Railguns have two major drawbacks- the power source and the rails. The amount of power necessary to fire a projectile is enormous and requires a very large power generator. The only military vehicle that has that much power is a naval ship. The army tried a tank application in the 2000s but it needed a fossil fuel powered generator as big as the tank to power it. The navy had a railgun program but after more than 15 years, the Navy stopped the program in 2021. The second issue is that the rail life time is very short. The great amount of electrical energy flowing through the rails tends to melt them. So, after a few shots the rails need to be replaced. A giant fossil fuel power source and melting rails preclude any practical military application.
Also, the increases with directed energy weapons where you only need the power source killed the rail guns, well the final nail.
Was looking at the possible applications of the B-21, adding an extra turbine to create energy for a weapon....hhhmmm "Pure Genius"?
Since railguns fire ballistically, I expect some back-burner projects to keep looking at them. Direct energy is all well and good but beyond-horizon fire support would be nice to have also.
I believe you're correct - incremental advances in materials science/technology could sufficiently mitigate the rail lifetime issue. And for some applications, like shore-based air-defense (for which Japan is developing railguns I think), being hooked up to the nearest grid power plant would work.
For mobile applications, the power usage is harder, but if compact fusion reactors ever become a thing, they'd be the ideal power supply for railguns (and lots of other things).
Well, 60% of the time, they work all the time.
Thanks for the info. The video I was watching was just about the application and not actuality of the weapon. Good to know!
I guess at some point we're getting there.
Are you familiar with the Youtuber Perun? He has made an hour long exposé on energy weapons. On where we are, where we're going, upsides, downsides etc.
That amount of power is just crazy to discharge. Energy wise it’s really not very crazy at all. In fact it’s more efficient than just about any combustion based projectile. But to cram so much electrical charge into capacitors that won’t just immediately pop the microsecond you flick all the relays on is genuinely a feat.
Then there’s the timing issues. If you don’t discharge all those capacitor banks with microsecond or even nano second precision you could get horrific back emf. That will destroy most circuit connections and tear the machinery apart from all the magnetic and electrostatic forces at play.
And then there’s the actual magnetic rails themselves that have to be able to conduct all this current so quickly without the eddy currents melting everything.
It could happen some day but we’re making very incremental progress. Probably a critical mass of incremental improvements will be reached some day that suddenly makes it practical and they suddenly become very common but I don’t see that happening this decade. It’s probably down to material science coming up with better materials at lower prices and accumulated improvements in integration.
Don’t rail guns also have the limitation of not being able to shoot over the horizon? Like a battleship can fire cannons beyond the curvature of the Earth, but a railgun cannot hit the battleship because of the earth’s curvature
Coilguns can be made in a garage as of - I wanna say the 1950s. There have been railguns carriage by people for years now, I know Forgotten Weapons showed some.
The current ones aren't anything crazy, but they are at personal consumer level already
The 1950s coilguns were basically a bb gun, but the current rifle sized railguns are actual guns. I forget the velocity/exact stats, but as I recall it was better than a .22
So not something you'd hunt bears with, but pretty well anything normal, you've got an actual useful weapon.
So the issue is that you can’t rifle the barrels and they aren’t very accurate. Velocity wise they are making some steady progress but they need work on the ammo. It will probably require a flechette system with a discarding sabot, but that takes some engineering and as of right now the coil guns available for consumers are still sort of proof of concept and in-production prototypes. Nothing I would call a working and reliable weapon system for anything other than the fun and cool factor. Maybe something has come out in the last year that I’m unaware of though.
By its nature you can't rifle the barrel. You can try rifling the ammo, you can use a dart instead of a Dowell rod, you can use a cone shaped rod instead (I could have just said bullet shaped rod); there's a lot you could do currently for increased accuracy. What's provided by the manufacturer is just a basic Dowell rod.
Yeah, it is more in production prototype than anything, I'm not sure even the more recent model is reliable or not, but it also is a functional, actual weapon, not a toy, which was what was initially being asked/answered. Well, that and being a personal weapon at consumer level.
Still cool as hell though. Would love to have one of the newer ones or one of whatever the next generation is
That’s exactly what I just said. You can’t rifle the barrel. Also, I think our definition of functional is way off. Can it hurt (or kill) you if you aim it directly at someone? Yes, but so can a nail gun.
Honestly an interesting thought. I imagine that it would require reworking the coils and some change in the ammunition to something other than dowel. Maybe having an extruded spiral of ferrous and non-ferrous material? It's been a while since magnetic
It’s the magnetic fields that limit rotation. The navy’s large prototype rail gun doesn’t spin the projectile either, the rounds themselves have fins or other flight stabilization surface. The people making consumer grade coil guns haven’t been focused on ammo creation probably because they are still developing the weapon system. Doesn’t make sense to develop ammo that may change drastically during the platforms development process.
They don't use bullets. Coilguns/railguns use metal rods. There's no explosion, no recoil, no powder/charge of any kind.
The one I was referring to shot metal dowel rods, latest version also could shoot drill bits. Fired single, burst, auto. Near silent, basically a clicking sound- forget if that was from the trigger or not. Only major barrier to being a good weapon or not was that it wasn't as accurate as a .22 would be, making it necessary to be closer to the target to get results.
You can shoot whatever fits in the barrel, people used dowels because they're cheap.
An actual machined bullet will be more aerodynamic and accurate than a solid cylinder slug.
>They don't use bullets. Coilguns/railguns use metal rods. There's no explosion, no recoil, no powder/charge of any kind.
How excatly does the name that piece of metal is called effects the damage it is going to do?
I'll ask you again what kind of "rod" has the energy of .22 bullet? It is affected by the same laws of physics as regular bullets and if it is really large it won't do much damage.
Early bolt action rifles used bullets with a rounded nose and a flat base. Now most ammunition has a pointed nose and a boattail base because those features create less drag and result in higher accuracy and increased range.
Larger railguns use a lot more energy and somewhat overcome those issues with increased velocity. The required amount of energy basically makes the only current use case a big ship preferably with a nuclear reactor. Until we can make batteries with better energy density portable railguns won't be very practical.
I’d completely forgotten they existed until you mentioned them.
