r/BeAmazed • u/Wooden-Journalist902 • Nov 15 '25

Technology Hypersonic railgun round goes through metal plates like they are made of paper.

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451

u/ALexGOREgeous Nov 15 '25

What would be the application for this? Warships? Buildings?

505

u/ShonuffofCtown Nov 15 '25

Warship based railguns make the most sense to me. I am deeply unqualified though

379

u/SIPR_Sipper Nov 15 '25 edited Nov 15 '25

The ridiculous power needed to use one of these means you basically can't use it with anything that doesn't have a power source on board.

So any naval vessel with a nuclear reactor on board is great. Otherwise, its not very effective to use fuel to charge a battery to fire a railgun instead of just using conventional munitions that supply their own power.

EDIT: ok like a dozen people have informed me that its all about barrel wear, not power consumption. There's a lesson here about trusting random people on reddit.

59

u/FLDJF713 Nov 15 '25

Problem is that the US navy tried it and it would only be good for one shot before the entire firing assembly would need to be replaced. It wasn’t cost effective nor really effective for wartime use.

75

u/IvanNemoy Nov 15 '25

The USN and DARPA are still working on it and the issue with "every capacitor and the guide rails and power couplings disintegrate every shot" has been largely fixed. Key issues at this point are power consumption, cycle times and reducing sizes to where it can be mounted on something less than a BB sized hull.

Considering the first attempts were in 1984, I'm not holding my breath on this one.

10

u/Practical-Hand203 Nov 15 '25

Key issues at this point are power consumption, cycle times

I was thinking, aren't the nuclear reactors even on large vessels pretty small, with something like 100kg of fuel? With everything else that needs powering, charging caps must take a while ...

18

u/mr_potatoface Nov 15 '25

100kg of fuel?

Modern carrier reactors contain about 1000kg of fuel which is good for 25 years. But they also have over 100 tons of shielding. The new Ford class carriers are very overdesigned for the current configuration. I believe they only use 1/3 of their total power generation capability, with the rest available for retrofits. It was one of the problems the Nimitz have right now. Their biggest constraint is the limit of available electrical capacity. Their reactors are right at the limit.

7

u/IvanNemoy Nov 15 '25

Yep. The Zumwalt was made with excess power capacity with railguns in mind. If the can get the required power needed down (the General Atomics "Blitzer" system used 25 MW every shot,) they could improve the cycle rate and make it more viable.

3

u/Animanic1607 Nov 16 '25

And now we are unmaking the Zumwalt because they suck.

2

u/Engineer_Zero Nov 15 '25

Could you not supplement that with something like a battery bank?

1

u/SteelCode Nov 16 '25 edited Nov 16 '25

Reactors don't necessarily have the capacity for anything, it's the capacitors (or batteries) that would hold a charge -- problem was (iirc) that the capacitors burned out quickly and the reactors just couldn't recharge fast enough... you're talking about bottling several hours worth of charging batteries just to punch a fist-sized hole through a ~mile long line of fire... not really effective at destroying an enemy force arrayed against your fleet; you'd prefer to launch a dozen guided missiles at key targets to utterly obliterate them while barraging their position with explosive ordnance from the long guns for roughly the same effective power draw. (hyperbolic estimates for the ~80's-90's original testing)

Nowadays I believe they can fire anout once a minute with modern reactors and components, but battles aren't really just about popping 1 target per minute in a large-scale fleet engagement; railguns are really about sniping a priority target from outside visual distance. I believe some of the tests in the early 00's could hit relatively accurately at several miles away but due to topology, that's hard to translate into real-world applications since targets are often behind mountains or other buildings and not just a bullseye spray-painted onto a mountainside.

1

u/Practical-Hand203 Nov 16 '25

Did you mean to repond to me? I did state that I'd expect small reactors take a long time to charge cap(acitor)s.

1

u/SteelCode Nov 16 '25

Maybe not, might've hit the wrong tiny button, can't be bothered to relocate the comment. sorry.

1

u/tschawartz12 Nov 16 '25

But its caps, having multiple banks would reduce that. It's still early tech as far as it all goes. The real issue has been rails, they damage themselves but theres a Japanese company that has made great strides in that dept. The hold ups are power/heat, system wear and size for deployability.

1

u/schwuar Nov 15 '25

Hmm DARPA and railguns? Brings back memories

1

u/Menzlo Nov 15 '25

Do you have a source for this? Would love to read more as I had thought railgun efforts had been all but abandoned.

1

u/Kevlar013 Nov 15 '25

This video from a few months ago states it's basically dead in favor of missiles and lasers: https://youtu.be/qqhXsUwncfE

1

u/JustNilt Nov 16 '25

Have they fixed the barrel lifetime issues yet? Last I heard they only got off a handful of shots per barrel at best but I haven't really kept up with the work on them so I may have missed something on that.

1

u/TelluricThread0 Nov 15 '25

This was maybe true 15 years ago with one of the crappy first prototypes. You can watch them fire several rounds in succession with an auto loader system in test footage.

1

u/Ok_Release231 Nov 15 '25

Was looking for this comment. I believe I read somewhere that the forces generated on the rail are so great that it's basically rendered useless once fired, or something to that effect. That's pretty wild.