The US Navy Wants More Railguns and Lasers, Less Gunpowder 517
coondoggie writes Speaking before nearly 3,000 attendees at the Naval Future Force Science and Technology EXPO in Washington, D.C., Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert charged his audience to reduce reliance on gunpowder in a wide-ranging speech on the future technological needs of the Navy. "Number one, you've got to get us off gunpowder," said Greenert, noting that Office of Naval Research-supported weapon programs like Laser Weapon System (LaWS) and the electromagnetic railgun are vital to the future force. “Probably the biggest vulnerability of a ship is its magazine—because that’s where all the explosives are." Weapons like LaWS have a virtually unlimited magazine, only constrained by power and cooling capabilities aboard the vessel carrying them. In addition, Greenert noted the added safety for Sailors and Marines that will come from reducing dependency on gunpowder-based munitions.
Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Funny)
How is that fancy laser going to work when the enemy uses a smoke screen? Or a mirror?
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Informative)
I am figuring your comment is in jest.
A laser powerful enough to bring down an airplane would burn thru a mist and probably melt a mirror instantly before the can use a reflection to aim it back.
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Except if a laser is so powerful... how exactly do you aim it without it burning out the prisms/mirrors that are utilised to aim it?
They don't use curved barrels on the main guns. Work it out yourself. Wait, you can't. So: The lasers will go in the turrets, just like the guns do now.
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Amazing! You have described exactly how these things don't work!
I couldn't have done it better myself!
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What do you mean by "burn through"? When you heat up a gas hot enough to change its state, the next state up is plasma. Plasma is opaque.
Really, lasers seem much easier to defend against than to get to work right... there's so many varied potential defenses for them (ablatives, smoke, chaff, higher thermal conductivity materials, heat sinks, polished surfaces, etc, plus presenting a precisely pinpointable beacon for return fire). And any ambient scatter (and there will be a lot) will be enough to cause perm
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Plasma is opaque.
What do you mean plasma is opaque? As long as the electromagnetic wave is above the cut-off, higher than the plasma frequency which depends on density for colder plasmas, then electromagnetic wave will propagate through plasma. Plasma at the same density as air is still has a cutoff in IR above the wavelength of something like a Nd:YAG laser.
But regardless, still depends on the situation, because for pulsed lasers, the time scale of energy absorption is way faster than the timescale that ablated material
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Insightful)
For steel walls 5km away you've got railguns.
The laser is for 1/2" of aluminum flying at mach 3 in your general direction..
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Except if the other ship has lasers...
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:4, Informative)
Except if the other ship has lasers...
When did the US Navy last fight a proper ship vs ship battle with big guns? This is just a solution in search of a problem/budget .
The most recent US ship-to-ship battle was in 1988 against the Iranians. That's only 26 years ago.
Details from the 'pedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis
However, the whole point is to STAY ahead of the other naval powers. Most every country today has helicopters, submarines, battle tanks, etc. The pertinent detail here is that the quality of the US's arsenal is often a generation (and sometimes quite a bit more!) ahead of its opponents. This is a major reason as to why the US has lost so comparatively few soldiers in combat since Viet Nam. Being able to dominate the battlefield by technology has been necessary since Og used a rock against Mog instead of a his bare hands, and history is full of examples of countries that didn't keep up with the curve. This is just another wrung on the never-ending technology ladder.
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Lasers have over the horizon issues as they can't use ballistic trajectories. You aren't going to take out another ship at 100 miles with a laser, even aside from the thermal blooming issues which would start sapping the energy of the beam at that range in atmosphere.
Lasers work better against ballistic missiles or airplanes because they are much farther above the horizon and can be targeted without worrying about the curvature of the Earth. Even then, they are still more of a defensive weapon under those
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Informative)
What plane has 11 inches of steel?
Ships are killed by planes and subs, by missiles and torpedoes. Big ship to big ship combat just doesn't happen much anymore. Missiles take care of that.
Ships can launch surface to surface missiles and torpedoes as well. Ships are still perfectly capable of killing other ships. They just don't line up and broadside each other with 15 inchers anymore.
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Funny)
Ships can launch surface to surface missiles and torpedoes as well. Ships are still perfectly capable of killing other ships. They just don't line up and broadside each other with 15 inchers anymore.
Is it only me or does this really sound utterly gay?
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Funny)
Ships can launch surface to surface missiles and torpedoes as well. Ships are still perfectly capable of killing other ships. They just don't line up and broadside each other with 15 inchers anymore.
Is it only me or does this really sound utterly gay?
To be fair, those ships are already full of seamen.
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The A-10 "Warthog" is arguably the most heavily armoured plane in the world. From its wikipedia entry:
[The armour is] "made up of titanium plates with thicknesses from 0.5 to 1.5 inches (13 to 38 mm) determined by a study of likely trajectories and deflection angles. The armor makes up almost 6% of the aircraft's empty weight."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Interesting)
Lasers are used against aircraft or missiles. The railguns are for naval targets. Smoke is hilariously ineffective against a railgun strike. And it is hard to maintain a smoke screen around a missile or an aircraft.