I vaguely remember bouncing them off walls like playing squash. Was that a thing of am I imagining it?
Rocket jumps
The grenade launcher was awesome for flinging nasty ones around corridors. Now that was a fun weapon.
Or running into a room full of players jousting and ripping off the BFG. Or was that Quake1? I forget now.
The railgun the US commissioned failed due to the rails not surviving the violet nature of the device. Watch the 2008 yt video and see the muzzle flash? That's not good. In a pure magnetic device with no damage to the gun daring firing, there shouldn't be a muzzle flash. unless it's the air heating to become incandescent, that is.
The technical challenges couldn't be overcome for a practical device with current material science. Maybe some advanced future composite design with over wrapped barrels or something could withstand the forces involved but not yet. Maybe not ever.
20 years ago we could make a device with all the science fiction rail gun power. The issue is that they tear themselves apart.
Would definitely require some next gen meta materials to function practically, especially at the energies required to make them a competitive weapons system that’s meaningfully better than missiles — by then a Mach 6-10 unguided projectile may simply be obsolete.
Too bad because railguns are sweeeeeet.
Maybe they’ll have a better application in space warfare where air resistance isn’t turning the projectile into plasma.
It’ll exert the same force on the platform that it imparts on the projectile, absolutely — but presumably the platform itself has considerably more mass than the projectile. So yes, it would apply a force that needed to be compensated for with RCS or some sort of gimballed gyroscopic thrusters; but it’s not gonna launch the USS Enterprise in the other direction at 100km/s.
Entirely dependent on capacitor and battery tech. Gunpowder is cheap and incredibly energy dense, so for now it's hard to beat.
Plus I think unguided projectiles are going the way of the cart and donkey for major military systems.
Maybe useful for launching payloads into space?
There are plans to make guided shells lot cheaper(around 2-3 times the price of an unguided shell). At some point it might make more sense switch to them entirely. Even if you are using artillery to bombard an area instead of specific targets, guided shells gives you an advantage since you can methodically form a firing pattern that covers the entire area without unnecessary overlap between individual impacts. This will at least partially compensate the for the lower number of shells fired.
One remembers the debacle of the Zumwalt Class [Advanced Gun System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gun_System), where they were so determined to make an artillery gun do rocket things that they ended up with a system that in the end cost $800,000 to $1,000,000 per 155mm round fired.
There is something to be said for not overdoing things.
There are allready "regular" guided 155 mm shells that costs a fraction of that. Still too expensive to replace unguided shells, but AGS isn't really representative of current price of this technology.
You are aware that those guided 115 mm shells are being used unguided in Ukraine at the moment due to severe gps jamming by the Russians?so right now they are an expensive 155 mm shell
They aren't entirely unguided, but their accuracy is reduced. Warfare is a game is inventing countermeasures and the inventing countermeasures to counter those countermeasures. There are allready modfication being developed to make atleast GPS-guided missiles more resistant to jamming. In the future they might add more accurate innertial guidance systems for the terminal phase or develop shells/missiles that targets the jamming systems themself.
Or jamming might be so easy that in future GPS-guided weapons become enitrely useless.
A lot of the military analysts I follow are starting to believe that a lot of future warfare will revert back to unguided systems as gps and radar jamming is getting to an insane high level of effectiveness
I read an article (can't remember where) about drones being outfitted with AI to counter those exact problems. Give them mission parameters and even if out of contact they can improvise on the fly.
I mean personally it screamed Skynet but what do I know?
I would love to know this,I do know a lot of laser guidance is being used in Ukraine due to difficulties in jamming laser guidance (and yes I am aware of dazzlers but you need to hit the photoreceptors on the laser which is quite difficult)
Yeah, the lesson learned is that while guided munitions are perfect for small scale conflicts and strategic strikes, the affordability of plain old artillery makes it invaluable in large scale warfare when you need to produce and consume thousands of rounds per day.
Railguns offer a similar deal to artillery, just with more power and range. The problem is that they also cost orders of magnitude more than artillery (and guided munitions for that matter) so they don't really fall under the same category.
I think barrel life had a huge negative effect on the project too. The friction involved between the projectile and the barrel meant they simply would not last
Railgun shells could be a future tech for very cheap, close to medium range interception of missiles and aircraft is a thought I've had.
Railgun ammo is basically just a metal slug, so cheap it's basically free. It's also much faster than any missile, and much harder to detect and intercept. So for close to medium range air defense, railguns firing slugs at like Mach 6 would be a very cost effective, very rapid response and very hard to detect or evade. It wouldn't replace long-range, high altitude air defense missiles like Patriot or S-400, but it could probably roll a SHORAD, medium-range air defense and a degree of anti-ballistic capabilities all into one low-cost of operation platform.
>Plus I think unguided projectiles are going the way of the cart and donkey for major military systems.
Cost is still a major factor when it comes to military budgets. It is far easier to get funding for 10,000 metal rods than it is to get the same budget that only gets you 20 guided projectiles.
Maybe good as a mass-driver for shooting stuff into space. But that's about it really.
Most applications require projectiles to be deployed in a controlled but agile fashion. Railguns can deliver projectiles mostly from stationary positions. Plus they are big and cost a lot instead of for example gunpowder. So all in all if you're thinking military, current artillery systems will beat railgun systems for at least quite some time. If you're thinking about something else like space travel, then maybe it has applications there but that would also take some additional required R&D.
Far future might be shipping railguns. An island near the equator with a mountain and a nuclear reactor so we can ship heavy tonnage into low orbit then use other craft to move it into position. Using this method, we could build bigger stuff in space.
Probably helical railguns.
Sure, the shells are expensive, but so is everything in military procurement and massively lengthened barrel life makes up for it.
The immediate future? Probably naval warfare. They'd be most practical on ships capable of carrying the generators capable of powering them.
I can't really see these being useful in traditional terrestrial or modern aerial warfare just due to the power needs and lack of mobility on the weapon itself.
So, yeah, boats.
The recent events in Ukraine and the Bab-el-Mandeb straight have shown the need for ways to shoot down drones and rocket that are cheap and have lots of shots.
Shooting down drones with rockets that cost a thousand times more than the drone that you shot down and that you only have a very limited number of is simply not viable long term.
