You’ve probably heard about the US Navy’s recent successful railgun test, but it’s not the only game in town:
It’s all go in the world of hypervelocity railguns this week. Following Friday’s 33-megajoule test shot carried out at a US Navy laboratory, it has also been announced that a different railgun known as “Blitzer” has recently carried out firings which suggest that it is almost combat ready.
The Blitzer comes to us courtesy of famous radical-tech company General Atomics, well known to Reg readers for its development of robot warplanes and electromagnetic mass-driver catapults for aircraft carriers among other things.
Now, in a statement which is dated 7 December (but which didn’t appear on the firm’s website until yesterday*) General Atomics would like to inform the world that the Blitzer was carrying out highly interesting and “tactically relevant” shoots back in September, actually, while the johnny-come-lately test job at Naval Surface Warfare Centre Dahlgren hadn’t even got its boots on.
Railguns have been one of the preferred technologies of near-future SF writers for years, but the necessary real-world technology has not been easy to develop. SF versions are often postulated as replacements for rifles and machine guns, but the current technology will only be suitable for fixed installations or shipboard use (and not just any ship: the electrical requirements are huge).
This may be the most attractive facet for the remaining “big gun” advocates in the Navy:
In the nearish future, depending how accurate GA’s “tactically relevant” puffery turns out to be, warships equipped with Blitzer-type railgun turrets might offer far better air defences than Type 45 or Aegis vessels can today. Such defences might only be penetrable by bigger, heavier railguns firing from beyond the horizon — along the lines of the Dahlgren boffins’ desired 64-megajoule weapon. It would, of course, require a massive capital ship to carry such guns and power them for any serious rate of fire — such a future might see the big-gun (railgun) dreadnought battleship return to its lost dominion over the seas, ousting the parvenu aircraft carrier, missile cruiser etc.
