Railguns: The Kinetic Future of Warfare

[Music] the future of warfare is here well on the distant horizon at least humans in their never-ending quest to find newer and better ways to kill one another are pushing the boundaries yet further we've come a long way from bows and arrows but we're now entering a world where we might soon have guns capable of firing shells at speeds up to 10 kilometers or 6.2 miles per second and forget about gunpowder the future's electric railguns are the latest phenomena currently lying in weight it's a little difficult to give a precise state of play as to what we might actually see these kinds of guns because as you can imagine with foreign militaries vying for global supremacy they don't exactly keep a blog on their progress by using electromagnetic force railguns will be able to finally discard gunpowder a mainstay in almost every kind of gun since the chinese began experimenting with the black powder back in the 10th century not only will they be significantly faster but also more accurate potentially cheaper and because of their components much safer to be carried on board ships but this is a weapon still very much in the development phase where it has been for decades now i mean don't expect any major announcements anytime soon [Music] perhaps some of you are scratching your heads and wondering just what exactly a railgun is so well let's begin with how this weapon will operate essentially a railgun is a large electrical circuit typically composed of three main parts power source two parallel rails and a moving armature in the middle which will launch the projectile the power source has to be big typically in the millions of amps for a large scale version while the parallel rails are usually between four and nine meters in length and made of a conductive metal such as copper the armature will be made of some kind of conductive metal or possibly even plasma in which an arc of ionized gas will push a solid payload forward it all sounds very futuristic doesn't it a fairly simple explanation of how it all works is that an electrical current is passed from the power source into the first of the parallel rails which is positively charged the current then moves through the armature and down the other rail which as you might have guessed is negatively charged before returning to the source and so completing the circuit the current that is now circulating creates an electromagnetic force from both rails moving counter-clockwise around the positive rail and clockwise around the negative rail this energy produces what we know as lorentz force named after the dutch physicist hendrick a lorenz which pushes the projectile away from the power source and towards the end of the rails now we say push but the reality is more like thor's hammer slamming down at this point in theory at least the projectile exits the rails at speeds of well over three kilometers a second and lands on some poor unsuspecting soul up to 160 kilometers that's a hundred miles away there is of course a lot more to it much of which we'll get into later in this video but that's a really quick and easy introduction to braille guns [Music] railgun sound like the epitome of 21st century warfare but actually their route stretched back over a hundred years to the bloody carnage of world war one in 1917 french inventor andre louis octave volcanville plea constructed a small prototype of an electric cannon using roughly the same method this greatly impressed those who witnessed his early trials enough for military leaders to commission him to build a 30 millimeter to 50 millimeter version in 1918. sadly for bill ple but excellent for most of the world the great war came to an end that year before his working model could be finalized and the project was canceled not to be deterred he was granted a u.s patent in 1922 for an electric apparatus for propelling projectiles but then things went quiet while most agreed that the design was theoretically sound there was one pretty huge stumbling block the power supply to fire a weapon like this once required a hefty and steady voltage but to fire it constantly and no doubt as part of a larger group would almost have required its own power station the idea disappeared into the recesses of what might have been until once again the world found itself a war if you've been following along with our mega projects videos you'll know full well that the nazis were streaks ahead of the allies in the early years with regards to weaponry and technology but thankfully the nazi version of the railgun came far too late in the day it was in 1944 that joachim hansler of germany's ordnance office set out his design of the railgun which was quickly taken up by the luftwaffe but with very clear specifications it needed to have a muzzle velocity of 2000 meters a second a projectile with 0.5 kilograms of explosives and ideally would be mounted on batteries of 6 firing 12 rounds per minute two things you can certainly say about the nazis is that they were ambitious and needless to say this monster was never built but did catch the attention of allied engineers after the war who like those during the 1920s felt that the idea was sound but the amount of energy needed bordered on the preposterous according to a report in 1917 each of the guns would have needed enough power to light up half the city of chicago the second half of the 20th century was a little stop start on the railgun front the 50s and 60s saw nominal progress but in 1980 the ballistic research laboratory in the united states began a dedicated program of research into railguns however once the strategic defense initiative organization aka star wars began in 1984 focus and budgets were redirected and while research into railguns didn't cease it was no longer the primary focus and do make sure you are subscribed to this channel because we've got a video about star wars coming up not the movies the defense thing however one of the first working rail guns came not from the mighty usa but from yugoslavia under a project named edo zero the yugoslavian military technology institute developed a small scale railgun in 1985 which was later improved upon with edo 1 in 1987 a railgun that came with rails 0.7 meters long and was capable of firing an object weighing 0.7 kilograms at speeds of 3000 meters a second or projectiles weighing 1.1 kilograms at 2 400 meters a second unfortunately details of this gun are very hazy and we don't know how far these objects were shot or indeed what happened to the entire project but we can probably say that yugoslavia never managed to develop a large-scale version you would have probably heard of that the next major step came in 1993 when the us and british governments began collaborating on a railgun project at the dundrennon weapons testing center and 17 years later in 2010 bae systems and the us government both successfully tested railguns and we'll look at them in just a minute [Music] now at this point some of you might be wondering why is this technology taken over a hundred years to develop and why are we still not there the