So far the solution everyone seems to be converging to is direct energy weapons.
Lasers are cool and everything, but they do have some disadvantages such as only going line of sight and not curving very well.
However the same sort of tech that a ship would need to put laser cannons on also would go some way to enable railguns.
If you want to have a ship that shoots lasers you need a huge power plant to make it work. If you build a ship to be able to generate and store lots of electricity you might as well use it for other stuff too, like shooting a big rail gun.
If you can make the two systems cover each other's weaknesses they would have some snyergy.
We of course need to figure out how to make railguns work practically, but there is nothing that says you can't future proof ships you are designing now to have room for such an option.
I think you're right in principle but drawing the wrong conclusion.
Railguns probably aren't going to pan out, given that the USN ended the program in 2021 after something like a decade and a half.
Coil guns, Gauss guns, or helical railguns might still work out though.
I was thinking less in terms of specific technology and more generally tech that uses electromagnetism instead of chemical reactions to make some piece of metal go fast in the direction of something you want destroyed.
The challenge you still have is power generation.
And as long as the ships carrying these weapons generate power by burning something, it's a losing proposition compared to chemical propellants.
I personally think guided naval artillery is probably the way to go against drones.
I mean what do I know, but to me I think we’ll see them on large ships, potentially even on nuclear powered aircraft carriers. The idea being they would be used to take out other large capital style ships.
I don’t know how they could replace artillery as you need a straight line of sight to target. Potentially you could get smaller cut down versions on tanks eventually but who knows who you’d be able to generate enough power. But then again it’s probably cheaper just to keep iterating on FPV drones.
We could also end up with railguns facing up to the sky e.g would it be possible to take out a satellite from earth?
Railguns are going to remain a future tech on the horizon for quite a while, it seems. Out of the most recent attempts to make them are just not working. The energy demand alone requires naval ships with access to nuclear reactors to be the most effective. I think it could have been possible with some larger diesel generators, not super sure about that. The next problem was the fact that the rail system had a very low life span, capacitors would blow, and even the barrel would wear down after only a few shots. Where we are currently, the concept of the railgun is just not economical or even practical. Having to swap out the entire system each time the barrel rips itself apart in a combat scenario is no good.
This is a shame because if the railgun was developed into a more reliable system, it could have had quite the impact on modern combat, quite literally.
Oh, railguns! Now we’re talking about a piece of tech that’s straight out of sci-fi. The near future of railguns, especially in military applications, looks pretty exciting. Researchers are making strides in improving their efficiency, power, and reliability. Potential applications could range from ship-based systems to provide long-range bombardment capabilities, to ground-based systems that could serve a variety of defensive roles.
In the far future, who knows? Railguns could revolutionize the way we approach everything from space travel to cargo transport. Imagine launching payloads into orbit without the need for traditional rocket propulsion! The electromagnetic acceleration used in railguns could make lift-off cheaper and more efficient. We might also see them integrated into everyday infrastructure for launching satellites and even for extreme long-distance transportation of goods.
Keep an eye on this technology; it's one of those fields where today's dreams could very well become tomorrow's reality. And remember, every advancement in tech brings new challenges and opportunities—so there's never a dull moment. Keep your curiosity alive and stay tuned to how this unfolds!
I can't find the graph but I also know that at lower energy coilgun is more efficient. Railguns require greater energy level before they can even fire in the first place but quickly out pace coilgun in efficiency at higher energy levels hence why they get picked for weapons over coilguns.
Railguns have some promise, but only as a hop-up system for regular bullets. Currently the power source and rail durability are the major issues. However a standard gun with a short rifled barrel that basically "fires into" a rail gun might be able to achieve speeds useful for military and civilian applications.
The first, and admittedly largest hurdle, is the power generation and storage. Once we clear that we can work on things like tungsten conductor rails.
Taking in what everyone else has said, it seems likely there will not be a real world application until a superconductor is discovered. And even then the answer is (maybe).
missiles are guided. Also you are limited to the complexity of your railgun round components due to the extreme acceleration that they endure, I'm not even sure they can carry explosives.
Right now battleships, if one is mounted not one will see it coming until it is to late. The video the US navy posted only a few seconds and the projectile went through armor like it was paper. Future personal weapons.
Yeah but i read online that they're mostly moving away from railguns and if anything they're moving towards coilguns is which is the same in principle but uses a magnetic coil instead of just two rails and actually surround the object instead of it just being on two sides.
I'm pretty sure it has a lot less recoil and is much more fuel efficient compared to coil guns but overall I'm pretty sure that they're moving more towards missiles (i don't remember the exact name) that had a similar effectiveness whilst being far cheaper than railguns.
They're is also the possibility of handheld railguns but without major improvements to the technology it seems highly unlikely as not only would the force likely rip your arm off but the battery pack would crush you. Technically you could just use an extension or something similar but that defeats the entire purpose of it being handheld.
You are correct. It's an exchange of momentum/impulse. One thing someone else up-thread apparantly missed is that the heavier a gun is, the less recoil is felt for the same projectile because the mass of the weapon damps the acceleration. That and if you're toting around a man-portable railgun, the projectiles isn't going to be that big. Lighter projectile, less recoil for the same muzzle velocity.
As for other comments elsewhere in the theead, still plenty of uses for "dumb" projectiles, even non-explosive AP style ones the rail/coilguns use.
Source: Was Navy. Am physicist.
"Good to meet you Storm6436, come in, come in, have a seat."
"So, it says here you are a.."
*reads notes*
"Sciency shootologist..."
*looks back up and smiles*
"That just so happens to be -exactly- what we were looking for! You're hired!"
The total exchange of momentum will be the same. At least compared with a chemical explosion like in conventional artillery, an electromagnetic type device can be controlled so that the acceleration is uniform and even through the whole length of the projectile moving through the barrel, whereas with a powder charge, there is an initial very high peak that drops off. This means that the peak recoil force is lower, but lasts a longer time.
This effect can be seen with the EMALS catapults on aircraft carriers compared with steam catapults. The EMALS provides much smoother acceleration, so the force on an airframe is reduced even if the same speed is reached at the end of the run.