Keep in mind, anything you could hit with a navel gun is even easier to hit with a rail gun. Currently the velocity of railguns is roughly equivalent to navel guns. However, that speed will climb.
Eventually this speed should surpass escape velocity which means railguns will eventually be able to tag satellites or even launch small hunter-killer kill vehicles to destroy/disable/subvert enemy orbital infrastructure.
The weapons are quite effective. The question in the new era is how to defend against such things so that a battle group is survivable. Between all this and hypersonic missiles carrier groups might be a thing of the past. Large surface fleets might also just be too vulnerable to be useful.
High endurance aircraft that can strike from extreme range and attack submarines with surface strike capability might be the order of the day. A submersible destroyer for example could get in close with heavy weaponry, fire a salvo, and then dive before enemy systems could target and strike it. Such a thing would be vulnerable to enemy attack submarines but then you could just escort it with a flotilla of attack submarines to act as defense. You could even add some drone carriers. Submersible aircraft carriers were built by the Japanese in WW2. Consider what you could do if you gave such a design a nuclear power plant, expanded the size to Nimitz proportions, and replaced the planes entirely with more compact drones.
That is a possible vision of the future.
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Currently the velocity of railguns is roughly equivalent to navel guns.
They will leave your hands free too.
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I dunno, some navel [youtube.com] guns are pretty powerful.
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Apart from targets over the horizon.
That's only because current railguns are not powerful enough. Yet. :-p
(Could some physicist give us an estimate of the energy I'd need to shoot downwards and kill some bastard in Australia?)
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, no. Railguns, like conventional cannon, fire a projectile that obeys the law of gravity. Which means the trajectory is parabolic for those who are exceptionally dense.
So, yes, railguns can hit targets over the horizon.
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:4, Insightful)
You do know that the 16" guns on the battleships could fire 15-25 miles (38km max range)?
And that their projectiles were unpowered, right?
And that they still hit the ground/water at the end of their flight, right?
And that the math required to hit a target out of sight of the gun has been well known since before World War-ONE, right?
It's not just not impossible, it's something that's been in use (hitting targets beyond the horizon) for more than a century.
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:4, Insightful)
Note the Paris Gun. Used in WW1, effective range 130km (80+ miles), muzzle velocity 1640 m/s (comparable to modern DS rounds).
In other words, everyone doesn't agree. Yes, railguns are better for the purpose, for a lot of reasons. But it's not impossible to build conventional cannon that outrange anything currently in use - it can be done with WW1 technology, after all....
By the by, do you know what the primary advantage of a railgun is? No, it's not super-high muzzle velocity. it's elimination of the powder charge. Since the powder charge for a modern (defined as post-WW1) artillery piece is larger than the projectile, that more than doubles (more than triples for most artillery) your ammo capacity. And that's not even counting the space taken up by the fire-suppression system and armor protecting the powder magazines.
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Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Interesting)
Then how does a man in a fox hole lob a grenade into another fox hole without even poking his head above his own fox hole?
Naval guns don't point directly at their targets. They account for range by pointing UP. This gives the trajectory a curve which more then compensates for the curvature of the Earth. They also account for wind by pointing the guns slightly into the wind to counter the effect of the wind. And then they account for heading by leading the target a bit such that they're aiming for where the enemy will be when the shell arrives rather then where the enemy is right now. Other things are factored... humidity, air pressure, temperature, etc. Factor it all accurately and in real time with a computer and you have a good chance of hitting your target unless it is jinking all over the place.
Currently railguns have about the same muzzle velocity as a WW2 battleship cannon. Which is only because no one has ever gotten a shell to travel faster then that with chemical propellant. There might be some exceptions. I think some of the giant land guns might have had higher muzzle velocities. The germans had a big gun they used against the French and I think there was another one built in the middle east somewhere but it escapes me. Regardless, the weapons were too large to really be practical. They were big white elephants that accomplished very little compared to their cost.
Railguns have the potential to achieve far higher muzzle velocities. Again, you could potentially fire a shot from a destroyer straight up and slap a satellite out of the sky if you got the muzzle velocity up about four or five times what a WW2 battleship could manage. That is a long way to go but it is technically possible. Where as with a chemical propellant you'd need an absurdly long barrel to even try such a thing.
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Informative)
Currently railguns have about the same muzzle velocity as a WW2 battleship cannon. ... There might be some exceptions. I think some of the giant land guns might have had higher muzzle velocities.
