Will the Navy develop a working, deployable railgun by 2020?

[jimmy olsen]

Not just subs, carriers are nuclear too and we built quite a few nuclear cruisers in the past though.

[Viking]

Not just subs, carriers are nuclear too and we built quite a few nuclear cruisers in the past though.

They stopped making CGN's some time ago.

[jimmy olsen]

I did specify "in the past" didn't I?

Anyways,  might not need a nuke plant to work.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4231461.html

The lab version doesn't look particularly menacing—more like a long, belt-fed airport screening device than like a futuristic cannon—but the system will fire rounds at up to Mach 8, drawing on tremendous amounts of electricity to generate the current for each test shot. That, of course, is the problem with rail guns: Like lasers, they're out of step with modern-day generators and capacitors. Eight and 9-megajoule rail guns have been fired before, but providing 3 million amps of power per shot has been a limitation. At 32 megajoules, this new system appears to be the most powerful rail gun ever built, and the Office of Naval Research is installing additional capacitors at the Dahlgren facility to support it. The planned 64-megajoule weapon, if it's ever built, could require even more power—a staggering 6 million amps.

According to Dr. Amir Chaboki, the program manager for Electro-Magnetic Rail Guns at BAE Systems, "The power is available. The challenge is how you use it." The Navy's electrically-propelled DDG 100 Destroyer, Chaboki says, is a prime candidate for the final 64-megajoule system. Around 72 megawatts (MW) of the vessel's power can be used for propulsion. But during combat, the destroyer's speed could be brought down, freeing up energy for a rail gun. Chaboki calculates that firing the 64-megajoule weapon six times per minute would require 16 MW of power, which would be supplied by either onboard capacitors or pulsed alternators. The more daunting challenge is the force of the rail gun itself: A few shots can dislodge the conducting rails—or even damage the barrel of the gun.

[Razgovory]

16 MW is more power then a small country.

[grumbler]

Not just subs, carriers are nuclear too and we built quite a few nuclear cruisers in the past though.

They stopped making CGN's some time ago.

But not because of the fears of some lover of run-on sentences that "just don't like the idea that you design a ship with a nuclear reactor with the intention to put it in harms way where somebody might intentionally shoot weapons at it that might destroy the ship and disperse the nuclear fuel into the environment."  SSNs are still being made, and they are nuclear-powered.  CGNs were stopped (and even scrapped while quite young) because it simply costs too much to run a ship's nuclear power plant for the gain you get from it, for anything smaller than a carrier that is able to breath air.