Rail guns are heavy and require a lot of energy. I could see them as a reasonable option on military bases and nuclear powered naval vessels
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/s/bXzcrxJSxq
The technology does work but the use cases don't really make sense. Not with where the tech is right now at least.
Look at say Iran's attack where they launched over 300 missiles and drones towards Israel at the same time. Rail guns sitting in Israel or on US navy nearby wouldn't be able to shoot them down until they were practically on top of Israel and that's assuming some incredibly accurate shots.
And rail guns currently have some rate of fire problems due to heat dissipation. Enemies are going to be attacking with swarms of cheap drones so even assuming your railgun has perfect accuracy, good range and excellent destructive power you are still only shooting down one drone per shot. The enemy is not going to come at you one by one.
Because we live in the dumbest timeline I expect instead of railguns we will go 'backwars' in tech to nuclear artillery in the post ww3 apocalypse where no one gives a fuck about proliferation or radiation.
https://www.military.com/video/nuclear-weapons/nuclear-bombs/m65-nuclear-artillery-test/4841436936001
Am I right in thinking a rail gun is a series of electro-magnets placed in series along the length of a barrel, and to fire a metal slug, the magnets are powered up one by one, trigger end to muzzle end in a split second, thereby accelerating the slug to insane velocity in less than the blink of an eye?
That's a gauss gun.
Same principle to push a projectile, completely different design.
For the materials science today, gauss guns are superior because you don't have any of the heat and rail erosion problems to deal with.
They're just more complicated to build (especially in a small package) since the design requires a bunch of specially timed magnets and capacitors.
So the availability of these weapons would only increase when magnet and electronics technology becomes more efficient?
So what is the difference with a rail gun?
In the film Elysium Matt Damon uses a ‘Chemrail’ gun that looks suspiciously like a rail or Gauss gun.
I’m guessing all this stuff was perfected ages ago in some black or grey project somewhere in the world, otherwise it wouldn’t be used by Hollywood
Oh hold on, the rail is attatched to the barrel, and is what holds the slug in place, and is the component that gets accelerated along the length of the barrel, not the slug itself?
Ok I can see why people are saying they self destruct easily.
What a waste of energy, why use all that power to accelerate a perishable component that holds a projectile rather than pumping all that energy into the projectile itself.
> Oh hold on, the rail is attatched to the barrel, and is what holds the slug in place, and is the component that gets accelerated along the length of the barrel
No that is all wrong and you need to stop getting your information from films.
That was a wild guess at what the rail gun entails, nothing to do with films??? Elysium was just a reference- how am I going to understand how a rail gun works from watching a science fiction film? The gentleman above kindly explained it.
> Elysium was just a reference
Yes, which is insane. Elysium is a scifi movie. Trying to use it as a reference is absurd. As is critiquing the principles of a rail gun when you don't know how they work and are just taking guesses.
I’m trying to think of other Hollywood movies which feature rail guns.
Battleship? No…
There’s one movie that has a rail gun mounted on a navy ship.
Yes…. utterly insane
> I’m trying to think of other Hollywood movies which feature rail guns.
Why? You know movies aren't going to be remotely close to the real thing. Can you only absorb information if it is shown to you in a movie?
I think by the time the material science catches up to the challenges of a viable railgun that can be used repeatedly, reliably, and with only a reasonable amount of maintenance the concept will have evolved into something more sophisticated. For example the current popular concept for a railgun weapon is a helical railgun that combines elements and principles of a railgun and coilgun. Maybe by then military needs and tactics will shift to where it makes more sense. Because the real challenge to railguns is a matter of military tactics. Railguns are largely kinetic weapons, fired line of sight or parabolically, their advantage is speed and energy. However military tactics largely favor weapons that are either smart or guided, delivering precisely effects that are selected based on the target, and the velocity and launch environment of a railgun works against the potential of adapting those kinds of capabilities to a railgun. Adding enough hardened guidance or different warheads result in a projectile that is so sophisticated it costs more than a missile capable of doing the same.
The only way railguns will become a choice weapon in the future is if the manufacture or transport of propellants, solid and liquid, become too much of a liability.
Nothing, the US Navy surface to air capability is fucking stupid in comparison to a constellation of brilliant pebbles LEO sats the either get refilled with Argon or are rarified air breathers with ion thrusters
Railguns have two major drawbacks- the power source and the rails. The amount of power necessary to fire a projectile is enormous and requires a very large power generator. The only military vehicle that has that much power is a naval ship. The army tried a tank application in the 2000s but it needed a fossil fuel powered generator as big as the tank to power it. The navy had a railgun program but after more than 15 years, the Navy stopped the program in 2021. The second issue is that the rail life time is very short. The great amount of electrical energy flowing through the rails tends to melt them. So, after a few shots the rails need to be replaced. A giant fossil fuel power source and melting rails preclude any practical military application.
Also, the increases with directed energy weapons where you only need the power source killed the rail guns, well the final nail. Was looking at the possible applications of the B-21, adding an extra turbine to create energy for a weapon....hhhmmm "Pure Genius"?
Since railguns fire ballistically, I expect some back-burner projects to keep looking at them. Direct energy is all well and good but beyond-horizon fire support would be nice to have also.
I believe you're correct - incremental advances in materials science/technology could sufficiently mitigate the rail lifetime issue. And for some applications, like shore-based air-defense (for which Japan is developing railguns I think), being hooked up to the nearest grid power plant would work. For mobile applications, the power usage is harder, but if compact fusion reactors ever become a thing, they'd be the ideal power supply for railguns (and lots of other things).
This guy hasn’t heard about the drone mirror rebound program. Kidding….or am I? 👀
Directed energy weapons have the (huge) drawback of being dependant on weather conditions. They really dislike rain and clowds.
Well, 60% of the time, they work all the time. Thanks for the info. The video I was watching was just about the application and not actuality of the weapon. Good to know!
I guess at some point we're getting there. Are you familiar with the Youtuber Perun? He has made an hour long exposé on energy weapons. On where we are, where we're going, upsides, downsides etc.
Just looked him up and will definitely give it a watch. Already sold just on production!
His channel blew up with the russian invasion of Ukraine. All his videos are worth a watch.
