine Navy will push through. Once it arrives here, it would actually be the most modern ship in the meager Philippine fleet.

They should build a railgun that launches Standard and Harpoon missiles. Then build a BB fitted with a broadside of railguns to just sling volleys of those things at targets hundreds of miles away.