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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446

u/ALexGOREgeous Nov 15 '25

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

511

u/ShonuffofCtown Nov 15 '25

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

380

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.

8

u/B1ack_A1ch3myst Nov 15 '25

When I was in the Navy from 2014 to 2020, these were relatively new, using this exact video if I remember correctly. The only viable option that I heard was to bring back nuclear cruisers to mount them on. The power plant would essentially have to charge a stupid big battery bank for each shot. Seeing as the US currently hold Naval superiority anyways, the costs outweigh the benefits.

Source: Am former ETN2

3

u/LongJohnSelenium Nov 16 '25

They don't take that much energy, its just that most ships have little power to spare.

A 16inch shell has a muzzle energy of about 350 megajoules, which is about 100kwh.

So while you need a hefty generator with a high output to charge fast for the next shot, you don't actually need much fuel on hand to charge it. So a gas turbine generator would be fine.

I believe the gun pictured was closer to a 20kwh muzzle energy, so after all the inefficiencies would probably need like 50kwh total to fire. So if you wanted to shoot a round every 30s you'd need a 6MW generator. But the amount of extra fuel wouldn't be much. Like a gallon of fuel per shot.

So there's no reason nuclear would be needed.

1

u/B1ack_A1ch3myst Nov 16 '25

Unless you consider the factor of fuel being limited. Sure, we have stable supply lines, however in a wartime scenario where a weapon like this would be needed, steady supplies of fuel coming from supply ships cannot be guaranteed and, as you said, it requires a surplus of energy that is not going towards everything else that a warship needs to function.

While it would be perfectly viable to fire this kind of weapon using energy created by conventional fuel, I suppose the argument made as far as I can remember was the longevity or sustainability of such a tactic.

Although I’ll admit, back then it was mainly a thought experiment and concrete numbers may be present these days that we just simply didn’t know about back then.