WW2 battleship "cannon" (actually "guns" as they had rifling), up to 18" bore, were the longest range conventional guns ever, although the accuracy deteriorated beyond about 20 miles. Anti-aircraft guns had a higher muzzle velocity, but being smaller bore did not have such range (air resistance had greater influence). There have been higher velocity and greater range unconventional guns such as with additional firing chambers up the barrel, and the experimental German WW2 "Arrow gun" which fired a long thin shell with tail fins out of a larger bore barrel by means of a segmented wooden jacket (a "sabot") which fell away after leaving the barrel.
The germans had a big gun they used against the French and I think there was another one built in the middle east somewhere but it escapes me. Regardless, the weapons were too large to really be practical. They were big white elephants that accomplished very little compared to their cost.
In their day they were not white elephants. The Western Front in WW1 was static so those big guns, usually railway mounted (not to be confused with "rail guns"!), were useful for hitting things like enemy railway junctions miles behind the front, even though it took days to set one up and about an hour to fire each shot. A specially modified one was even used to hit Paris 70 miles away, more as a terror weapon because its shells dropped with no warning from the stratosphere like a modern ICBM. In WW2 two were used very effectively to hammer the Americans at the Anzio landings. The Germans also had massive seige guns which went for explosive power rather than range such as the "Big Berthas" of WW1, technically howitzers, which were very effective at destroying fortifications at short-ish range such as at Liege in 1914.
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Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:4, Informative)
Currently railguns have about the same muzzle velocity as a WW2 battleship cannon
Not even close to true.
The typical muzzle velocity of a typical 16 or 18in gun was around 2500 ft/s.
The Navy's railgun has already surpassed Mach 6, or >6600 ft/s.
No, the railguns the Navy is developing are quite definitely hypersonic and have been for some time.
Not "at some point the in future", but right now.
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Interesting)
Compared to what? How is the current paradigm any better? The only advantage of the current paradigm is that we're well adapted for it. We have the largest surface carrier fleet in the world.
However, the British had the largest battleship fleet in the world and what did that get them when the airplane came around?
Call it what you will... the law of this world is adapt or die. If we wish to maintain our military edge then it is in our interest to be realistic about the long term viability of our fleets and adapt strategies as required.
The issue with our current weapons systems is that they are very vulnerable to modern weapons. You could drop a whole carrier fleet fairly easily with a barrage of hypersonic missiles fired from a small number of disposable re-purposed fishing boats. Just strap on the launchers, sync them with orbital spy sat targeting and geo location... and fire. Those things come screaming in faster then bullets... and even the Aegis defense system is reported to be unable to really stop them.
Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit.
And the carrier group is slag heading to the bottom of the ocean. Don't blame me. I'm not the one that invented the machine gun and made infantry charges obsolete. That's just progress.
You have to know the carrier will be obsolete eventually. And when that happens what will take its place?
I gave two options of what I thought was more survivable. The first is just high endurance aircraft capable of traveling very long distances without refueling. That means the carriers if they exist could stay well out of hypersonic missile range. However, the problem with that idea is that carriers would be incapable of traveling within hundreds of miles of the enemy coast simply because it would be too easy to fire a hidden shore battery that destroyed the carrier. The current range of hypersonic missiles is about 50 miles. That is the current critical range. You have to kill from beyond 50 miles. Or more then 5 times the maximum range of WW2 battleship guns. And note, those guns were not accurate at that range. That is how far the range has opened up. It was not long ago that ships had to see each other to engage each other. Today, if you can see the enemy then one side or the other has committed suicide.
Submersible ships are another option. It sounds exotic but it was successfully done during WW2. The only trick would be to give it enough mass to carry enough weaponry to be effective and then to give it a power plant with enough power to give the ship freedom of the seas. If a carrier fleet can submerge and stay submerged for months at a time like our ballistic fleet then they can cruise right within the critical range of these weapons systems, surface, deploy their weaponry, and then submerge before they can be stopped or retaliated against.
This gives such a fleet freedom of the seas as well as the ability to counter the worst enemy weapons so long as the ships can dive fast enough to avoid a strike.
A counter might be cruise torpedoes. We have missiles that fly to a specific destination, then break off the tip which lands in the water... that tip is a self guided homing torpedo. It homes in on enemy sonar and acoustic signatures and attempts to destroy them. These weapons are quite effective against submarines and it allows US destroyers to launch a few of these in various directions. They all splash into the water and seek enemy targets. It is quite difficult to evade all them. And subs really have very few options against enemy torpedoes.
Simply affix that torpedo to a cruise missile giving it a 500 or so mile range.
In addition, you can setup a web of passive listening stations throughout the ocean floor that listen for even the smallest sound anywhere in the sea. If they're all networked then you should be able to passively echo locate any fleet that gets near the net.
Such are arms races.
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How is that fancy laser going to work when the enemy uses a smoke screen? Or a mirror?
You're making it too complicated.
One EMP burst, and all that fancy hardware will be burned-out scrap.
