Modern CIWS & Anti-Missile Systems (Deployed and in development)

schenkus

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Registered Member
  • in all the excitement, let's not forget in general the best tactics against any point-defense is to mount a saturation attack, so that a CIWS gun runs of out bullets, a SAM-system runs of out missiles, and a CIWS railgun runs out of power

A CIWS railgun might also be prone to overheating, especially if it is used to shoot salvos like the 20 or 30mm CIWS mostly in use nowadays.

Perhaps a better use of a railgun as a CIWS would be for guided ammunition like in the Strales/DART system for OTO Melaras 76mm which uses a sabot to reach 1200m/s speeds and tries to destroy missiles at bigger distances with only very few shots.

If you could get something like this working with a railgun at 2500m/s this might allow you to destroy missiles at 10km distance. (And the railgun could also replace your main gun)
 
let me add this:
A CIWS railgun might also be prone to overheating, especially if it is used to shoot salvos like the 20 or 30mm CIWS mostly in use nowadays.
to
  • what would be the 'latency' of a CIWS railgun, I mean when it would be able to shoot the next round, and the round after the next?? EDIT LOL I don't even know the 'duration' of a railgun shot if you know what I mean ... the time for which it needs the max. power input ... ANYONE?
as an another 'latency', now of the railgun to cool off (LOL)


Perhaps a better use of a railgun as a CIWS would be for guided ammunition like in the Strales/DART system for OTO Melaras 76mm which uses a sabot to reach 1200m/s speeds and tries to destroy missiles at bigger distances with only very few shots.

If you could get something like this working with a railgun at 2500m/s this might allow you to destroy missiles at 10km distance. (And the railgun could also replace your main gun)
I don't mean to nitpick, just not sure if the railgun 'emissions' wouldn't 'interfere' with the RF beam 'too much':
aoQmb.jpg


(comes from
DART
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... plus I hope it's obvious what I put in apostrophes is not meant to be ... exact :)
 
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Consider 35 pounds of metal moving at Mach 5.8. Ten shots per minute. 1,000 shots before the barrel wears out under the enormous pressures. That’s the devastating firepower the
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aims to deliver in the next two years, and they’re well on their way.

“We continue to make great technical progress,” said
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program manager Tom Boucher. Boucher and an aide briefed me in the blazing hot courtyard of the Pentagon, which was hosting the annual
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— a kind of military-grade science fair.

Three years ago, then-Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert declared that railguns — which fire projectiles with electromagnetic pulses rather than gunpowder — had come so close to battle-ready that he wanted to
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. Since then the Navy has changed course, deciding that permanent land-based test sites would provide more and better data for fewer dollars than an ad hoc installation aboard a repurposed fast transport (variously known as JHSV or EFP). So on November 17, along the Potomac River at the
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in Dahlgren, Va., a new 32-megajoule railgun built by BAE Systems opened fire for the first time. (See video above). A second railgun is being set up at the Army’s
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in the New Mexico desert, where there’s enough wide-open space to fire the weapon at its maximum range of more than a hundred nautical miles.

While White Sands tests the long-range performance of the projectile, Dahlgren will work on the weapon itself. Previous test weapons were like medieval bombards, firing just a few times per day. The Dahlgren team is now making multiple shots per hour as they work out the bugs, and by the end of the year they expect to reach the goal of 10 shots per minute. For comparison, a standard 5-inch deck gun can fire
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, albeit only for a single minute before its quick-reload drum runs empty; the 16-inch guns on battleships fired about twice a minute.

Once they’ve reached the 10-round a minute rate, Dahlgren will switch focus to barrel life. A decade ago, experimental railguns often wore out their barrel with a single shot. With new materials better able to endure the intense stresses, the barrels on the current test weapons can last for hundreds of shots before requiring replacement — roughly how long a battleship’s 16″ barrels lasted back in World War II. The goal is a barrel that lasts 1,000 rounds.

The next big question — beyond the scope of the current test program — is power. The current railguns fire a 16 kg slug at 2,000 meters per second (roughly, 35 lbs at Mach 5.8), which takes 32 megajoules of energy per shot. Pumping out 10 such shots a minute requires 20 megawatts of power. Unfortunately, the only ships in today’s Navy that have sufficient energy are
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— of which there are just 11 in service — and
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— just three.

Firing railguns off anything else would require expedients. One model might be Dahlgren itself, where the Navy has literally wired up several 20-foot CONEX containers full of batteries, good for fifty shots: Such an ad hoc power source could conceivably go in a cargo hold. Retired Navy strategist
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has proposed just such a solution, converting EFP transports into expedient railgun platforms to
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.

In the nearer term, however, not only the Navy but also
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want to capture some of the benefits of railgun technology in their current cannon. Sponsored by the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, both services are testing
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designed for the railgun from existing 5″ inch naval guns and
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. (The HVP itself is the same, but is wrapped in a different fly-away package called a sabot). Using gunpowder rather than electromagnetic impulses means the muzzle velocity is lower, which in turn means the projectile can’t escape the atmosphere to fly without friction over vast distances. Even so the 5″ gun firing HVP more than doubles its normal range, to about 30 nautical miles. (The Navy officials present didn’t have the latest figures on the Army tests).

Gunpowder-propelled HVP is not enough to replace the railgun in all aspects. The electromagnetically-launched weapon not only travels further but hits harder, rendering a high-explosive warhead unnecessary for many targets. But for crucial missions such as
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, conventional cannon firing Hyper-Velocity Projectiles can play a crucial role as a
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around 30 nautical miles out. Beyond that, out to 100 miles, the giant railguns can take over with crushing force.
source:
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