answer is that while railguns are very much theoretically possible they do come with a whole host of problems power supply is a big one as i've already said a couple of times the power needed for this kind of weapon is absolutely enormous over the years the us navy has taken a keen interest in railgun technology no doubt with the hope of one day including them on their ships but it's unclear whether a single ship would have enough power to sustain a weapon for a long period another huge problem is durability the stress placed on this gun and its various components during launch is massive with the rails taking a particular beating not so long ago rail lives were measured in the tens of launches though the us claims it has now used the same set of rails over 400 times in reality they'd probably want to be able to use them for at least 3 000 launches for it to make sense in combat easier said than done the fierce heat generated by the high velocity of the armature as it thunders down the rails means that they tend to melt quite quickly then you need to take into consideration the repulsion of the two rails remember they're charged with opposite currents which creates a strong repulsive force which attempts to push the two rails apart any piece of machinery consistently subjected to this kind of force is eventually going to come apart it could well be that our technology has not yet progressed to the point that this is viable in the long run ideally a gun should be able to hit its designated target if not it's just an expensive destructive firework and this is another area where railguns have been struggling the us navy has been developing a small guidance package that could be included in the projectile but the complexities are pretty mind-boggling it needs to be less than two kilograms with an outer diameter of less than 40 millimeters the device would need to be able to withstand accelerations of at least 20 000 g's to put that number in perspective a manned shuttle launch experiences no more than three g's it would also need to cope with incredibly high electromagnetic fields and temperatures of over 800 celsius it also needs to run on a pitiful amount of power just eight watts that can operate for at least five minutes and it also needs to be cost effective costing less than a thousand dollars per unit this is another area where it's not exactly clear whether human technology is there yet or even remotely close [Music] we know that railguns come with a catalog of potential problems but it hasn't stopped several from appearing now just to clarify a point before we move on many small-scale railguns have already been developed with numerous universities particularly in the united states building and testing their own models however the leap from these devices to a potential weapon is staggering these small versions demonstrate that the theory behind it is sound but we're still a long way from seeing a large-scale successful railgun that can be used regularly in 2010 two tests were carried out using technology that had been developed by bae systems the first of which by ba itself fired a 3.2 kilogram projectile at a speed of 3.3 kilometers a second which is mach 10 roughly five times the speed at which concord traveled the same year the u.s navy used its own bae-provided rail gun and pretty much replicated that experiment and this is where things begin to get a little confusing there's no doubt that in the last couple of decades the americans have led the way with this technology but things are not quite so clear anymore a few years ago it seemed that the u.s was on the verge of real-life sea trials using the brand new joint high-speed vessel usns trenton and photos even emerged of a railgun aboard the uss millinocket whether this happened or not we're not sure but the united states seems to now be prioritizing the development of hyper-velocity projectile hvp technology which essentially uses the same kind of projectile used on a railgun but with conventional weapons perhaps the tests just didn't go well we don't know it the military is a bit secretive there are a few reasons for the switch the hvps can be used with what is already installed on a ship it's a vastly cheaper alternative and it doesn't require the same kind of monstrous electrical supply as railguns that being said they are less than half the speed of the projectiles fired from a railgun but at speeds of max 3 they aren't exactly slow in 2018 a railgun was spotted on board a chinese landing craft and later that year the chinese government themselves confirmed it with zhang zhao an associate research fellow at the people's liberation army pla naval university of engineering saying after hundreds of failures and more than 50 000 tests we have successfully developed the largest repeating power supply system in the world he went on to clarify that this repeating power system he was referring to was in fact a railgun project but again the information is scant we don't know whether the railgun spotted on the landing craft was simply a working prototype or if the pla has already managed to install a working railgun on a vessel but it does seem unlikely some have even suggested it might be a complete fabrication and the whole thing is simply aimed at boosting chinese military prestige [Music] at the moment it seems a little unclear where we go with this technology it would appear that the united states is now moving in a different direction and as for the chinese railgun it remains to be seen whether this is more a statement piece or a serious long-term aspiration railgun technology often comes back to the same issues the absurd amount of energy needed along with the massive pressure put on the gun over and over again makes it far from economically sound at the moment this is perhaps a piece of technology that we'll just have to wait a few more decades to see its full potential emerge and who knows perhaps when it finally does arrive it won't even be used to kill the idea of adapting railgun technology for space travel is now gathering pace over a decade ago a design was proposed for a 3.2 kilometer long railgun that would be able to launch space vehicles into orbit in theory the jet used would accelerate from zero to mach 1.5 in under 60 seconds before eventually reaching mach 10 as it leaves the stratosphere this would of course be a hugely complex system but once up and running it would slash launch costs to a fraction of what they are now it would be so low that we could start launching spacecraft daily if we needed to it might sound far-fetched and yes we're still some way off developing those kinds of spacecraft but i don't know about you it sounds much better than using this technology to blow each other up so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe if you've got a suggestion for future mega projects use the comments below and thank you for watching you

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 473,043

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Id: PaHAL2hQXzM

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021