Strat
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How is that fancy laser going to work when the enemy uses a smoke screen? Or a mirror?
You're making it too complicated.
One EMP burst, and all that fancy hardware will be burned-out scrap.
Strat
Because there's absolutely no defence against EMP :| If it was that simple forces would just EMP each others tech then go back to fighting with mechanical means.
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A railgun creates an EMP every time it is fired. Everything on that ship is EMP hardened anyway.
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:4, Informative)
Erm? Care to explain how a railgun would cause an EMP?
Because there is a huge electromagnetic discharge?
It's kinda how railguns work.
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Informative)
Why don't you read what a railgun is and how EMPs are generated?
And EMP is generated by having a very high electrical current somewhere. The better that current couples to the far field, the faster that current happens, and the larger the current is all contribute to the magnitude of the EMP. Railguns involve a very larger current, and require it to be applied over a loop with some amount of area to it, so it covers the first and third point well, and just only partially covers the speed one because they are kind of slow compared to other high current devices.
I've worked with small railguns before on plasma experiments. While pulsed plasma experiments already create EMI nightmares if you make any mistake in shielding or groundloops, the railgun has destroyed electronics in diagnostics near by that needed to be rebuilt and better designed. While not on the spatial scale of an EMP by a nuclear bomb (or even a well designed Marx generator...) it does require hardening and careful design of electronics in the vicinity. A lot of military equipment is already hardened anyway, but just making parts of a railgun functional and surviving itself already go a long ways there anyway.
Not that there is that much sensitive electronics needed to make it work, most of it is simple, robust high power electronics, and the sensitive stuff is just there to report on its performance. I don't know what types of switches, etc., they use on the large scale railguns, but if they use things like ignitrons, the basic parts of the railgun will be large capacitors and vacuum electronics, which are very robust against voltage spikes unlike silicon stuff.
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:4, Informative)
A rail gun works by creating a massive magnetic field with a huge current. That same current induces massive Lorenz forces. Those Lorenz forces accelerate the projectile.
To accelerate effectively the current ramp needs to be steep.
That combination of a massive magnetic field with steep ramps is an ElectroMagnetic Pulse, or EMP.
The railguns the Navy develops are big and thus they have big electromagnetic pulses. Any not EMP hardened electronics near them just die.
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And how do you propose to launch this EMP attack? EMP isn't a magical thing you can just conjure up and cast at someone like a wizard. Pretty much anything you could do to a hit a ship with an EMP would be no less difficult than just blowing up the ship with something explosive. EMP is only preferable if you then intend to send soldiers on bored the ship to seize it and retrieve if for yourself, but good fucking luck with that. I imagine the crew would scuttle it before you had chance.
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And how do you propose to launch this EMP attack? EMP isn't a magical thing you can just conjure up and cast at someone like a wizard. Pretty much anything you could do to a hit a ship with an EMP would be no less difficult than just blowing up the ship with something explosive. EMP is only preferable if you then intend to send soldiers on bored the ship to seize it and retrieve if for yourself, but good fucking luck with that. I imagine the crew would scuttle it before you had chance.
I suppose you could hit them with a nuclear bomb. Those things produce pretty powerful EMP.
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"First, you don't hit the target with the EMP device. You detonate the device overhead and let the EMP hit the target."
It makes no difference, you don't need to go for direct hits with shells, landing a nuke a few metres from them is still going to be just as effective as blasting an EMP above them, bonus points for using cluster munitions. In fact, this is exactly the road the Chinese have gone down with their carrier killers - multi-warhead high blast weapons that don't need the precise aim of a shell but
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The fancy hardware is on a ship. A navy ship. I guess they make them from metal since a few years. Which means Faraday cage, a simple physical principle/idea.
Then we have the problem of generating an EMP.
Only works with nukes ignited in very high atmosphere, you know. Or you could invent a fancy EMP cannon wich unfortunately would only work in direct line of sight. Good look in bringing an EMP canon on a boat in range of a railgun or laser armed *war ship*
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Funny)
Plus every cat on the battlefield is going to be chasing it.
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I can see it now.
We're gonna replace the ALQ-39 chaff dispensers on our aircraft with KTY-56 cat dispensers.
Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score:5, Funny)
Plus every cat on the battlefield is going to be chasing it.
Not after they catch it.
Not eliminating all "gunpowder" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not eliminating all "gunpowder" (Score:5, Informative)
Yes they are, an aluminium slug impacting the ground at say Mach 15 does not need any gunpowder to create a large hole in the ground or destroy a building, the kinetic energy of the projectile will do that all by itself.
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Yes they are, an aluminium slug impacting the ground at say Mach 15 does not need any gunpowder to create a large hole in the ground or destroy a building, the kinetic energy of the projectile will do that all by itself.
