NX Class

[Captain Seafort]

Why wouldn't they have the range?

I never said that they wouldn't - I said that CYRRENTLY, in RL, they don't. I am not an expert in magnetodynamics or ballistics, and I don't claim to be. I just know that they don't, right now, and that was all I said.

Even today, we may not have the technology to build a space warship, but the weapons themselves wouldn't be a problem outside the atmosphere - there's nothing to slow a round down, so they'd keep going at the same speed forever.

[Mikey]

OK - fine. What has any of this to do with my idea to include rail guns rather than some continuity-wrecking weapons tech on the NX-class?

[Jim]

Even today, we may not have the technology to build a space warship, but the weapons themselves wouldn't be a problem outside the atmosphere - there's nothing to slow a round down, so they'd keep going at the same speed forever.

save for forces from gravatations bodies like planets etc...

[Mikey]

A perfect example of "TR-116 syndrome" at work.

If we're goping to debate about the actual practicability of rail a/o coil guns in space, then remember: gravity decreases EXPONENTIALLY - as the square of the distance from the mass in question. You would have to be doing your fighting pretty close indeed to a body in order to have that seriously affect your firing solution. It would be more akin to a modern sniper accounting for wind.

Although it opens the way for a whole array of in-system evasive tactics...

[Granitehewer]

wind........i hope you didn't mean flatulence

[Teaos]

I wonder how much damage a kenetic attack like a rail gun could do to an armored ship. That and the attack would be spread out not cetralised. So you would do a lot of little damage everywhere but no big damage to important parts.

[Tsukiyumi]

It of course depends on the speed the projectile is travelling, and its mass. If you 'fired' a super-dense object with a one-ton mass at even 25% of c, the energy released on contact would be immense. The armor of another ship would have to be excessively dense to withstand such an attack. Effect on shields are another thing, of course, but considering the relative simplicity of a rail/coil gun, I can see them being a reasonably effective starship-based weapon in the 2150's.

[Tsukiyumi]

Of course, a limited ammunition supply would be a major drawback, but they never seemed to run out of 'photonic torpedoes' on Enterprise anyways, right? How many of those damn continuity-wrecking things did they have on board?

[Mikey]

EVERYTHING on board the NX-01 was a continuity-wrecking device.

And to give you an idea, the current 64mJ rail gun that the USN is working on does not require a warhead(!) - just a solid slug - to destroy a main battle tank at up to 7 miles.

[Tsukiyumi]

I wonder what the mass of that projectile is, and its speed...

[Mikey]

I don't recall the specs exactly, but it's not as big as you might guess... IIRC by a quick TV visual analysis, it looked to be about the same size as a 90mm mortar round.

[Blackstar the Chakat]

Here is some stuff about from Wikipedia about Railguns as weapons.

Railguns as weapons
Railguns are being pursued as weapons with projectiles that do not contain explosives, but are given extremely high velocities: 3500 m/s (11,500 ft/s, approximately Mach 10 at sea level) or more (for comparison, the M16 rifle has a muzzle speed of 930 m/s, or 3,000 ft/s), which would make their kinetic energy equal or superior to the energy yield of an explosive-filled shell of greater mass. This would allow more ammunition to be carried and eliminate the hazards of carrying explosives in a tank or naval weapons platform. Also, by firing at higher velocities railguns have greater range, less bullet drop and less wind drift, bypassing the inherent cost and physical limitations of conventional firearms - "the limits of gas expansion prohibit launching an unassisted projectile to velocities greater than about 1.5 km/s and ranges of more than 50 miles [80 km] from a practical conventional gun system."

If it is even possible to apply the technology as a rapid-fire automatic weapon, a railgun would have further advantages in increased rate of fire. The feed mechanisms of a conventional firearm must move to accommodate the propellant charge as well as the ammunition round, while a railgun would only need to accommodate the projectile. Furthermore, a railgun would not have to extract a spent cartridge case from the breech, meaning that a fresh round could be cycled almost immediately after the previous round has been shot.

Tests
Full-scale models have been built and fired, including a very successful 90 mm bore, 9 MJ (6.6 million foot-pounds) kinetic energy gun developed by DARPA, but they all suffer from extreme rail damage and need to be serviced after every shot. Rail and insulator ablation issues still need to be addressed before railguns can start to replace conventional weapons. Probably the most successful system was built by the UK's Defence Research Agency at Dundrennan Range in Kirkcudbright, Scotland. This system has now been operational for over 10 years at an associated flight range for internal, intermediate, external and terminal ballistics, and is the holder of several mass and velocity records.

The United States military is funding railgun experiments. At the University of Texas at Austin Institute for Advanced Technology, military railguns capable of delivering tungsten armor piercing bullets with kinetic energies of nine megajoules have been developed. Nine megajoules is enough energy to deliver 2 kg of projectile at 3 km/s - at that velocity a tungsten or other dense metal rod could penetrate a tank.

The United States Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division demonstrated an 8 megajoule rail gun firing 3.2 kilogram (slightly more than 7 pounds) projectiles in October 2006 as a prototype of a 64 megajoule weapon to be deployed aboard Navy warships. Such weapons are expected to be powerful enough to do a little more damage than a BGM-109 Tomahawk missile at a fraction of the projectile cost.

Due to the very high muzzle velocity that can be attained with railguns, there is interest in using them to shoot down high-speed missiles.

This is my kind of weapon. Low cost ammo, and massive damage.

[Tsukiyumi]

Right. Something tiny travelling at tremendous speeds can impart incredible energy. Destroy an MBT? With an object the size of a tennis ball? If you up the ante to basketball-size, you could sink a warship, or at least cause considerable damage. Of course, if you increased the speed enough, you could sink one with the tennis ball sized object. Or one the size of a marble...

Very impressive.

[Mikey]

Hey, I was pretty good with my educated guess, huh? Let me amend that fantastic quote by ChakatBlackstar by saying, IIRC, the 8 mJ project is now able to fire a few times before servicing, and that it is part of a prgoram to field a 64 mJ weapon within about 15 yrs.

[Blackstar the Chakat]

We're a long way from marble sized ammo doing that kind of damage. They're still trying to build a railgun that doesn't damage itself everytime it fires. There's a sale pitch: "This gun is so powerful it destroys itself!"