It's 2024 and we still don't have railguns, lasers or powered exoskeletons. What the frick happened?
It's 2024 and we still don't have railguns, lasers or powered exoskeletons. What the frick happened?
It's 2024 and we still don't have railguns, lasers or powered exoskeletons. What the frick happened?
Too expensive
>Too expensive
Nah, its the energy requierments.
Cant really do lasers and railguns without reactors.
This. It's not like we don't know HOW to do a big frickin laser, it's just utterly impractical.
You're an innumerate, technologically ignorant moron. Wall plug efficiency for a random modern laser is 50%. So a 1 megawatt laser needs 2 megawatts of power. Do you know how much that is? It's a construction machinery grade engine. You buy one off Wish for half a million USD. mount it in a shipping container and fuel it with your dad's propane tank or diesel drums. A basic gas turbine for ships is 35 megawatts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM2500#Specification
No, its the wear on the barrels. They can't take the strain of firing multiple shots
The US Navy was getting hundreds of shots through railguns in the mid 2010s. Read a fricking powerpoint.
You're right, let's triple the defense budget immediately
Japan is fricking around with railguns
Yeah, but much smaller and not for shore bombardment.
It's more practical this way, I think.
I wonder how much technological/expertise crossover there is between this and all the maglev research Japan has done.
I personally agree, just figured it was relevant to point out the current Japanese railgun development isn't particularly directly related to previous USN railgun efforts.
unique scenario they’ve got kaiju to worry about
We are also. The power requirements are the main holdup, plus barrels last like one shot (two if lucky).
Middle school girls don't count
MAGNETIC FIELDS FOLDED 1000 TIMES!
>Those heim joints
I came.
The israelites have Light Blade is service and air defence lasers will be entering service in other nations within a few years.
As for railguns the maintenance requirements are just too high for the same capability missiles already offer.
>power exoskeletons
A sci-fi meme until battery energy density drastically increases.
They're going to have to find a completely new kind of battery. There really hasn't been any innovation in the current kinds of batteries we use since they were invented. The only thing that's changed is the cooling around them.
Fluoride-ion batteries could do the job they aren't something you want to risk damaging.
I keep thinking that having a good bike to act as a charger could solve the battery problems.
exoskeletons are in use already and arent some big lumbering constructs for the front but for the logistics.
We're in the lame and gay timeline where quadcopters dropping grenades is the apex of weapons development. No cool armed light attack/recon helicopters, no modernized dragonflies, no battleships armed with even bigger and more absurd guns, no squads armed with a dozen different guns and 3 or more calibers to go around, no airforce adopting plane after plane on a basis that'd put call of duty's release schedule to shame. No, not even in the realm of entertainment where big studios would rather give you a live service than release annual interactive blockbusters
>it's another midwit didn't read any news from the last decade episode
TALOS was cancelled because it sucks compared to quadcopters and/or lifting heavy like a real man.
America has had lasers fielded for months (army) or years (navy).
China and Japan are both spamming railgun engineering papers like there's no tomorrow while America fixed the barrel wear problem and then quietly shelved them.
> The Navy has a warehouse full of railguns ready to go!
Oh. You again.
>powered exoskeletons
shit idea, it doesn't do anything to prevent chronic injuries, the main reason it was being pursued. It just shifts the strain to a different point on the body. They've abandoned it for a good reason
Those were unpowered exoskeletons, dingus. Powered versions directly take the load off your body.
We have those
Exoskeleton would typically have armor. Wheels could work, but you'd probably want to og with treads if you're going that route. You'd also want the guns directly mounted.
Oops, we've reinvented the tankette.
We have railguns on carriers to launch aircraft and they suck dick
>railguns on carriers
Lol no, a big linear actuator is not a railgun.
It literally is by definition
No, railguns work by having 2 live rails and flux forming around the projectile provides the thrust.
The EMALS is a linear induction motor where the flux is produced by coils.
They are fundamentally different designs.
t. electrician
is Emals a coilgun
I have yet to hear anyone reeee about a coilgun so it might be a recoilless gun
Theyre more reliable and efficient than steam powered systems. Get your fricking facts straight
We've been stuck in the technology tree for 5 fricking decades. Fusion and room temp superconductors should have been invented 30-40 years ago but instead we went with the sharing cat videos and porn tech tree.
Those two things would propel us forward like the steam engine and the transistor did.
we do in fact have lasers
mostly for demo shit right now
the most in-use laser systems at the moment are dazzler systems.
they are literally deployed by CENTCOM right now. yes they are essentially prototypes but they exist and they work.