Only for line of sight type shots and shots with a relatively low ballistic trajectory. For shorter ranged shots with a more ballistic trajectory the launch speed would need to be greatly reduced. Note that if the shot is sufficiently high (perhaps a target on a reverse slope) the projectile is coming down at a gravity induced speed, not at a launch induced speed.
Kinetic energy projectiles do not completely replace explosive warheads.
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Unless the projectile store all its energy in form of momentum instead of explosive.
To do that, you just need to shoot your projectile at ridiculous speeds. [wikipedia.org]
Kinetic has problems with indirect fire ... (Score:2)
Unless the projectile store all its energy in form of momentum instead of explosive To do that, you just need to shoot your projectile at ridiculous speeds.
Kinetic energy projectiles have limitations with respect to indirect fire, to avoid redundancy see an earlier response: http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org].
Re: Not eliminating all "gunpowder" (Score:5, Informative)
Naval gun propellant charges now use LOVA propellants (originally developed for tank and SPA munitions). These are RDX, and later, HMX-based formulations. Nitrocellulose is old-school; it went out with the last battleships. I know. I worked at NSWCIH on the project. You fail current knowledge forever.
TNSTAAFL! (Score:2)
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Unless your ship has a nuclear reactor on board
Fun fact: The US Navy operates 86 nuclear powered ships (mostly submarines). They seem pretty comfortable with it.
=Smidge=
No "unlimited" ammunition (Score:3)
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I guess it depends on the role, if it's a ship whose job is wholly to protect say an aircraft carrier, then it has all it needs to just keep on doing that.
But yes, it doesn't mean ships whose job is to shell the living shit out of places from off the coast will have unlimited ammunition, it's true in a defensive capacity though.
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Laser are line of sight only, they can't do indirect fire. A ship would also need rail guns to launch projectiles. Its an improvement, but there will still be ammunition limits.
Lasers probably wont be used for Ship-to-ship or even ship-to-shore engagements, they're much more suited as CIWS or Anti-air roles.
Or you could try more Diplomacy? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not work on the diplomacy? No country in the world has so much trouble talking to others like the US. Always resorting to violence when someone do not follow their orders. Wars going on directly or by proxy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Africa and South America and it is just a matter of time until wars are instigated in Asia. Lighting the world on fire sure are a good way of seeing to it that you have to burn gunpowder like there is no tomorrow.
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They need to update gunboat diplomacy to railgunboat diplomacy.
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LOL indeed the U.S. is awful at diplomacy absolutely horrible. Just look at how it gets rooked over on trade treaties. Totally ineffective at negotiations.
Re:Or you could try more Diplomacy? (Score:4, Insightful)
You do not understand diplomacy. It is not about winning it is about balance of power. A trade agreement which is favor of, lets say, the US and the other side must pay, then this will result sooner or later in less respect for the US. In the end they hate the US for being rude and brutal even without weapons. However, this is the diplomacy the US normally does. And often it is not only not in the interest of the other nation, it is also not in the interest of the general population in the US.
All would be much better when the US would be able to learn to be less imperial. And yes, the Chinese try to be the same. That will also not help to have stable world politics.
ISIS just burned a man alive (Score:4, Insightful)
Please explain to them your concept of diplomacy.
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Shrug
By any measure I know the U.S. is the most diplomatic nation on earth.
In terms of foreign AID
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
We are number one the UK is number 2 the rest aren't even in the same league.
In terms of diplomatic outreach consulates, trade delegation sheer levels of engagement the numbers are similar. I have no idea what universe the OP lives in that the US is the least diplomatic nation on earth.
Yeah I voted for Nostradamas as well (Score:3)
But that whole being a witch thing cost him the south.
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Not meddling in their entire region and propping up dictators who favor selling us cheap oil for the last, oh, 100 years or so?
- so now we're talking about the British Mandate?
Have you tried diplomacy with the Jihadists? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not all humans are created alike
Not all humans are reasonable
Not all humans are sane
Diplomacy works on humans who are (at least) sane. On the other hand, savages such as the Jihadists who recently burnt a Jordanian pilot to death are not interested in diplomacy
I understand that passifists / peace loving / tree hugging / hippie wannabe like you want peace, but let me tell you this one thing - you will only get your peace if others are afraid to mess with you
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Wrong. If others are afraid of you and feel helpless, they will radicalize themselves and start to terrorize you. This result in so called asymmetric war fare. Societies are normal reasonable and should not be confused with single individuals. However, if a group of people becomes desperate they might use extreme measures. Some of them become normal criminals which obviously do not follow common rules, as they position themselves outside of these rules. With terrorists it is very similar. We have had our sh
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Force will not help you to solve conflicts in the long run.
Ask the Native Americans how well that worked out for them?
Force solves all kinds of problems. It doesn't solve ALL problems, but it does solve SOME problems.
