Railgun Update from General Atomics

Comments

1. 
   24414563 Apr 20, 2011

   
   

   Why is the Navy leaving proven technology and to put the rail gun on DD251 would endanger ship. These rail guns use tremendous amounts of power, so what happens if you lose two generators? Captain has to make a real quick decision and no decision would be good for the ship. The same applies to the new carrier catapult which are powered by steam as its free and available. This is becoming scary as Navy brass with Roughead at helm cannot see that these catapults will require bigger demands of power which means you have something that can fail. Catapults are proven technology, and their failure rate is near 2%. To have weapon systems and catapults be dependent on generators is absurd and believe your just doing it to spend the money.The CIC probably does not know a thing about this, but a defenseless ship because generators fail is just down right scary.

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2. 
   19873982 Apr 21, 2011

   
   

   Where do you think that steam comes from? It's piped from the steam generators in the engineering plant. Still takes power to make, but with an electric catapault (which, considering it's the tech on most new "fast-launch" roller coasters, means it probably has a similar low failure rate) you don't have hundreds of pounds of steam released, actually saving wear and tear on the engineering plant. In the cat space, you now have banks of electromagnets that don't corrode, don't catastrophically fail. Remember, a straight deck carrier is proven technology, and how many of them do you see about now? As for the weapons, same point. Yes, you're dependant on power generation, but you no longer need as much magazine space, and your projectiles are inert, or at least much less explosive and ready for a fire to blow the ship in half. I'm sure there will be problems at first, but that's why it's new technology. Before it gets fielded, the kinks should be worked out, and procedures for casualty recovery in place.

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3. 
   LCDR_KENT Apr 28, 2011

   
   

   Seven years to get into production? This has taken too long already. This should be fast tracted. The ships (DD-51) they want to put them on are almost out of date now.

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4. 
   Jim37F May 01, 2011

   
   

   Cool, now we just need to scale this down to where we can put this on an Abrams!

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5. 
   Jim37F May 01, 2011

   
   

   11 comments (this will make 12) and only half of them are legit? Whats up with all these obvious spam advertisments? Isn't there an administrator or moderator here to remove those posts? Or better yet, add in a Captcha to prevent them in the first place

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6. 
   11189403 May 07, 2011

   
   

   My god! The 9MJ EMgun finally after what 25Years or so since the RFP !! It sure looks like the one we submitted from GD Pomona.

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7. 
   JTP709 May 18, 2011

   
   

   @24414563 Swords were proven technology too, why did we move onto a mechanism that had moving parts, chemicals, cloth, and could only be used to kill someone once every few minutes? Oh yeah . . .

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8. 
   vlogger Dec 08, 2011

   
   

   amazing.

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9. 
   Erichs Dec 28, 2011

   
   

   I can see adding this to the Abrahms tank

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10. 
    PHS_Smith Jan 04, 2012

    
    

    Another waste of taxpayer money on a toy project that goes nowhere.

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11. 
    dwwhite1963 Oct 17, 2012

    
    

    the concerns re: generators failing could be prevented by a nuke powered boat?? yes? no?

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