railguns

[Evodavich]

i just want to say that the ruilguns is not being used to it's fullest, is this on purpose or accident

1. minigun, gatt guns and vulan canon rail style weapons would make great anti-missile systems
2. ur using normale bullet shaped rounds why not use purpose shaped rounds
3. also the fact that ur firing 200 ton soild rounds is silly the should be hollow with shit in them ???

or am i just crazy ????

[expedient]

As I understand it the railguns on the Karinne ships are firing their projectiles at speeds a good percentage of the speed of light. If it's a third of c then that's about 100,000,000 meters per second. I suppose it would be difficult triggering any useful explosive or fragmentation in the time it takes to pass straight through the enemy ships.

If the Karinnes wanted to use explosive rounds then the MPAC technology, which is plasma contained by a magnetic shield, is still effective. (Plus all their other weaponry.)

Not sure if the rounds are shaped to best effect already but the Karinnes do have better computing technology than we have and some nasty detail orientated engineers.

The big benefit in ship-to-ship battles for the railguns is their enormous range with the GRAF cannon and hyperspace missiles being their main alternatives at long range.

Using the railguns for point defense might introduce a small problem of tacking all the projectiles as they effectively have such a huge range who knows what they might hit eventually.


PS You don't sound crazy.

[Fel]

What you have to understand about magnetic catapult technology (rail, gauss) is that the rounds fire at such extreme speeds that they don't NEED anything extra.

Case in point is the heavy rail cannon the Karinnes employ. When its projectiles hit a target, they vaporize, and that vapor penetrates the armor of the target. The armor affected ALSO vaporizes and is carried along into the ship itself, and once inside, that vapor acts like a massive pneumatic battering ram, smashing through anything and everything. It also spreads out once it makes penetration, inflicting massive internal damage to an enemy vessel, but as it spreads out it loses its force, and peters out usually before passing completely through. When it does completely go through a ship, however, the exit hole is MUCH bigger than the entrance hole. When they don't go all the way through, they mushroom out a ship like an impact crater. This damage is virtually instantaneous, because those rounds, when fired in space, are moving at about .198 the speed of light, or about 56,000 kilometers per second if I did my math right (doing it in my head, sue me if I'm way off...nyah.), but the slugs can inherit the velocity of the firing ship, adding it to its own. That borders on relativistic speeds. Heavy mount cannons can put some serious power into their catapult systems, which makes the rounds move at insane speeds and inflict horrific damage when they hit, more than enough to punch through shields like they're not there and drive through most known armor types.

In some ways, the heavy rail cannons are even more lethal than pulse weapons, because they literally have line of sight range. In space, the slugs don't slow down, so provided you can lead your target, you can theoretically hit from millions of kilometers away. The tradeoff is that rail cannons are fairly large, limiting the number that can be mounted on a ship, and they have a much slower rate of fire, so Karinne vessels will use rail weaponry at longer range, then switch to particle beam, plasma torpedo, and pulse weaponry once they're at close range.

This dual weapon system makes Karinne ships nasty at almost any combat range.

Small arms rail weapons fire a round at about 14,000 miles per hour, depending on the model. The Gladiator models fire a little faster velocity round because they can put more power behind it. When something hits you that's moving that fast, it goes right through you before it has a chance to even break up. In fact,they go so fast that the impacted item suffers very little "shockwave" damage common in common bullets, where the kinetic shockwave caused by the bullet making impact causes more damage. This shockwave is what makes watermelons explode when hit by high power rounds rather than just having a hole punched in them, as you've probably seen on TV. Get hit by a rail slug, and you just have a neat hole clean through your body.

The only thing they could really put inside a slug to make it more devastating is heavier base elements, so every atom/molecule is heavier and is harder to stop. In heavy rail cannon slugs, it's feasible to fill a slug with radioactive matter like uranium to irradiate an enemy vessel, but why do that when you can just close range and cut it apart with particle beams? Outside of that, nothing else woudl really work. Explosives would vaporize, chem/bio agents would burn up, etc.

[J-Man5]

So would lots of smaller hits against another ships shields from many many railguns cause the shields to overload faster?

J-Man5

[Omegano]

I can think of one thing that would be utterly devastating that might still work for putting in the rounds. One cubic millimeter of Anti-Matter. I think that would be all it would take. And the vaporization would release it on impact, and cause a VERY big boom. No clue how hard it would be to make, though...

Omegano

[lapland]

The matter making up most of the known universe is still there even if invisible. Thus if you fire an anti-matter projectile it would be destroyed slowly by a series of small collisions before reaching the destination. The only means of holding anti-matter is to contain it within a magnetic field. This would have to be programmed to shut down at a specific time after fireing.

The smaller projectiles could be interesting though. Instead of many guns, use one gun fireing multiple projectiles like a shotgun. Although your going to have to make sure all projectiles are going to a known destination or someone may get hit lightyears away in a few years.

[ANTIcarrot]

What you have to understand about magnetic catapult technology (rail, gauss) is that the rounds fire at such extreme speeds that they don't NEED anything extra.