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Okay, how about we send you to talk some sense into Daesh, I'm sure they'd listen to you. Putin has also been calling for your input a lot, explain to him why he shouldn't have half of Ukraine. Lil' Kimmy's a nice guy, could you please go over there and talk him out of his nukes. While you are on your world tour, please explain to the Iranians that achieving hegemony over its neighbors is a losing strategy and nukes won't help them.
Maybe in your bunny world, the U.S. caused all these problems. Hey, are you
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The US did cause the Iranian problem.. the rest of them are much less cut and dried.
Re:Or you could try more Diplomacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
War is diplomacy by crude means.
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I don't think you understand, they want to stop storing explosives on ships. The ships will be carrying the explosives whether they are to be used or not. Will better diplomacy change how chemistry works? Unless you think a few stunning diplomats could render maintaining a defensive force unnecessary. In which case, you may want to check up on whether there are any other big military and/or economic powers with extra-territorial ambitions right now.
Re:Or you could try more Diplomacy? (Score:5, Informative)
I am sure he actually understood. He just wanted to take the chance to make an idiotic comment about the U.S. to what he hoped would be a receptive audience. I mean it takes a truly special person not to notice just how much the U.S. engages with all the other nations of the world.
Gunpowder (Score:2)
This is the kind of stuff the Military industrial complex comes up with when they need to give congress a set of cheap buzzword to defend wasting more money on equipment that will never be used to make a real difference anyway,
The US stategic doctrine is flawed and have been since the Vietnam but just like the cavalry survived almost a centu
If only the UK navy could follow suit (Score:5, Funny)
However successive UK governments have seen "improving" the navy as meaning strip it of as many ships as it can. Soon it'll consist of 2 men and a rowing boat. Oh, and one overpriced aircraft carrier with no planes that can fly from it.
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Oh, and one overpriced aircraft carrier with no planes that can fly from it.
It's increasingly unclear that having planes launched from an aircraft carrier is a feature. Drones and missiles are a lot cheaper than manned planes (and require less logistical support).
Britain built a strong navy to protect from the threat of invasion from Spain and France. It kept a strong navy to guard the colonies and, during the cold war, to provide a second-strike capability if the USSR decided to launch nuclear weapons at London. We primarily have one now to provide artillery and logistical s
Re:If only the UK navy could follow suit (Score:5, Interesting)
What do we need a large navy for now?
That is what they were saying after WW1 then look what happened. I'm not saying there's a big war round the corner or anything but we need a large decent navy for when we need a large decent navy.
Re:If only the UK navy could follow suit (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, the exact same arguments were being made about the F-22 and Eurofighter. "Why do we need these high tech planes when all we're doing is bombing mud huts in Afghanistan?".
Those planes look like kind of a good idea now we have Russia flying within miles and sometimes literally outright breaching sovereign NATO airspace again with it's probing patrols in the Baltic, the North Sea, and English channel and with transponders off and no response to communications. We're also finding those mud huts are right in the middle of a high tech Syrian air defence network too.
So it's kind of a good thing we didn't listen to the naysayers and did decide to keep up with our 4.5th gen and 5th gen fighter programs after all.
Some people don't understand that you have a military that's prepared for what might happen, not what is happening or has happened in the past.
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"What do we need a large navy for now?"
If you think the threat from russia has gone you're kidding youself.
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It's increasingly unclear that having planes launched from an aircraft carrier is a feature. Drones and missiles are a lot cheaper than manned planes (and require less logistical support).
However having a good airbourne radar is a nice thing to have, and we can't have one of those because they need to be catapult launched. The helicopter ones don't go as high.
Missiles don't have the same range as planes if you want to deny an area to other planes, and drones are completely untested in actual combat, as oppo
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However successive UK governments have seen "improving" the navy as meaning strip it of as many ships as it can. Soon it'll consist of 2 men and a rowing boat.
Except the rowing boat will be mothballed. Because they actually ordered a sailboat, with the option to upgrade to a rowboat. Turns out sails weren't practical so they decided to opt to have the rowlocks installed. Except BAE systems want to charge 323249084036540820147086e+38 pounds to do it even though they supposedly designed it to have rowlocks ea
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That price makes it sound almost reasonable! :)
I think the study will say something like:
No, it's impossible to fit rowlocks on. It will cost a huge amount. Trust us we made the thing and we know. Can't be done. So, you'd better buy those sails from us instead (conflict of interest?? Perish the thought!) at a price which is suspiciously close, but slightly less than what the rowlocks cost.
Re:If only the UK navy could follow suit (Score:4)
I used to think they were overpriced too, but apparently a couple of HS2 trains will cost as much as one of those aircraft carriers.
Now I can't figure out if the aircraft carriers are a fantastic bargain or the HS2 rolling stock is one of the biggest government orchestrated thefts from the public purse to private business in history.
Huh? (Score:2)
Have they tried cordite?
