I am doing some damage comparsions....
I am however unsure if the giant main gun of the Ragnarow Titan is a Gaus or the Rail gun?
Please help me:
Primary Weaspon = EDIT: Rail Gun
Secondardy Weapon = EDIT: Gaus Guns
Thank you!
The main gun is a Rail gun.
The huge cannon that goes down the entire center cannon is the railgun, as well as where most of the Ragnarov's abilities spawn from. So the primary weapon. It is the only unit in the game that has the railgun weapon type, and is not affected by any research.
The Gauss guns are the three double turrets on each support "wing" of the Ragnarov. It is the secondary weapon, and is affected by the range and damage upgrades for the Gauss weapon type.
You know the US Navy has just tested its first railgun a few months back. It has been calculated that it would have an IMPACT velocity greater then mach 5, at about 180 miles away. Its so powerful that they can't risk using explosive shells, mass rounds are going to be more effective with that kind of impact velocity anyways. Now all the Navy needs is a reactor that can actually provide the power for these insane guns...
They have a power generator in the works, yet the heat inside of it always melts the plates containing the reaction.
Sareth, off-topic, but yes they do. The problem isn't really the power source though. Modern submarines, battleships, and carriers all run on their own nuclear reactors, so power isn't really an issue. You might have to turn the propellers off for a couple seconds to fire a volley, but that's not really an issue when you're sniping someone a few hundred miles away.
A big portion of the problem is the wear and tear on the rails themselves.
I have heard that one important bottleneck is the capacitor technology...the charge up time can be a real killer for getting lots of shots off quickly...I suppose that isn't a problem for a long range precision strike, but if you were looking to replace more conventional weapons (let's just be theoretical and say a machine gun) then it'd be a problem...
I suppose it doesn't matter though if, as you say, longevity (and maybe heat dissipation) is the biggest issue...simply put, firing faster ain't going to help so much if your device breaks while you're using it...
Actually saw an interesting talk on some of the new capacitor technology they are working on, but they were more concerned with non-military applications which kind of bummed me out...new rechargeable batteries can only be so interesting....
Railguns already have the force to vaporize tungsten, that's the cone of flame you see behind them, and that metal doesn't like to get melted, really doesn't like to get vaporized, and really doesn't like to burn. Imagine what that has to do to the inside of the rails. Railguns, unless they can magically be made to fire much cooler, will remain a sniping weapon while gauss weapons will be capable of more rapid fire (built one of those once, very fun little device) due to the fact that you only have the heat from the electricity, not the friction as railguns do.
Well, there are all sorts of new things in the works though. Tobacco Mosaic Virus (apparently when you infect a tobacco planet with it, it'll convert something like 50% of the mass of the plant into more of itself, it's that vicious) when bound to the plates inside of batteries can apparently increase battery charge by 10 times, taking your 1-day smartphone and making it a 10-day smartphone. I guess they're testing how it does with repeated recharges now.
I'm not going to lie, I didn't believe you at first when you said TMV could help batteries so I actually looked it up...
That is quite impressive...considering the age of some of the articles (late 2010) I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention on developments recently (or maybe the rock I live under is too big)...is this stuff actually being used in anything commercial or is it still in the research phase?
To my knowledge, still in the research phase.
haha yeah i remember reading a blurb in the WSJ about that, very cool stuff indeed. Something creepy about using viruses in that way.
If I remember correctly they had a piece of "paper" that was really a virus that had 1/4 of a charge of a double A battery. Very cool stuff. Once it is implimented I can say that cellphones are a deadly virus needing to be contained!
I would have to go back and check but I believe that the gun that the USN just tested is their new improved model which is twice as powerful and thus twice the power useage of their first one 32gw as opposed to the 16gw and the high speed cruisers they are wanting to mount it to would have to coast while the monster was being charged. Talk about powerhungry hehe. I can't imagine what it would take to power one the size that the Ragnarov has. But suffice it to say we prob don't have a watt measurement for it currently.
@ nate
2 times as powerful? holy guacamole. Would be crazy to see one of these bad boys bring back a submarine deck gun that would fire 360 miles away at an aircraft carrier, the size of the crater in the carrier would probably be pretty big. I wonder how many shots it would take? Sign me up for that duty any day of the week (almost as fun firing off an adcap torpedo or tomohawk missile). i wouldn't be surprise if phalanx guns would have a hard time dealing with that high speed of a projectile, i'm not even sure if we have the capability to target something that small moving that fast.
Better question, would normal small caliber weapons have the energy to destroy something moving that fast? I mean you might hit it off course, but you're not going to stop it like when you hit a missile. You might need to use guided missiles for stopping the thing.
@ goa
From what i've seen of the official demonstration vids, the shot itself isn't particularly large(no WW2 style battleship shots).
Well the phalanx anti-missile system onboard a ship might be able to do it, yet mach 5+ is fast. Phalanx systems aren't exactly "small arms fire"(lol) and would really need enough bang to destroy the aerodynamics of the shot, and considering the high ballistic arc (pretty much attacking from above) any small push to either side would throw off targeting and render the shot potentially harmless. Remember its travelling at mach 5, and small things would be hitting it travelling at slower speeds, yet still would be like mini brick walls having a few mach in speed difference. Also, phalanx systems fire a LOT of rounds per second, and the energy of any impact would be enourmous. Any sailors on the boat would be afraid of some shrapnel, as the round would likely be pulverized into thousands of pieces. If I remember rightly the shrapnel issue would be because of the engagement range of the phalanx guns, something that I don't remember, and wouldn't tell you If I did, lol.