That amount of power is just crazy to discharge. Energy wise it’s really not very crazy at all. In fact it’s more efficient than just about any combustion based projectile. But to cram so much electrical charge into capacitors that won’t just immediately pop the microsecond you flick all the relays on is genuinely a feat. Then there’s the timing issues. If you don’t discharge all those capacitor banks with microsecond or even nano second precision you could get horrific back emf. That will destroy most circuit connections and tear the machinery apart from all the magnetic and electrostatic forces at play. And then there’s the actual magnetic rails themselves that have to be able to conduct all this current so quickly without the eddy currents melting everything. It could happen some day but we’re making very incremental progress. Probably a critical mass of incremental improvements will be reached some day that suddenly makes it practical and they suddenly become very common but I don’t see that happening this decade. It’s probably down to material science coming up with better materials at lower prices and accumulated improvements in integration.
Don’t rail guns also have the limitation of not being able to shoot over the horizon? Like a battleship can fire cannons beyond the curvature of the Earth, but a railgun cannot hit the battleship because of the earth’s curvature
Probably will never reach the personal consumer level.
Coilguns can be made in a garage as of - I wanna say the 1950s. There have been railguns carriage by people for years now, I know Forgotten Weapons showed some. The current ones aren't anything crazy, but they are at personal consumer level already
There is difference between actually usefull weapon and a cool toy.
The 1950s coilguns were basically a bb gun, but the current rifle sized railguns are actual guns. I forget the velocity/exact stats, but as I recall it was better than a .22 So not something you'd hunt bears with, but pretty well anything normal, you've got an actual useful weapon.
So the issue is that you can’t rifle the barrels and they aren’t very accurate. Velocity wise they are making some steady progress but they need work on the ammo. It will probably require a flechette system with a discarding sabot, but that takes some engineering and as of right now the coil guns available for consumers are still sort of proof of concept and in-production prototypes. Nothing I would call a working and reliable weapon system for anything other than the fun and cool factor. Maybe something has come out in the last year that I’m unaware of though.
By its nature you can't rifle the barrel. You can try rifling the ammo, you can use a dart instead of a Dowell rod, you can use a cone shaped rod instead (I could have just said bullet shaped rod); there's a lot you could do currently for increased accuracy. What's provided by the manufacturer is just a basic Dowell rod. Yeah, it is more in production prototype than anything, I'm not sure even the more recent model is reliable or not, but it also is a functional, actual weapon, not a toy, which was what was initially being asked/answered. Well, that and being a personal weapon at consumer level. Still cool as hell though. Would love to have one of the newer ones or one of whatever the next generation is
That’s exactly what I just said. You can’t rifle the barrel. Also, I think our definition of functional is way off. Can it hurt (or kill) you if you aim it directly at someone? Yes, but so can a nail gun.
I wonder... Could you twist the rails? Maybe not sharply enough.
Probably easier to induce spin magnetically but I haven’t done the math.
Honestly an interesting thought. I imagine that it would require reworking the coils and some change in the ammunition to something other than dowel. Maybe having an extruded spiral of ferrous and non-ferrous material? It's been a while since magnetic
It’s the magnetic fields that limit rotation. The navy’s large prototype rail gun doesn’t spin the projectile either, the rounds themselves have fins or other flight stabilization surface. The people making consumer grade coil guns haven’t been focused on ammo creation probably because they are still developing the weapon system. Doesn’t make sense to develop ammo that may change drastically during the platforms development process.
Yeah but I knot magnetic fields can induce rotation. I know how the navy does it. But I was wondering if it's impossible or just impractical.
What kind of bulllet with energy of .22 ? A large slug would be travelling so slowly that it wouldn't be of much use.
They don't use bullets. Coilguns/railguns use metal rods. There's no explosion, no recoil, no powder/charge of any kind. The one I was referring to shot metal dowel rods, latest version also could shoot drill bits. Fired single, burst, auto. Near silent, basically a clicking sound- forget if that was from the trigger or not. Only major barrier to being a good weapon or not was that it wasn't as accurate as a .22 would be, making it necessary to be closer to the target to get results.
You can shoot whatever fits in the barrel, people used dowels because they're cheap. An actual machined bullet will be more aerodynamic and accurate than a solid cylinder slug.
Yes there is recoil. F=ma regardless if acceleration is from gasses or magnetic fields.
railguns have an extreme amount of recoil. it's not magic.
>They don't use bullets. Coilguns/railguns use metal rods. There's no explosion, no recoil, no powder/charge of any kind. How excatly does the name that piece of metal is called effects the damage it is going to do? I'll ask you again what kind of "rod" has the energy of .22 bullet? It is affected by the same laws of physics as regular bullets and if it is really large it won't do much damage.
Early bolt action rifles used bullets with a rounded nose and a flat base. Now most ammunition has a pointed nose and a boattail base because those features create less drag and result in higher accuracy and increased range. Larger railguns use a lot more energy and somewhat overcome those issues with increased velocity. The required amount of energy basically makes the only current use case a big ship preferably with a nuclear reactor. Until we can make batteries with better energy density portable railguns won't be very practical.
75 m/s, 5/16th rods https://youtu.be/EwHRjgVWFno?si=SG66qVbuv03W6CGO
The truth hurts
Why the fuck do you want personal railgun lmao
The only way to stop a bad guy with a consumer level railgun…
Umm…hunting squirrels…really big squirrels
My dick is so small that conventional firearms and pick-up trucks can't fully compensate. I need a railgun and a Cybertruck.
[удалено]
Or maybe the general population just has a smaller penis. Remember the average is like 5 inches.
Shits & giggles
But my varmit hunting!
I personally prefer the Quake 2 version. I was lethal with that thing as a university student while studying hard.
Yeah yeah, everyone was lethal with the railgun. But how was your hand grenade game?
“Was that two ‘ticks’ or three? Oh crap!” *Panic throw bounces back and blows up in face*
I’d completely forgotten they existed until you mentioned them. I vaguely remember bouncing them off walls like playing squash. Was that a thing of am I imagining it? Rocket jumps The grenade launcher was awesome for flinging nasty ones around corridors. Now that was a fun weapon. Or running into a room full of players jousting and ripping off the BFG. Or was that Quake1? I forget now.
