The PLA and Chinese MIC is nortoriouslt secretive, so a publication like this implies that the project is quite far along and that most of the big hurdles have been cleared. Remember that the Chinese MIC is almost all state owned so it doesn't have to publish puff pieces of appease shareholders.
Shit I was suppose to work on this ! China has surpassed everyone . Although this weapon is a bad idea. It needs 1 million amperes to generate Lorentz force . Drones are far better to target enemy ships
I'm guessing this is a lot harder to stop than a drone though. If you're getting a slug of solid metal coming at you at hypersonic speeds, presumably destroying or deflecting it is a non trivial problem. And I'm guessing this kind of weapons would be mounted on ships with nuclear reactors?
I am not a weapon specialist but I work in Electromagnetics , so producing 1 million amp. requires a great deal of energy and high wear and tear. Again the erosion inside the chamber from which the shell will be ejected will be much more than regular gun. It can be improved with various materials but then again producing this war machine will be much more costlier and repairing it will be much more difficult. From Ukraine war it is clear costly weapons are not much effective if you have intense drone warfare. Iranian cheap drone tech with swarm attack can parallelize these things easily. I understand that its a great leap for researchers on EM tech but again for real war scenario I am not much confident (although rail gun is popular among navies in Asia but personally I see a great flaw in regards to cost and energy consumption).
EDIT : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaHAL2hQXzM A good summary
With respect, I think that taking lessons in naval warfare from ground warfare is a bit questionable.
Due to the ranges involved naval warfare, drones of sufficient range and power and communications capability are already going to be much larger and more expensive than your average ground combat drone. Not only that, but they have to carry much larger payloads to reliably take out a ship, and they have to be fast and evasive enough to be reasonably capable of penetrating the layered defences of a naval battlegroup when massed. Not only that, but naval drones have to be navalized (made resistant to salt water spray, collapsible wings for storage, etc) and launch platforms are expensive ships, not cheap patches of dirt.
None of the above are problems for ground combat, which makes ground combat suicide drones much cheaper to produce and field in numbers. If you look at current prototypes for naval strike drones, they mostly look like slightly smaller jet fighters instead of much smaller ground combat drones.
Well that's my point is from the start. This machine requires huge amount of power like 25 MW minimum for firing. Not saying it's not possible but then we have to built a gigantic destroyer with huge nuke reactor and so on. The life of this machine whatever you do will be lower than regular guns, why not use hypersonic missiles to target destroyers or create atomic explosions underwater to destabilize the naval fleet. I meant to say in real case scenario we have more suitable options. Obviously I am not a weapons specialist and dont have insights on the PLA research so we have to wait for further progress. ( It's also my personal opinion)
Well like you say, we don't have any insight into the PLAN planning or R&D projects. From the information we do have, the Type 055 Destroyer has an integrated power system that some articles have mooted to be laying the groundwork for a future railgun system. It's possible that the PLAN has also made some sort of breakthrough (or is close to doing so) with the power miniaturization or storage systems that would be necessary to fit one onto a Type 055. Either that, or the PLAN is doing this as a vanity project, which is pretty out of character for them.
As for hypersonics, naval missiles are housed in VLS silos that can't be reloaded at sea. Even if the mooted railgun can only fire a few dozen or so shots before requiring a barrel replacement, that still works out favorably if the barrel replacement can be done at sea. Also consider that it's possible that hypersonic missiles might still be impacted by jamming or some future interception system, whereas a metal slug travelling a mach 3 tends to not care about either. As for a sub surface nuke, setting aside the very obvious environmental damage (China plans to fight near it's home waters so can't be so blase about nuclear contamination), using any sort of nuclear weapon is a huge step up the escalation ladder and would be only one step down from striking a US base with nukes.
I'm not an expert on this stuff either obviously, so I'm just speculating on the benefits China might see in is pursuing this. It's worth noting that these things aren't mutually exclusive. I can see how this could be used for specific situations while drones are used as a more general type of weapon. Kind of how Russia uses hypersonics for some pinpoint strikes on high value targets.
I figure there is a reason they're pursuing this, but could also be a moonshot project where they don't necessarily expect it to become practical, but want to see how far they can push it. As you said, they're bound to discover some new tech through this process so even if the particular application doesn't pan out, it's not a waste of time to understand this stuff.
No research on EM is a waste of time but ultimately I talked to our country's weapons lab experts they told me US has hidden the real research so to create surprise attack on its enemies . Maybe its possible to reduce the wear and tear to some degree. Every weapon has its strength and weaknesses but yeah putting a 25 MW power plant on and with huge erosion we have to wait and see if it makes to the destroyers or in some other action.
I wonder if you could use a magnetic containment field or something similar ways plasma is controlled in a fusion reactor.
Plasma containment done in TOKAMAKS are pretty good but they have their own plasma instabilities and turbulence. That's why commercial fusion reactors are not ready yet. Regarding this gun, the issue is generally in putting a huge power and then the erosion. I think many countries will try to overcome this by shortening the length of the gun to reduce the Mach no and the erosion. Then why not use traditional hypersonics to kill the destroyer itself. How about creating underwater shockwave with nukes to destabilize the fleet and so on. China has tonnes of monies 🤣 , it is just testing everything. China has dug itself pretty well into Plasma thrusters and fusion reactors. Let's see where it leads to. I also think this rail gun can be used for clearing mountains and rough terrain.
The goals are a bit different though. The problem with plasma containment in fusion reactors is that plasma moves in unpredictable ways, and the amount of energy you need for a reliable containment field is higher than the energy output of the reactor. For this sort of application you'd be using the field for a containment of a metal slug and it just means eating more power. Regarding the power issue, it's worth noting that it would likely use supercapacitors. So you don't necessarily need a powerplant that can output 25 MW directly. You'd just charge up the capacitors for a few shots.
And yeah, it looks like China's taking a very broad approach to tech development. This sort of system could potentially be used for launching small satellites as well.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I've heard that it tears itself apart every time it fires
It has high erosion when it fires ultimately it will wear down the chamber very fast.
Thanks. Also lmao:
In the US, the navy poured a vast sum of money and decades of work into rail guns, but had to throw in the towel in 2021 to focus their limited resources on hypersonic missiles instead.
Haha at least they're getting consistent results with both projects. :)
does it still destroy itself every shot or is that the thing they fixed
This is exactly the point of that article, they did fixed that, shot 120 times in a row and it didn't break. it's still impractical because complicated as hell, big and putting it on a ship would require nuclear reactor for power, but that one problem is apparently solved.