I swear to god the US will be fielding death rays in space and gays will still be posting
>WE WUZ ROBBED N SHEET WHERE MY SCIFI AT
Sure, but we have like a dozen and a half destroyers with laser dazzlers in active use in the pacific. That's by far the most operational in-use laser system we currently deploy.
They already have “death rays” in that they can blast people with gamma radiation to cause massive diarrhea and eventual death. A visible light laser is the endgame for vaporizing matter via searing heat.
qrd on diarrhea rays
>cause massive diarrhea and eventual death
That helps us vs china and Russia. What tools are America building to handle India?
Sir that unit is currently deployed to syria.
nLight, Lockheed, and General Atomics are all working on megawatt class lasers
Loosely.
Active programs of record have Lockheed working on a 500mW laser and the overarching DARPA program for a 1mW class laser is still in progress.
HELSI has nlight working on a 1MW system via coherent be combination system, General Atomics is using distributed gain medium to try for 1MW, and Lockheed is using spectral beam combining. The initiative calls for 1MW, but Lockheed asked for twice as much money and promised a 500kW system because Lockheed
the 500kW laser might actually happen in the next 18-24 months.
1mW is less likely. We'll get there eventually, but 500kW is perfectly suited for certain roles.
1MW.
1mW is a laser pointer.
The Patriots decided we weren't ready for them yet.
We do, it's just classified.
Thug Shaker would have told us if that was true.
Can't believe I forgot about that moron already. Has he been sentenced yet?
Battery is the major limit. There is a private market coil guns though they don't have much stopping power. Arch Flash Labs made four different models
Im actually pretty worried lasers will win the arms race against missiles and the nuclear deterrent will fall apart.
>meanwhile on bizzaro /k/
>it's 2024 and we still don't have guided missiles, drones, or reconnaissance satellites. what the frick happened?
The Navy is run by morons
The Army is run by morons
No matter the year lasers weapons are just 10 years away from widespread battlefield deployment
>railguns
As they are, worse than missiles in almost every conceivable way
>exoskeletons
Not enough power
>lasers
Soon...
>railguns
>As they are, worse than missiles in almost every conceivable way
Cost and magazine depth are significantly better for railguns. Using a $2 million SM-2 for air and missile defense makes even less sense now when the incoming targets are $10k Houthi drones.
>rail guns for anti-drone
If you mean a surface drone (little boat) when CWIS / bushmasters already do the job cheaper than a railgun ever will.
If you mean airborne drones now you are trying to hit a tiny maneuvering target with an unguided kinetic kill projectile from a ship moving on the sea. The stabilization system is going to cost more than missile to maintain assuming you can even get something that accurate to exists at sea instead of in a lab.
What we truly need is enterprise-grade AI-powered end to end synergic laser crypto-mined exoskeleton solutions, controlled via NFT.
Well, the United States doesn't. However...
>implying this mock-up can do anything
Calling everything fake is a weak cope.
Then let's see some actual video of one, mounted to a ship, conducting multiple firings.
>"PROOFS!?" bawked the American chicken, unable to handle being beaten by the Chinese.
Real militaries don't rely on publicity stunts to fund weapon programs.
The railguns work fine but Cruise Missiles outrange them. We've got Lasers being fitted onto Warships. Powered Exoskeletons are just waiting for a better battery.
railguns are dumb. Even the most efficient ones are like 50% efficient meaning they dissipate as much energy into the shooter as they would into the target. This leads to poor service life.
And while their muzzle velocities might be greater, drag increases with the square of the velocity and energy dissipated scales with the cube, meaning the additional muzzle velocity gets wasted.
And I'm kinda skeptical that you can make smart rounds for it.
If you want range and precise targeting you can have smart rounds with ramjets or missiles
>Even the most efficient ones are like 50% efficient meaning they dissipate as much energy into the shooter as they would into the target.
That's better than modern guns. Most hover around 30% efficiency
>Most hover around 30% efficiency
+25% for 1.7 km/s (APFSDS Rh-120mm) with a specific impulse of +1.1MJ/Kg and normal propellants. Show me a railgun with +40% of eff above 1 km/s.
The Navy's railgun had ~30% efficiency from capacitor to muzzle energy, less for the complete fuel to muzzle energy.
An all that ignoring the weight of capacitors/generator that's more important than simple comparisons of efficiency. Just because the weight railguns are simply worse than conventional guns.
>railguns
Heavy, expensive and vulnerable to indirect fire. The amount of power required makes logistics hard and detection easy.