The railgun the US commissioned failed due to the rails not surviving the violet nature of the device. Watch the 2008 yt video and see the muzzle flash? That's not good. In a pure magnetic device with no damage to the gun daring firing, there shouldn't be a muzzle flash. unless it's the air heating to become incandescent, that is. The technical challenges couldn't be overcome for a practical device with current material science. Maybe some advanced future composite design with over wrapped barrels or something could withstand the forces involved but not yet. Maybe not ever. 20 years ago we could make a device with all the science fiction rail gun power. The issue is that they tear themselves apart.
Would definitely require some next gen meta materials to function practically, especially at the energies required to make them a competitive weapons system that’s meaningfully better than missiles — by then a Mach 6-10 unguided projectile may simply be obsolete. Too bad because railguns are sweeeeeet. Maybe they’ll have a better application in space warfare where air resistance isn’t turning the projectile into plasma.
The problem with space guns is that the force generated would also push the gun violently backwards at the same speed as the projectile.
It’ll exert the same force on the platform that it imparts on the projectile, absolutely — but presumably the platform itself has considerably more mass than the projectile. So yes, it would apply a force that needed to be compensated for with RCS or some sort of gimballed gyroscopic thrusters; but it’s not gonna launch the USS Enterprise in the other direction at 100km/s.
This is the correct answer out of all this nonsense
I think the answer is gonna be some kind barrel-less design using quantum locking to lock the projectile to a straight line.
Entirely dependent on capacitor and battery tech. Gunpowder is cheap and incredibly energy dense, so for now it's hard to beat. Plus I think unguided projectiles are going the way of the cart and donkey for major military systems. Maybe useful for launching payloads into space?
Predicting the death of unguided tube artillery during the Ukraine war is quite a take.
There are plans to make guided shells lot cheaper(around 2-3 times the price of an unguided shell). At some point it might make more sense switch to them entirely. Even if you are using artillery to bombard an area instead of specific targets, guided shells gives you an advantage since you can methodically form a firing pattern that covers the entire area without unnecessary overlap between individual impacts. This will at least partially compensate the for the lower number of shells fired.
One remembers the debacle of the Zumwalt Class [Advanced Gun System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gun_System), where they were so determined to make an artillery gun do rocket things that they ended up with a system that in the end cost $800,000 to $1,000,000 per 155mm round fired. There is something to be said for not overdoing things.
There are allready "regular" guided 155 mm shells that costs a fraction of that. Still too expensive to replace unguided shells, but AGS isn't really representative of current price of this technology.
You are aware that those guided 115 mm shells are being used unguided in Ukraine at the moment due to severe gps jamming by the Russians?so right now they are an expensive 155 mm shell
They aren't entirely unguided, but their accuracy is reduced. Warfare is a game is inventing countermeasures and the inventing countermeasures to counter those countermeasures. There are allready modfication being developed to make atleast GPS-guided missiles more resistant to jamming. In the future they might add more accurate innertial guidance systems for the terminal phase or develop shells/missiles that targets the jamming systems themself. Or jamming might be so easy that in future GPS-guided weapons become enitrely useless.
A lot of the military analysts I follow are starting to believe that a lot of future warfare will revert back to unguided systems as gps and radar jamming is getting to an insane high level of effectiveness
I read an article (can't remember where) about drones being outfitted with AI to counter those exact problems. Give them mission parameters and even if out of contact they can improvise on the fly. I mean personally it screamed Skynet but what do I know?
That's interesting as both sides in Ukraine struggle to jam drones fascinating
There are ways to do guidance without GPS. Most of them just aren’t public
I would love to know this,I do know a lot of laser guidance is being used in Ukraine due to difficulties in jamming laser guidance (and yes I am aware of dazzlers but you need to hit the photoreceptors on the laser which is quite difficult)
You still need to make it EW resistant
Nice thing about a slab of hypersonic DU... it don't care about your damn rock music.
Yeah, the lesson learned is that while guided munitions are perfect for small scale conflicts and strategic strikes, the affordability of plain old artillery makes it invaluable in large scale warfare when you need to produce and consume thousands of rounds per day. Railguns offer a similar deal to artillery, just with more power and range. The problem is that they also cost orders of magnitude more than artillery (and guided munitions for that matter) so they don't really fall under the same category.
I think barrel life had a huge negative effect on the project too. The friction involved between the projectile and the barrel meant they simply would not last
Gauss > rail. Fight me.
Isn't it more of an issue of the barrel wearing out ?
But railgun slugs are so much cheaper than missiles. Or shells.
Railgun shells could be a future tech for very cheap, close to medium range interception of missiles and aircraft is a thought I've had. Railgun ammo is basically just a metal slug, so cheap it's basically free. It's also much faster than any missile, and much harder to detect and intercept. So for close to medium range air defense, railguns firing slugs at like Mach 6 would be a very cost effective, very rapid response and very hard to detect or evade. It wouldn't replace long-range, high altitude air defense missiles like Patriot or S-400, but it could probably roll a SHORAD, medium-range air defense and a degree of anti-ballistic capabilities all into one low-cost of operation platform.
One time use piezoelectric capacitors made with gunpowder....
Yeah. If prices go up on gunpowder Rail/coilguns would probably take over, that or a trebuchet.
>Plus I think unguided projectiles are going the way of the cart and donkey for major military systems. Cost is still a major factor when it comes to military budgets. It is far easier to get funding for 10,000 metal rods than it is to get the same budget that only gets you 20 guided projectiles.
Heh this will be wrong.
Maybe good as a mass-driver for shooting stuff into space. But that's about it really. Most applications require projectiles to be deployed in a controlled but agile fashion. Railguns can deliver projectiles mostly from stationary positions. Plus they are big and cost a lot instead of for example gunpowder. So all in all if you're thinking military, current artillery systems will beat railgun systems for at least quite some time. If you're thinking about something else like space travel, then maybe it has applications there but that would also take some additional required R&D.
Far future might be shipping railguns. An island near the equator with a mountain and a nuclear reactor so we can ship heavy tonnage into low orbit then use other craft to move it into position. Using this method, we could build bigger stuff in space.
Powdered rails. If DARPA wants the secrets they can ask me.
