US Navy Railgun - Their Most Powerful Cannon

this is the US military's most powerful cannon the electromagnetic railgun which can shoot up to 100 nautical miles at Mach 7 point 5 and impacting the target at Mach 5 using only energy as its propellant the high velocity projectile will destroy land sea and air targets purely from its kinetic energy rather than with conventional explosive warheads so what is a railgun well the ear alga launcher is a long-range weapon that fires projectiles using electricity instead of chemical propellants like gunpowder magnetic fields created by high electrical currents accelerate a sliding metal conductor or armature between two rails to launch projectiles at 4,500 miles per hour basically it shoots a big solid metal projectile at very high speeds and vast distances and does damage using kinetic energy only using electricity to shoot the railgun works by storing power for several seconds generated from an external source like a ship after the weapon is charged with some 32 mega joules of energy it's capacitors send an electrical pulse down two long rails one negatively charged and one positively charged generating an electromagnetic field that fires the projectile along the two rails at up to Mach seven using extreme speed the warhead impacts with high kinetic energy ripping a hole through whatever it was aimed at the 25 pound projectile is a non explosive bullet like a big dart inside an aluminium alloy casing or semi that falls away after the projectile leaves the barrel the greatest advantage of an e/m rail gun on a naval vessel over traditional explosive round weapons is the safety aspect as no propellant is required to fire the projectile and no explosive rounds are stored in the ship's magazine valve guns have been around a long time in sci-fi TV shows and movie the most recent I can think of is from the TV show the expanse we're all the big military spaceships all user al guns and in the 2009 movie Transformers - a naval vessel uses a railgun to shoot a transformer off the pyramid but the e/m railgun has two major complications the weapon takes an enormous amount of power to fire and that literally tears itself apart with use the railgun has already been in development and testing for over a decade with total cost exceeding five hundred million dollars in its current form the railgun simply requires too much power for widespread use the problem is the only ships that will be able to generate the gargantuan 125 mega watts of power required to fire the railgun other zumwalt-class destroyers which will use rolls-royce turbine generators to produce as much as 78 megawatts of power for the ship but only three of these technologically advanced warships will be produced a bigger problem is that the railgun will shred its internal components to bits if it is fired enough you can see parts of the rails themselves in Rupp ting from the weapon s plasma when it is fired the projectile is leaving at incredibly high velocities and it accelerates down the barrel the contact between the Sabo and the rails simply erodes the gun itself the other short-term solution is to develop a railgun that uses less power and ian's railgun that could fire a projectile at 2,500 miles per hour instead of 4600 miles per hour and hit a target at 15 nautical miles instead of 100 nautical miles would still be incredibly useful especially if the Navy could mount the weapon on existing warships a less powerful railgun still has all the advantages of being cheaper to fire and removing dangerous explosives from a ship anyway that's the end of this video thanks for watching and we'll see you next time bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Wonder World

Views: 12,421,447

Rating: 4.8118529 out of 5

Keywords: us navy railgun, railgun, rail gun, navy railgun, electromagnetic railgun, wonder world, military weapons, future weapons, future technology, electromagnetic, naval ship firepower, energy weapon, military gun, military cannon, Most Powerful Cannon, military fire power, em railgun, energy gun, most powerful weapon, futuristic technology, futuristic weapons

Id: 58MmOpSm4LY

Length: 4min 20sec (260 seconds)

Published: Fri May 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/PickleKing111]

Nah bro i thinks thats just a normal Railgun.

[u/yahya-ak]

Just needs some crane legs and shooting barrels.