From: Christian Weisgerber (naddy@mips.inka.de)
Date: Mon Jun 23 2003 - 14:15:18 MDT
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.
I'm out of my depth here, but I wonder whether thinking about maximum
range doesn't miss the issue.
A while back I read a bit about WWII-era battleship fights. One
aspect that stuck in my mind was the difficulty of hitting your
opponent at all. I'm not sure how stable a gun platform a steaming
ship in heavy sea is. The target keeps moving around, too. And
while the ballistics of your guns are known (from empirical testing,
I suspect, rather than first principles), the environmental conditions
are variable with wind, rain, etc. When you are shooting at a
distance of several km's, these things add up. I understand ship
artillery started shooting with a guesstimate, observed how far
they were off, and tried to compensate.
With this in mind, shooting dumb rounds beyond the horizon looks
entirely pointless to me. Certainly for anti-ship use. You are
not going to hit anything. For engaging targets at long range you
really want something with homing ability, either missiles or, if
fired from a gun, at least smart projectiles that have terminal
guidance.
One aspect that seems to come up when talking about railguns is the
prospect of _much_ higher muzzle velocities, allowing flatter
trajectories and higher accuracy. This may or may not incidentally
increase the maximum range. Very light projectiles at very high
speeds would quickly shed speed at longer ranges, but for close
range work if you can throw a piece of metal at close to escape
speed at your opponents, you are going to hit them instead of just
harassing the fish.
-- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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