Smart Weapons. (Score:2)
We have yet to see some real advances in torpedo design. Weapons that could, hang around in a particular region and then select the target and seek to destroy it. Catch with a navy much like the airforce it can be subject to very effective area denial weapon systems. For example aircraft attacks can be readily disrupted by simply targeting them with attack radar, which has a significantly different signature to search radar. The pilot can either take evasive action foiling the attack or ignore the onboard
Great until the power plant gets hit (Score:2)
Yes, there are plenty of examples of ships being suck or disabled by a hit to a magazine.
There are also others of ships being disabled, and then sunk or abandoned, when they lost power.
Finally, there are many, many examples of ships disabled and on fire which continued fighting, sometimes with just one gun left firing.
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Yes, there are plenty of examples of ships being suck or disabled by a hit to a magazine.
There are also others of ships being disabled, and then sunk or abandoned, when they lost power.
Yes, that's why nuclear aircraft carries have two reactors, except the Enterprise, which has eight. But they decided that was unnecessary. If someone gets close enough to actually shoot your aircraft carrier, you have already failed.
You can expect combat vessels to have two reactors. Also, you can expect them to sink rapidly if they get hit hard enough to compromise even one reactor vessel.
So how are you going to power all those toys? (Score:2)
If you want railguns and lasers, you'll still have to carry the energy required to fire them aboard the ship.
Retroreflector (Score:2)
BattleTech? (Score:3)
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Rail guns fire slugs; they aren't about to put an exploding shell in a rail gun with that much electrical and magnetic energy around.
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With the reactors on board most ships they got the power, without the need for large shells with/or gun power taking up space. They can have much more ammo on board since they only need the shell part not a ton of gun powder to get shell from A to B. On top of much more power behind a rail gun shot makes armor of another ship well worthless.
What reactors? Most naval vessels use diesel, reactors are reserved for the unseen gunless submarines and the equally gunless aircraft carriers, since it just dont make sense on run off the mill surface ships like destroyers and frigates.
Is this merely an attempt to bringe the expensive white elephants that the battleship proved to be back into active service?
Re:Beating physics (Score:5, Informative)
There's actually a few tradeoffs here. Unless it's a nuclear powered ship, then efficiency does matter. Fuel is much more energy dense, due to not having its own oxidiser, but railguns are fearfully inefficient. Unless they get the efficiency up then the fuel might take up more space. That said, being liquid, it fits into awkward spaces more easily.
As for power, that's an interesting one. If you look at the proposed railgun specs, the slugs have about the same kinetic energy as a WWII battleship round from at 16" gun. While the velocity of a railgun round is much higher, it doesn't weigh well over a ton. Plus, the battleship round also has about the same energy again as an explosive payload. So in practice the railgun will have about half the energy delivery capacity of a single round from a WWII battleship.
Of course, the railgun has a much longer range, a much higher speed, is much smaller and doesn't requite an unstable mix of fuel and oxidiser to be carried so that is a win.
In terms of armor, that's more or less gone from ships. The reason being that modern torpedos and some missiles which dive shortly before impact essentially make explode under the ship not against it, lifting it partly out of the water and creating a bubble which the ship falls into breaking its back. Armor is more or less worthless against that sort of attack. So if you're in a war with the USSR, there's no point in having any.
Excpet the only naval engagements from western nations in vaguely recent times have been things like the exocet missile strikes frmo the Falklands war (again less energy than a battleship round, and armor would have helped), a boat packed with explosives (again armor would have helped) and a few others. So ship armor is already more or less worthless against a modern well equipped navy, but it's probably worth having for when one isn't engaging one of those.
But back to the railgun.
There's an interesting thing that hitting a target with a high energy inert round often doesn't do a whole lot of damage. There was a case in WWII of some armed merchant cruisers (i.e. cargo ships with a couple of obsolete guns welded on) were mistaken for cruisers by some German raiders. The raiders engaged at long range with AP rounds and scored some direct hits. The AP rounds went all the way through the unarmored ships and out the other side without detonating (they were designed to penetrate a bit into armor and then detonate: the lack of armor caused the warhead to not trigger). The end result was that the ships wound up with some perfectly survivable 15" holes in them and managed to escape.
Likewise, the British army still like their HESH rounds, because the APFDS rounds (basically a long, thin very high speed slug designed to penetrate thick tank armour) have the annoying habit of going right through more lightly armoured vehicles without doing significant damage except for two small holes, where as the HESH rounds tear them open.
The cause of this is that very high energy rounds are hard to stop. Even the target has trouble stopping them, and if it fails to, then they leave with most of their energy and deliver it elsewhere.
In fact come to think of it, back when muskets were becoming obsolete, some armies found that although the modern high speed, high accuracy bullets made it much easier to hit the target, they tended to go right through people. The result being that again, the round not only had to hit a person but unlike a musket ball, had to hit something important, so there was a much higher survivability rate from people who were shot.
