U.S. Navy to Test Star Wars Rail Gun in 2016

[Albino Boo]

While this does seem useful for naval vessels to defend against anti-ship missiles at an affordable cost, surely if you wanted to intercept a nuclear missile you'd want to do so with something that has better guidance capabilities and a longer effective range than a simple projectile weapon (or rather, a very advanced weapon that fires simple projectiles), so that you could bring it down from as great a distance as possible?

A missile seems to be a better tool for shooting down other missiles from very far away.

Also, $25000 seems pretty expensive for a dumb projectile, but I guess depleted uranium or w/e they're using must be pricey.

The Chinese have developed a land based intermediate range ballistic anti ship missile. This means that carrier battle groups need defence against warheads in the reentry phase. The rail guns muzzle velocity of Mach 7-10 as opposed to the SAM velocity of Mach 6 mean hits are more likely and its possible to have more shots in the same period of time. The current anti ballistic missile system is designed to hit ballistic missiles in the launch phase. During this period they are slow and do not accelerate that quickly and are relatively easy targets.

Why is it call Star Wars? Star Wars uses direct energy weapons, railguns and other projectile weapons are either outdated, second hand, or specialized weapons.

Its called star wars because it came out of the early 80s SDI program known as star wars. Rail guns were just one part of the program. Other areas included ground based lasers and even a space based x-ray laser powered by nuclear detonations.

Thats where my skepticism comes in. if its moving at such friction as to cause fireballs just from that, lets look at another object that does the same - meteorites. see where I'm going with it yet? Its going to burn up till it reaches these 100 miles, reducing its effectiveness.

Missile warheads come in at Mach 29 without burning up. Dealing with heat build up at hypervelocity has been an area heavily researched over the last 70 years. Now as an educated guess I would say that the slug has an ablative coating and by clever design you manage the shock wave in front. By shaping the shockwave you can reduce the thermal buildup. It only has to survive for less than a second.

 

[truckspond]

...Don't worry about any lack of drama. The kinetic energy of the projectile sets the air around on fire.

It's the same effect that everything that comes back from space experiences and ultimately what caused the Space Shuttle Columbia to disintegrate (Fun fact: The shuttle is so large that it can communicate during re-entry through a "Hole" in this effect formed by the vertical stabiliser! Other craft are not large enough and suffer complete loss of communication until they slow down.). The atmosphere does NOT like things travelling that quickly and will do whatever it can to slow it down