At visual range I don't think you would have a chance in hell of stopping one of these shots(visual is something like 26miles to the edge of the horizon). I don't know what the muzzle velocity is, but its gonna be high, and only 26 miles of wind resistance isn't going to do much to that shot. Fast and mean, and oh so effective. I wonder how deeply you could penetrate into a mountain with one of these things. The shots sure would be cheaper then a tomahawk missile.
The main issue imo, would be tracking a small fast moving target to get the right anti missile weapon on target at the right time.
Adding wipple/whipple (I forget the spelling) shields is sufficient. Ironically, for all their power, if you put a plate of aluminum (or some other metal) in the path of the shot about a foot away from your hull, your hull will end up with nothing more than a scorch mark. I've read that the reason for this is that at those speeds, it'll explode on pretty much any change in density, so hitting a metal plate above the main hull will cause it to explode there while doing almost no damage to the hull itself.
Not yet anyways.
What are they, something between 20-40mm rounds? By ships standards I consider that small arms.
So maybe Phalanx round would be effective as well if they hit the thing. Interesting.
May need a Physics boffin to confirm but i believe the velocities these things fire at create a shock front that would 'push' smaller objects out of the.
Hyper velocity impacts are seriously bad news too, I remember reading about them around the time of the 1st gulf conflict. It was theorized that a crowbar from 200 mile up effected by gravity all the way would hit with enough force to vaporize Saddam Hussein's palace. I believe that was about a mach 15 impact, these guns are pretty scary stuff.
You're probably referring to the sonic boom. I suppose it would exert a force on an object attempting to approach it from the side, but for an object in front of it, it would have little to no effect.
Project Thor
The phalanx system would never be able to hit a railgun round. an object the size of a brick going at mach 5 would be damn near impossible to lock on to. Even atmospheric haze would ruin the lock.
Yep I agree with you ase of spadez. Yet I'm also looking ahead to see what would be improved, and perhaps the phalanx system could be improved to deal with this threat. After all, warfare capability constantly evolves, once someone has a powerful capability, someone will spend a lot to provide a powerful defense to that capability. I don't profess to know all the intricacies of the physics involved at such an encounter, i'm just talking about it because well, its fun and its also very cool, imo.
Interesting idea however salt is a major issue with this system and reguler upkeep is required to combat corrosion I don't see how that would be practical on a submarine but maebe some genious will figure something out.
Ase is right the Phalanx has enough problems hitting the guided missile systems that if goes after currently not to mention is jams ALOT.
I would be cautious about using such a device underwater... I'd be concerned that the water itself would tear the projectile to shreds.
In the event of the submarine surfacing you run into another problem: as mentioned previously the rails undergo friction, which degrades them. In addition, you will get electrical arcing (which is a big portion of the fireball that you see in those test shots). If a submarine fires the weapon shortly after surfacing, I would be concerned that the salt water would conduct the current from the rails to some other location that it's not supposed to go.
On Mythbusters, they tried a .50 cal shot into water; it disentegrated the bullet within a couple feet. The same would probably happen to the railgun's slug. Aside from that, you have a ton of current and a hot object. Current makes water split into it's components. Hot objects tends to make nearby hydrogen and oxygen go boom. You might actually blow your gun up lol.
Come to think of it though, I could see some smaller and less powerful nations using cloud seeding to cause rain near the ships using railguns to bombard them from hundreds of miles away, thus halting the bombardment. Hmm..
Na you don't need to be genius to solve the corrosion issue. You would have to store the gun internally(in a specially sealed, water free environment using a demoisturizer to limit corrosion...these are standard on submarines as it is, so this is completely doable) and set it up to fire as a deck gun via a "crane" apparatus that would require a small amount of setup before use. You would need calm seas and clear air to fire, yet i'm sure there would be testing to make it as "rough weather ready" as possible. This would be a rather large submarine, and it would have to have a keel or risk being flipped after it shoots (a submarine normally has a round hull). This thing probably wouldn't be winning any sound silencing competitions, yet its ability to be something like a large submersible sniper could be quite alluring for special ops. Especially if they could find a way to automate gun setup once the ship surfaces.
Now all the maintenance costs of those extra moving parts on such a ship would probably ensure that there wouldn't be a lot of these sort of "submersible guns", and we wouldn't know if such maintenance would be worth the cost. Yet, just possessing the capability alone is enough to change the nature of strategic planning, and therefore development of such a weapon could be worth the cost for this reason alone.
The question you asked OP, is a bit of an oxymoron
a Railgun IS a Gauss Gun, so it cannot be OR.
I think your refering to a COILGUN which is also a Gauss Gun.
Carl Friedrich Gauss formulated the mathematical descriptions of the magnetic effect used by magnetic accelerators, So weapons such as this using his designs are called "Gauss" Guns
Coilguns use a series of coils to fire a ferromagnetic projectile out of a tube.
Railguns use two electromagnetic rails to fire a projectile by the fact that two coiling magnetic fields result in a force that moves perpendicular of the opposing field movement.
so both Coilguns and Railguns are Gauss guns.
-Æ
In Sins they are treated as two different weapon types, even if this conversation got way off topic on real ones.
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