Railgun for the Navy. The United States abandoned the development of an electromagnetic gun
In the United States, funding for the development of an electromagnetic cannon, the so-called railgun, has long been considered a potentially revolutionary weapon system. It was developed for 16 years, but for the first time in the draft budget of the Navy for the 2022 fiscal year, two items related to money for the railgun disappeared.
What is a railgun?
With the help of electromagnetic installations, the Americans were going to disperse the projectiles to hypersonic speeds, they were planned to be used in the air defense system of ships. Railgun technology is based on the use of an electromagnetic force, known as the Lorentz force, to rapidly accelerate and launch a projectile.
Since 2005, the US Navy has experienced at least two different railgun designs, one from BAE Systems and one from General Atomics. More than $ 200 million was invested in these projects.
Both railguns functioned in much the same way, firing projectiles using powerful electromagnetic fields. In 2017, during ground tests, the BAE Systems railgun was capable of throwing projectiles accelerating to speeds of more than six Mach numbers. The kinetic energy of the projectile in contact with the target is incredibly large, it has been compared to the energy of a golf-class car rushing at a speed of 160 km / h. It was planned that the ammunition will be able to hit targets in the air and at sea at a distance of about 260 kilometers.
Why was the project canceled?
However, as time went on, the status of this program and any results it could achieve became increasingly hazy. If in 2014 the representatives of the US Navy claimed that in the near future they would acquire an electromagnetic railgun, they gradually began to forget about this project. Many experts initially criticized the idea of railguns. They drew attention to the fact that with the current level of technology development, it is impossible to create an electromagnetic accelerator of the required power in dimensions acceptable for a warship, even an aircraft carrier. To generate the necessary energy, in addition to the electromagnetic gun, an entire power plant is required to supply it with energy. It is no coincidence that the tests of the railgun were constantly postponed and postponed. In recent years, more and more information has also emerged indicating that the US Navy is close to canceling the railgun program. Nevertheless, funding continued at a relatively stable level until this year.
But new local successes in testing the railgun did appear. In September 2020, the Weapons Of World channel published on Youtube a video of a US Armed Forces exercise in which an Advanced Gun System 155mm artillery unit (a prototype railgun) mounted on an M110 Howitzer self-propelled howitzer intercepted a BQM-167 Skeeter air target imitating a Russian cruise rocket. In the same year, tests showed that there was a possibility of salvo firing from a prototype rail gun from BAE Systems. It was reported that in the future, these systems will be able to hit targets of various types – from ships and coastal targets to enemy aircraft and guided missiles – at a distance of up to 100 miles. Then, inspired by the results achieved, the US Navy even hastily announced that they expect production samples of this weapon to arrive by 2025.
It is obvious that the US Navy is not going to completely abandon the technology of the electromagnetic gun, using the obtained technologies, work is underway on the project of the super-high-speed projectile Hyper-Velocity Projectile (HVP). But the development of the railgun itself is planned to be postponed for some time. The US Navy says it will keep the equipment, technological developments and documentation related to the long years of working with railguns in case they want to revise this concept in the future. Perhaps the developers are expecting new technologies that will make it possible to advance in the creation of the railgun.
The head of the Center for Military Forecasting, Anatoly Tsyganok, believes that the creation of a railgun is a prospect for the distant future, and not a single country in the world has made any progress in this yet.
“Developers quite often get negative experience when creating new types of weapons, this is a common practice when huge funds are wasted. Apparently, at present, technologies have not reached the level when it is possible to create such a type of weapon as a railgun. But in any case, the United States has made significant advances in technology in the design and testing of advanced weapons, ”the expert summed up.