>lasers
No practical use beyond blinding people (war crime as of 1998) and destroying optics and sensors.
>powered exoskeletons
Anything that doesn't make the infantryman faster and more agile is just an extravagantly expensive billboard that says SHOOT ME PLEASE.
lasers can be used to destroy drones though, and that's definitely more viable than using expensive rockets
Power armour would be useful in urban warfare or for the last 100 yards of an assault, assuming you can make it proof against small arms and shrapnel. I agree that most of the time it's not helpful though.
My workshop/lab at UT was in the building next door to the BAE/SPAWAR testing barn and they would literally never tell anyone (including the guys working ~300' away) when they were lighting one of these bastards off. Which in hindsight was kind of hilarious.
current technology demonstrators are underwhelming - compared to conventional artillery 20-30% better speed at the cost of half of durability
not counting ROF or size of the systems...
simply not yet
Why do people see this as something that has to work well at some point? Maybe it was just a shitty sci-fi idea in the first place and will forever be impractical.
Man, I'm still waiting for those instant dehydrated pizzas from Back to the Future 2, who gives a frick about railguns?
>inserts dick in there
Congrats, you're now packing a whopping 2 incher. Go get 'em champ.
Powered exoskeletons are very much going to be a thing anon, just not in the way you think. People aren't hitting each other with sharp sticks anymore. The main use for an exta-strong soldier is going to be to move heavy things. Now, I need you to move 200 tons of powdered bug protein from loading zone A to loading zone B.
who says they dont exist? you, just because you dont know about them? why would you?
>What the frick happened?
We realized fiction...is fiction.
In FY24, the USN allocated approximately $26 billion dollars to Research, Development, Test and Evaluation. Of this amount, almost $10 billion went to Advanced Component Development and Prototypes, which railguns and lasers fall into that bucket.
Some of the big ticket items from that $10 billion:
LINK PLUMERIA (black project F/A-XX, the next generation fighter): $2.1 billion
PILOT FISH (black project): $900 million
Conventional Prompt Strike (hypersonic missiles to counter China): $900 million
CHALK CORAL (black project): $700 million
LINK EVERGREEN (black project): $550 million
RETRACT MAPLE (black project): $400 million
RETRACT JUNIPER (black project): $270 million
Etc. You get the idea. Their portfolio is a bunch of black projects. There's also some follow-on carrier work and next generation sub work are a couple hundred million each as well.
What did lasers and railguns get? Well, railguns got cancelled three years ago. Lasers got $50 million.
In FY25, lasers gets $10 million. Just enough to keep the lights on for HELIOS and HELCAP. The only program that makes an impact in the fleet is ODIN, and it's a fricking dazzler.
TL;DR The Navy doesn't give a shit about developing lasers and railguns. It's a damn shame too because they're the only service with enough power.
>Lasers got $50 million
Army lasers was around $100M
It's still woefully anemic when they blow billions on missile development every year. Hell, SM-6 1B is over $400 million on its own.
Pretty sure a chunk of the SM-6 R&D budget goes towards Aegis software shit and other random shit besides actual R&D for upgrades. It's basically the budget for everything the program needs that isn't directly procurement of the weapons.
The Standard Missile Improvement line item of $60 million covers things like AMDR integration. The $340 million line item is all missile design. I don't even think that budget covers test articles because they have a LRIP line item in procurement including Blk 1B for 10 missiles at $8 million a pop.
It's all a fricking shell game.
https://www.secnav.navy.mil/fmc/fmb/Documents/25pres/RDTEN_BA4_Book.pdf
Volume 2 - pages 180 through 186 and 923 through 959
Read the justifications yourself
pretty sure the highlighted line is a typo and it should read
> The FY25 decrease primarily attributed to termination of High Energy Laser Program
The phrase "High Energy Laser Program" is not used anywhere else in the document.
The reductions in laser funding from FY24 to FY25 are the following:
9402 (HELIOS): Reduced 15 mil.
5898: Reduced 5 mil and "completed".
9823 (ODIN): Moved 20 mil to a different part of the budget as sustainment.
That still reduced the RDTE budget for lasers from 50 mil to 10 mil. There may have been a program proposed to fill the development gap but there's no record of it here.
i literally have all of that wtf are you high or just dumb? welcome to america moron
Railguns (coil guns etc) are a dead-end, just like the super-range artillery guns are. The problem is that in the real world, materials can’t handle so much energy being dumped into them at once causing them not to be economically feasible while a missile which dumps its energy over a long period of time in a controlled fashion into cheap expendable material continues to be the meta. Sorry that’s just the way it is.
