From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jun 23 2003 - 10:57:19 MDT
--- JAY DUGGER <duggerj1@charter.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Jun 2003 12:32:46 -0700 (PDT)
> Mike Lorrey <mlorrey@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >Railguns can certainly shoot projectiles beyond the
> >horizon, more than
> >two times further, in fact, than current chemical gun
> >technologies.
> >
> Umm, this might not hold true. When I left the US
> Navy four years ago, descriptions of rocket-assisted
> rounds for 5" inch guns had just started to appear in the
> professional literature. The material suggested ranges of
> about sixty nautical miles (~68 miles or ~110 km) for
> surface targets. Bear in mind, I didn't see these fire.
> Military contractors deserve their reputation for
> exaggerating their products' abilities.
Any projectile that a cannon can shoot, a railgun can shoot, so any
rocket assisted round that extends the normal range of a 5" gun will
also extend the range of a railgun that itself has greater range than a
conventional 5" cannon.
Using dumb warheads as a comparison, the largest gun, the 16" used by
the now mothballed Missouri-class battleships, had a range of 24 miles.
This was the longest range chemical propelled gun in the US Navy
arsenal. A 5" gun with dumb warheads has a range of something around 12
miles or so. These ranges are with full bore rounds. Using saboted
rounds will extend the range a bit more
The only maritime guns of longer range than the Missouri-class 16" guns
were the 18" guns aboard the Yamato and Musashi superdreadnaughts of
Imperial Japanese Navy, thought to have a range of about 28-30 miles.
For longer range guns, you'd need to look at either the WWI and Nazi
era railroad based guns (the Paris Gun, for example). Otherwise, look
to the gun research of Canadian Dr. Gerald Bull between the 1960's and
his 1990 assasination by Israel's Mossad.
He designed the "Baby Babylon" gun owned by Saddam Hussein and capable
of a range of 110 miles (since dismantled), and had designed the
"Babylon" gun that was designed to put payloads into orbit witha 36
inch bore. The pieces of this were intercepted by British customs,
labeled as pipe for oil work, just prior to the first Gulf War.
Bull used to have two research centers, one on the Vermont/Canadian
border (where he had the only private border crossings into two
countries in the world), and one in the Carribean where he did research
for the US military. He had welded together two 16" bore barrels, end
to end, to achieve higher exit velocities, and researched saboted
rounds intended to reach the limit of space.
In the 1980's, he engaged in commerce with the US and Canadian
intelligence agencies, supplying Angolan forces fighting against the
Cubans and their clients with enhanced artillery rounds. US congress
prevented export of US warheads to Angola, but the Canadians did not.
Bull bought surplus US warheads, shipped via Burlington, VT, emptied
and remachined them to his specs, filled them and shipped them out via
Montreal. When this project came to public knowledge, they (the intel
agents) left him swinging in the breeze and he spent a year in prison,
after which, the only work he could find was working for Saddam and
South African military concerns (he designed the mobile artillery
vehicle known as the "Kalahari Ferrari").
=====
Mike Lorrey
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
- Gen. John Stark
Blog: Sado-Mikeyism: http://mikeysoft.zblogger.com
Flight sims: http://www.x-plane.org/users/greendragon/
Pro-tech freedom discussion:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/exi-freedom
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