Actually, that's not quite right. Having lots of energy is not the same as dumping it all into the target. Against a 300m thick target, a penatrator would only have 6 micro seconds to expand before it passed out the other side. That's not enough time for plasma expansion, even in a high energy nuke-like explosion. 90% of the energy is likely to blow through completely, and then dissapate a few thousand miles down range. In contrast a smart fuse round would explode some 15 micro seconds before impact, meaning the ship is not hit by a rifle bullet, which passes through doing little damage, but a shotgun blast (which can't pass through) which does far more damage. EG: 1x 5.56mm bullet VS 10x .45 bullets.

Rifles will disable easily enough, but they're not one hit kill weapons. Antiship railguns might be - but if they are loosing some large percentage of their energy to blowthrough, then they're inefficient. And given the odds they're facing the galaxy can't afford military inefficiency.

Small arms rail weapons fire a round at about 14,000 miles per hour, depending on the model.

Given Earth's extensive experience with battlefield projectile weapons, they may well have improved on this quite extensively. Nitrogen gas moderated plasma propulsion and super cavitating rounds spring to mind.

[Evodavich]

The matter making up most of the known universe is still there even if invisible. Thus if you fire an anti-matter projectile it would be destroyed slowly by a series of small collisions before reaching the destination. The only means of holding anti-matter is to contain it within a magnetic field. This would have to be programmed to shut down at a specific time after fireing.

The smaller projectiles could be interesting though. Instead of many guns, use one gun fireing multiple projectiles like a shotgun. Although your going to have to make sure all projectiles are going to a known destination or someone may get hit lightyears away in a few years.

the magnetic field would brake down if one of the projecters was dammaged, then boom cause the anti matter would be free.

and by purpose shaped rounds i mean neddle shaped round thats is also made of hard alloys in shuch a way that it would pass though mutiply ships ( would Cbim for the calculation)
before braking up

by the way u could put pulse paticles in a hollow round and then fire them in to the nebula

[expedient]

What you have to understand about magnetic catapult technology (rail, gauss) is that the rounds fire at such extreme speeds that they don't NEED anything extra.

Actually, that's not quite right. Having lots of energy is not the same as dumping it all into the target. Against a 300m thick target, a penatrator would only have 6 micro seconds to expand before it passed out the other side. That's not enough time for plasma expansion, even in a high energy nuke-like explosion. 90% of the energy is likely to blow through completely, and then dissapate a few thousand miles down range. In contrast a smart fuse round would explode some 15 micro seconds before impact, meaning the ship is not hit by a rifle bullet, which passes through doing little damage, but a shotgun blast (which can't pass through) which does far more damage. EG: 1x 5.56mm bullet VS 10x .45 bullets.

This is how I saw things but then after Fel's post I started thinking about the Neutronium armor. If it is the impact with the ship's hull that is causing the projectiles and the armor to vaporize then that might explain all the damage occurring. Hitting an ordinary target the railguns would (should) just shoot straight through the object.

I'm guessing that Neutronium is an artificial material similar in some way to the compressed matter in a neutron star? A kind of super-solid with much higher density to normal matter but stable without all the super heat and gravity. In this case it would be the armor's super-density that makes the railgun more effective. (The Karinne version must have some kind of multi-dimensional quality along with its greater density in order to stop the phased weapons.)

I can think of one thing that would be utterly devastating that might still work for putting in the rounds. One cubic millimeter of Anti-Matter. I think that would be all it would take. And the vaporization would release it on impact, and cause a VERY big boom. No clue how hard it would be to make, though...

Antimatter rounds created by a special version of the replicators and encased in a similar way as the MPAC weapons could be interesting. The Kimdori (and a few others) have some way of handling antimatter safely so it should be possible (theoretically ).

[ANTIcarrot]

Antimatter rounds created by a special version of the replicators and encased in a similar way as the MPAC weapons could be interesting. The Kimdori (and a few others) have some way of handling antimatter safely so it should be possible (theoretically ).

Replicators aren't needed. Humans can create anti hydrogen. All you need to do is ramp that process up and then stick the antihydrogen inside a PPG. A few months later the PPG will have expended itself, and you'll have a nice lump of solid antimatter iron in its core. And if you're accelerating that magnetically, you don't need a containment system!

[expedient]

Antimatter rounds created by a special version of the replicators and encased in a similar way as the MPAC weapons could be interesting. The Kimdori (and a few others) have some way of handling antimatter safely so it should be possible (theoretically ).

Replicators aren't needed. Humans can create anti hydrogen. All you need to do is ramp that process up and then stick the antihydrogen inside a PPG. A few months later the PPG will have expended itself, and you'll have a nice lump of solid antimatter iron in its core. And if you're accelerating that magnetically, you don't need a containment system!

That's a really elegant solution. I was coming at the issues with reloading and antimatter containment foremost in my mind but your idea simplifies the whole process.

[Mad Monk]

Ongoing research - worth viewing the videos to see them in action.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... sound.html

[rand]

cool thanks for the link about it.

[Doc Spratley]

Back in SF stories in the 60's, there was some descriptions of rail guns in a few of the stories. It humbles me to know that a lot of what we fantasized about in those days has come to fruition. Now lets figure out how to launch a spaceship into the cosmos using the same idea.

[Mistra]

Looks like someone made Jason's work on his railgun a whole lot easier... They made a gun that looks like an FPS.

http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/meet ... book-wall/