So, what I wonder is how the railguns fit into this. It seems that they'd be prone to very effectively making a couple of small holes in whatever they hit and delivering most of the energy into the sea or ground. Unless you actually hit the engines or some other critical piece, a ship, especially a warship can survive a surprisingly large number of holes before it is put out of action.
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> Of course, the railgun has a much longer range, a much higher speed,
The railgun range today is effectively _zero_. High velocity rounds have been launched from test guns, but none have actually successfully hit a moving target without a pre-plotted course for the target, nor have any significantly sized railguns been successfully tested from a portable platform. They also wear out so fast that the mass and resources saved on ammunition are effectively taken up by the necessary spare parts for the railg
Re:Beating physics (Score:5, Informative)
but railguns are fearfully inefficient.
Compared to chemical propellants? I don't think so.
Unless they get the efficiency up then the fuel might take up more space. That said, being liquid,
I'm fairly certain the nuclear reactor that powers the guns and the ship won't be that big of a problem. They don't do it on diesel.
Armor is more or less worthless against that sort of attack.
Thats why the strengthen the keel ... 40 years ago.
I'd keep going, but I'm just blown away by how you got to +5 on this. You don't seem to know anything at all about you're talking about. You're mixing and matching things in ways that makes them all simply completely false statements.
Re:Beating physics (Score:4, Interesting)
Compared to chemical propellants? I don't think so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
According to that firearm efficiency is not incomparable to piston engines, which is not all that surprising as the conversion of heat to motion is not dissimilar. In that case, a .300 rifle achieves about 32% efficiency.
For a fuel powered railgun, you have to first convert the fuel to heat then to motion then to electricity. The top marine diesles give about 51% efficiency, when you're preppared to sacrafice almost anything on the altar of efficiency. The likely efficiency of a naval marine engine is probably more like 40%, in which case you're already quite close to the gun efficiency and you haven't even generated electricity yet.
You've then got the capacitor bank charging, switching losses and finally the conversion of the insane current into motion.
So my guess would be that a rail gun is substantially less efficient than a conventional firearm.
I'm fairly certain the nuclear reactor that powers the guns and the ship won't be that big of a problem. They don't do it on diesel.
Well, that removes a lot of the advantages: nuclear reactors are vastly more expensive, so you've just put the price way up.
Thats why the strengthen the keel ... 40 years ago.
So why are modern torpedos designed to work that way?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
I'd keep going, but I'm just blown away by how you got to +5 on this. You don't seem to know anything at all about you're talking about. You're mixing and matching things in ways that makes them all simply completely false statements.
Touche, my man.
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There are two other, very large factors - the cost (energy, fuel, time, human and other resources) of getting the ammunition and the propellant to the battle, and the safety. The fuel to drive the ammo supply ships has to be taken into account. A given ship is expected to be able to carry four times as many rounds of railgun ammunition vs. standard ammunition, eliminating two or three supply runs, and possibly dangerous deliveries between ships in the middle of the ocean. Ammo ships are notoriously bad d
Re:Beating physics (Score:4, Interesting)
There's an interesting thing that hitting a target with a high energy inert round often doesn't do a whole lot of damage. There was a case in WWII of some armed merchant cruisers (i.e. cargo ships with a couple of obsolete guns welded on) were mistaken for cruisers by some German raiders. The raiders engaged at long range with AP rounds and scored some direct hits. The AP rounds went all the way through the unarmored ships and out the other side without detonating (they were designed to penetrate a bit into armor and then detonate: the lack of armor caused the warhead to not trigger). The end result was that the ships wound up with some perfectly survivable 15" holes in them and managed to escape.
Good stuff here. I just have to add that this effect is seen throughout the age of gunpowder: unless gunnery hit the enemy magazine, all they were doing was making pinpricks in the opposing fleet. Keegan's Price of Admiralty [wikipedia.org] describes Lord Nelson's fleet and the HMS Dreadnought being involved in these kinds of battles.
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So, what I wonder is how the railguns fit into this. It seems that they'd be prone to very effectively making a couple of small holes in whatever they hit and delivering most of the energy into the sea or ground. Unless you actually hit the engines or some other critical piece, a ship, especially a warship can survive a surprisingly large number of holes before it is put out of action.
I believe the primary potential advantage of railguns is that they allow for a higher number of rounds to be carried and potentially fired at a higher rate, and have the defensive aspect of removing a critical vulnerability aboard ship. Its a significant advantage if, as you imply, the enemy will have a hard time sinking you because you don't have a magazine to detonate.
On the subject of ammunition, railguns are probably less efficient in general, but its probably a lot easier to store more fuel and less i
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Err, the batteries or super capacitors are probably charged up before each shot then discharge during it, so most of the time they'll do very little if you hit them with a shell.
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Historically most certainly.
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Yep, it's a wonderful day in the neighborhood. Will you be my friend?