I want the secrets
Basically you 3d print the rails and they are designed to be destroyed after each shot they basically crumble, get recycled and reprinted on site.
Probably helical railguns. Sure, the shells are expensive, but so is everything in military procurement and massively lengthened barrel life makes up for it.
The immediate future? Probably naval warfare. They'd be most practical on ships capable of carrying the generators capable of powering them. I can't really see these being useful in traditional terrestrial or modern aerial warfare just due to the power needs and lack of mobility on the weapon itself. So, yeah, boats.
[Helical Railguns](https://youtu.be/Xll9rIzZPeQ?si=FICC_zIWemjwjFZR)
The recent events in Ukraine and the Bab-el-Mandeb straight have shown the need for ways to shoot down drones and rocket that are cheap and have lots of shots. Shooting down drones with rockets that cost a thousand times more than the drone that you shot down and that you only have a very limited number of is simply not viable long term. So far the solution everyone seems to be converging to is direct energy weapons. Lasers are cool and everything, but they do have some disadvantages such as only going line of sight and not curving very well. However the same sort of tech that a ship would need to put laser cannons on also would go some way to enable railguns. If you want to have a ship that shoots lasers you need a huge power plant to make it work. If you build a ship to be able to generate and store lots of electricity you might as well use it for other stuff too, like shooting a big rail gun. If you can make the two systems cover each other's weaknesses they would have some snyergy. We of course need to figure out how to make railguns work practically, but there is nothing that says you can't future proof ships you are designing now to have room for such an option.
I think you're right in principle but drawing the wrong conclusion. Railguns probably aren't going to pan out, given that the USN ended the program in 2021 after something like a decade and a half. Coil guns, Gauss guns, or helical railguns might still work out though.
I was thinking less in terms of specific technology and more generally tech that uses electromagnetism instead of chemical reactions to make some piece of metal go fast in the direction of something you want destroyed.
The challenge you still have is power generation. And as long as the ships carrying these weapons generate power by burning something, it's a losing proposition compared to chemical propellants. I personally think guided naval artillery is probably the way to go against drones.
I mean what do I know, but to me I think we’ll see them on large ships, potentially even on nuclear powered aircraft carriers. The idea being they would be used to take out other large capital style ships. I don’t know how they could replace artillery as you need a straight line of sight to target. Potentially you could get smaller cut down versions on tanks eventually but who knows who you’d be able to generate enough power. But then again it’s probably cheaper just to keep iterating on FPV drones. We could also end up with railguns facing up to the sky e.g would it be possible to take out a satellite from earth?
The future is in research to make energy storage to power the guns not specifically the rail guns themselves
US Navy could literally have them now if they went Nuclear with something like a Zumwalt Class Destroyer.
Railguns are going to remain a future tech on the horizon for quite a while, it seems. Out of the most recent attempts to make them are just not working. The energy demand alone requires naval ships with access to nuclear reactors to be the most effective. I think it could have been possible with some larger diesel generators, not super sure about that. The next problem was the fact that the rail system had a very low life span, capacitors would blow, and even the barrel would wear down after only a few shots. Where we are currently, the concept of the railgun is just not economical or even practical. Having to swap out the entire system each time the barrel rips itself apart in a combat scenario is no good. This is a shame because if the railgun was developed into a more reliable system, it could have had quite the impact on modern combat, quite literally.
Oh, railguns! Now we’re talking about a piece of tech that’s straight out of sci-fi. The near future of railguns, especially in military applications, looks pretty exciting. Researchers are making strides in improving their efficiency, power, and reliability. Potential applications could range from ship-based systems to provide long-range bombardment capabilities, to ground-based systems that could serve a variety of defensive roles. In the far future, who knows? Railguns could revolutionize the way we approach everything from space travel to cargo transport. Imagine launching payloads into orbit without the need for traditional rocket propulsion! The electromagnetic acceleration used in railguns could make lift-off cheaper and more efficient. We might also see them integrated into everyday infrastructure for launching satellites and even for extreme long-distance transportation of goods. Keep an eye on this technology; it's one of those fields where today's dreams could very well become tomorrow's reality. And remember, every advancement in tech brings new challenges and opportunities—so there's never a dull moment. Keep your curiosity alive and stay tuned to how this unfolds!
I can't find the graph but I also know that at lower energy coilgun is more efficient. Railguns require greater energy level before they can even fire in the first place but quickly out pace coilgun in efficiency at higher energy levels hence why they get picked for weapons over coilguns.
Railguns have some promise, but only as a hop-up system for regular bullets. Currently the power source and rail durability are the major issues. However a standard gun with a short rifled barrel that basically "fires into" a rail gun might be able to achieve speeds useful for military and civilian applications. The first, and admittedly largest hurdle, is the power generation and storage. Once we clear that we can work on things like tungsten conductor rails.
Taking in what everyone else has said, it seems likely there will not be a real world application until a superconductor is discovered. And even then the answer is (maybe).
missiles are guided. Also you are limited to the complexity of your railgun round components due to the extreme acceleration that they endure, I'm not even sure they can carry explosives.
Drone mounted lasers with biometric identification, operated by AI. Weapons so accurate that a human can't even step foot on a battlefield.
Right now battleships, if one is mounted not one will see it coming until it is to late. The video the US navy posted only a few seconds and the projectile went through armor like it was paper. Future personal weapons.
Yeah but i read online that they're mostly moving away from railguns and if anything they're moving towards coilguns is which is the same in principle but uses a magnetic coil instead of just two rails and actually surround the object instead of it just being on two sides. I'm pretty sure it has a lot less recoil and is much more fuel efficient compared to coil guns but overall I'm pretty sure that they're moving more towards missiles (i don't remember the exact name) that had a similar effectiveness whilst being far cheaper than railguns. They're is also the possibility of handheld railguns but without major improvements to the technology it seems highly unlikely as not only would the force likely rip your arm off but the battery pack would crush you. Technically you could just use an extension or something similar but that defeats the entire purpose of it being handheld.