We(USA) probably do have all of that, but there's literally no reason to put our cards on the table.
We're not like China who needs to constantly flex to be taken seriously. No one wants to take on America in a conventional war with or without showing off what cool shit we have in secret.
apparently the railgun the US army built was too powerful for any practical use. Not just would it rip itself apart with every shot, but would also be totally overkill for what you're trying to shoot.
>heeyy why don't modern militaries arm their men with 50. BMG rifles? So what if every soldier fricks up his shoulders and so what if it takes like 5x more material to produce the bullets??? It would be le heckin awsome scifi"
It was a sham from the very beginning just like SOI back then
hey, don't a lot of the next generation tanks use hybrid electric powertrains?
what's the wattage on those babies, maybe you could fit a railgun in a tank
Not unless you want to sit there and wait a few hours between shots, or have it plugged into an external power supply.
I need numbers before I'm going to believe you
The 32MJ naval railgun was going to need ~20-30MW of power generation to fire ~10 shots per minute.
Even if we cut that down to ~10MJ and ~3 shots per minute, that's still somewhere in the realm of 2-3MW, a generator that size would be about the size of a truck and weigh between 80,000-100,000lbs.
In that situation you would use a High-C Li-ion battery. With a 100 KWh battery it's enough for 12-15 shots of 9 MJ (similar to current 120 mm) and efficiencies of current HV railguns.
12-15 shots isn't operationally acceptable, basically all current tanks have at least 2-3x that many shots.
12 rounds in a ready rack is fine, imo, you can recharge the batteries later
So? recharge the battery while firing, add a second battery (500kg each). I wonder the time required to shot the complete 40-round-magazine of Rh-120mm and if that happens irl.
yeah okay alright I'm going to pull some numbers out of my ass for a tank-sized railgun, hold on
5kg dart going at 1550 m/s for a muzzle energy of 6 MJ, so you should triple that for the 30% efficiency (roughly duplicated an abrams round off of wikipedia)
a watt is a joule per second, so yeah you'd need a megawatt to recharge your capacitors in 18 seconds
Honeywell managed to shove a megawatt alternator into 300 pounds and a megawatt is 1400 HP, so about what you need for a tank engine anyway
not totally out of line, imo
The 1500HP engine in a tank already has a place to use that horsepower, running the tank systems and moving the vehicle. You can't just devote that to powering a railgun.
that's what the batteries, capacitors and hybrid electric drivetrain is for, you don't use all 1500HP of drivetrain for extended periods
We're just not there yet, maybe if we had power generation and storage capacity doubled from it's current state we could build a reasonable tank with a railgun, but right now it would be a pipedream.
if accelerating a metal slug from 0 to mach 10 is too much work, why not accelerate a bolter shell or gyrojet that's already in motion?
1st stage is the primer propulsion from the barrel of a gun, 2nd stage is the rails/coils accelerating the slug further, 3rd stage is the rocket motor igniting after leaving the rails/coils.
I have to imagine there would be difficulties in wear with a propellant chamber AND magnetic rails and you need to do all of that WITHOUT fricking up your 3rd stage motor or destroying the barrel?
Yeah good luck.
Railguns don't seem that useful without getting the barrel life comparable to conventional artillery. As for lasers, where have you been Anon? The USN has deployed lasers on warships for years now. And the Army is deploying them too.
anyway now that we've determined that duplicating modern tank performance with railguns and hybrid electric drivetrains is feasible we need to determine if it's actually better than modern tanks
anybody?
IMO if its ammo propellant is 'inert' and it still can move after one or two landmines (one motor per wheel) then is vastly superior.
you store ammo in the bustle anyway and capacitors and batteries can burn down pretty quick too so it's kind of a sidegrade
The advantage of batteries is placing. it's placing have far less restrictions and they don't need to be in a single place, can be smaller and distributed.
I feel like the requirements on the projectile would make it worse for slinging HE at soft targets, so while there would be advantages in survivability in not having propellant, it would make the tank worse at it's main job of ruining infantrys' and buildings' days.
ah yeah that's true, and the days of dedicated tank destroyers is over
hmmmm
Find me a nuclear battery, and I will change the world.
USG had the marauder plasma system back in the 90's. if some of the UFO lore floating around is correct they stuck it on the black triangle ultra-craft as part of an anti-icbm platform
no i am not joking
>I am not joking
That does not absolve you of the laughter at your expense
That goes double for you.
i am but merely the messenger