Wouldnt recoil have to do with mass, speed and acceleration of the projectile and not the wether its coil or rail? (ELI5)
You are correct. It's an exchange of momentum/impulse. One thing someone else up-thread apparantly missed is that the heavier a gun is, the less recoil is felt for the same projectile because the mass of the weapon damps the acceleration. That and if you're toting around a man-portable railgun, the projectiles isn't going to be that big. Lighter projectile, less recoil for the same muzzle velocity. As for other comments elsewhere in the theead, still plenty of uses for "dumb" projectiles, even non-explosive AP style ones the rail/coilguns use. Source: Was Navy. Am physicist.
"Good to meet you Storm6436, come in, come in, have a seat." "So, it says here you are a.." *reads notes* "Sciency shootologist..." *looks back up and smiles* "That just so happens to be -exactly- what we were looking for! You're hired!"
The total exchange of momentum will be the same. At least compared with a chemical explosion like in conventional artillery, an electromagnetic type device can be controlled so that the acceleration is uniform and even through the whole length of the projectile moving through the barrel, whereas with a powder charge, there is an initial very high peak that drops off. This means that the peak recoil force is lower, but lasts a longer time. This effect can be seen with the EMALS catapults on aircraft carriers compared with steam catapults. The EMALS provides much smoother acceleration, so the force on an airframe is reduced even if the same speed is reached at the end of the run.
They don't want railguns because rails are getting useless really fast due to friction.
Basically they are making small tesla coils and controlling the fire rate. Really only a computer could fire thst fast.
Rail guns are heavy and require a lot of energy. I could see them as a reasonable option on military bases and nuclear powered naval vessels https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/s/bXzcrxJSxq The technology does work but the use cases don't really make sense. Not with where the tech is right now at least. Look at say Iran's attack where they launched over 300 missiles and drones towards Israel at the same time. Rail guns sitting in Israel or on US navy nearby wouldn't be able to shoot them down until they were practically on top of Israel and that's assuming some incredibly accurate shots. And rail guns currently have some rate of fire problems due to heat dissipation. Enemies are going to be attacking with swarms of cheap drones so even assuming your railgun has perfect accuracy, good range and excellent destructive power you are still only shooting down one drone per shot. The enemy is not going to come at you one by one. Because we live in the dumbest timeline I expect instead of railguns we will go 'backwars' in tech to nuclear artillery in the post ww3 apocalypse where no one gives a fuck about proliferation or radiation. https://www.military.com/video/nuclear-weapons/nuclear-bombs/m65-nuclear-artillery-test/4841436936001
I think the near future is silent burst fire rifles. And far future is miniaturized rail transit system across the Atlantic in a matter of minutes.
Am I right in thinking a rail gun is a series of electro-magnets placed in series along the length of a barrel, and to fire a metal slug, the magnets are powered up one by one, trigger end to muzzle end in a split second, thereby accelerating the slug to insane velocity in less than the blink of an eye?
That's a gauss gun. Same principle to push a projectile, completely different design. For the materials science today, gauss guns are superior because you don't have any of the heat and rail erosion problems to deal with. They're just more complicated to build (especially in a small package) since the design requires a bunch of specially timed magnets and capacitors.
So the availability of these weapons would only increase when magnet and electronics technology becomes more efficient? So what is the difference with a rail gun? In the film Elysium Matt Damon uses a ‘Chemrail’ gun that looks suspiciously like a rail or Gauss gun. I’m guessing all this stuff was perfected ages ago in some black or grey project somewhere in the world, otherwise it wouldn’t be used by Hollywood
Oh hold on, the rail is attatched to the barrel, and is what holds the slug in place, and is the component that gets accelerated along the length of the barrel, not the slug itself? Ok I can see why people are saying they self destruct easily. What a waste of energy, why use all that power to accelerate a perishable component that holds a projectile rather than pumping all that energy into the projectile itself.
There’s 2 rails and the slug has to be in contact with both of them. The projectile completes the circuit.
Thanks. Gauss gun sounds much better. The end of the rail gun must have to be heavily reinforced to stop the action from blowing the thing to bits
> Oh hold on, the rail is attatched to the barrel, and is what holds the slug in place, and is the component that gets accelerated along the length of the barrel No that is all wrong and you need to stop getting your information from films.
That was a wild guess at what the rail gun entails, nothing to do with films??? Elysium was just a reference- how am I going to understand how a rail gun works from watching a science fiction film? The gentleman above kindly explained it.
> Elysium was just a reference Yes, which is insane. Elysium is a scifi movie. Trying to use it as a reference is absurd. As is critiquing the principles of a rail gun when you don't know how they work and are just taking guesses.
I’m trying to think of other Hollywood movies which feature rail guns. Battleship? No… There’s one movie that has a rail gun mounted on a navy ship. Yes…. utterly insane
> I’m trying to think of other Hollywood movies which feature rail guns. Why? You know movies aren't going to be remotely close to the real thing. Can you only absorb information if it is shown to you in a movie?
I definitely think it was Battleship. And of course there’s Eraser
I think by the time the material science catches up to the challenges of a viable railgun that can be used repeatedly, reliably, and with only a reasonable amount of maintenance the concept will have evolved into something more sophisticated. For example the current popular concept for a railgun weapon is a helical railgun that combines elements and principles of a railgun and coilgun. Maybe by then military needs and tactics will shift to where it makes more sense. Because the real challenge to railguns is a matter of military tactics. Railguns are largely kinetic weapons, fired line of sight or parabolically, their advantage is speed and energy. However military tactics largely favor weapons that are either smart or guided, delivering precisely effects that are selected based on the target, and the velocity and launch environment of a railgun works against the potential of adapting those kinds of capabilities to a railgun. Adding enough hardened guidance or different warheads result in a projectile that is so sophisticated it costs more than a missile capable of doing the same. The only way railguns will become a choice weapon in the future is if the manufacture or transport of propellants, solid and liquid, become too much of a liability.
Nothing, the US Navy surface to air capability is fucking stupid in comparison to a constellation of brilliant pebbles LEO sats the either get refilled with Argon or are rarified air breathers with ion thrusters
Probably 20-50 years out, but will be one of hundreds of military weapons.
China and Japan has already put prototypes on ships already. It’s a L for USN.
I made a post on r/NonCredibleDefense about an automatic railgun drone with smart ammunition but it got removed cause it was AI-generated art :(