this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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99
China Uses Giant Rail Gun to Shoot Smart Bomb Nine Miles Into the Sky (futurism.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
38 comments fedilink hide all child comments
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[–] [email protected] 50 points 7 months ago (6 children)

Successful or not, news of the test is a pretty big deal given that it was just a few months ago that reports emerged about China's other proposed super-powered rail gun, which is intended to send astronauts on a Boeing 737-size ship into space (NASA had begun building its own astronaut-shooting railgun in the 1990s, but had to abandon it due to lack of dinero.)

I thought EM-powered launching of fragile things like people was thrown out decades ago. How do you fire something up at high Gs without having high Gs? Projectiles and even some cargo may not care, but people might.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago (2 children)

You can launch people out of a mass driver.

They'll die, but you can do it.

[–] GrabtharsHammer 26 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If by people you mean "people-flavored slurry", sure.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

We here at Terminal Velocity Aerospace prefer the term "post human product".

[–] Anticorp 1 points 5 months ago

There's an amazing novel series called The Hyperion Cantos where they have these space ships that accelerate so quickly they turn the passengers into goo. Then over the course of the trip the auto-doc regrows the people. Their memories are wiped, so they aren't aware of what is happening to them.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago (1 children)

In theory you can launch humans magnetically if you have a really long acceleration track, though I don't think "gun" is really a very good description of such a facility since it's more like a maglev (or hyperloop style vacuum tube train) that gradually rises miles into the air with one end open. Technically possible, but given the costs and difficulty with getting a tall enough structure I'd be fairly skeptical that China actually intends to seriously build one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Wouldn't have to go straight up, could go along the ground then have a long sweep that turns up

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

That was actually the best idea because a long enough length and curve means you can use less acceleration each second. One problem is that to keep it low, like say 3Gs, both the length and curve are huge. Like hundreds of miles. Second is the exit - how high would you have to built it to not open the vacuum tube (it has to be a vacuum to work, i.e. the issues that Hyperloop ran into) and be slamming the projectile with a deceleration effect into the thin air that's left? The numbers have been crunched before, mass drivers on Earth can't deliver breakable things.

Also, that curve would be additional Gs and a lot of technical problems to maintain its path.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Thats what I was thinking of, you still have to deal with building a hugely tall structure though, because the exit must be above the thickest part of the atmosphere

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Most or all of it. To be at orbital velocity the projectile would be moving at 30 km/s. Even a small amount of gases would be a like a brick wall.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Hugely tall and extremely rigid, because if it wobbles while the projectile is moving through it, it will tear itself apart.

[–] Delphia 10 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Now someone much smarter than I can do the math, but over a long enough distance with a shallow enough incline on a ramp I dont see why it couldnt be done.

The math might mean the scale of the ramp makes the idea completely unrealistic to build. But I dont see why it wouldnt work.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Physics joined the chat

[–] Delphia 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

What does that even mean? Yes, this is a question of physics.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

8 gs is enough to cause most to pass out. 40 gs is usually going to cause permanent injury. Accelerating on a ramp at less than 40 gs would take a while if you want to reach escape velocity which is like Mach 25. Just mental mathing poorly, it’d be like a mile or two of railgun. Iunno, someone sober do the math.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Well yeah a lot of the concepts for magnetic accelerators for orbital launches in the past 50 odd years have required 2+ km of ramps to work well

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Mathematically it's possible, like you mentioned. But due to physical restrictions of our planet it might not be feasible

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The shallower your incline is, the more air you have to fight through post-launch to get to orbit, during which you're losing velocity. And to get into low-earth orbit you have to reach 28000 kph (17000 mph) because it's not so much about going up as it is about going really fast.

So you need to leave the end of the gun going fast enough to lose speed to air resistance and still reach and maintain orbit. I haven't attempted the math, but it seems like your vehicle would burst into flame going that speed in the atmosphere.

[–] EtherWhack 8 points 7 months ago

Inertial dampeners

[–] HootinNHollerin 4 points 7 months ago

Yea that’s just bullshit

[–] [email protected] 32 points 7 months ago

The war on god continues

[–] Diplomjodler3 20 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Man, what a cancer site. Anybody got an archive link?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Wow. Meet Your Macher

China's navy has apparently tested out a hypersonic rail gun — basically a device that uses a series of electromagnets to accelerate a projectile to incredible speeds — but during a demonstration of its power, things didn't go quite as planned.

As the South China Morning Post reports, the rail gun test lobbed a precision-guided projectile — or smart bomb — nine miles into the stratosphere. But because it apparently didn't go up as high as it was supposed to, the test was ultimately declared unsuccessful.

This conclusion came after an analysis led by Naval Engineering University professor Lu Junyong, whose team found with the help of AI that even though the winged smart bomb exceeded Mach 5 speeds, it didn't perform as well as it could have.

This occurred, as Lu's team found, because the projectile was spinning too fast during its ascent, resulting in an "undesirable tilt." Gun for Everybody

Successful or not, news of the test is a pretty big deal given that it was just a few months ago that reports emerged about China's other proposed super-powered rail gun, which is intended to send astronauts on a Boeing 737-size ship into space (NASA had begun building its own astronaut-shooting railgun in the 1990s, but had to abandon it due to lack of dinero.)

As with many space technologies, there's the propensity for some messy overlap with military tech. As such, news about the smart bomb rail gun test, which for the record did not make it all the way to space, could well freak out officials stateside.

Chinese officials, meanwhile, are paying lip service to the hypersonic rail gun technology's potential to revolutionize civilian travel by creating even faster railways and consumer space launches, too.

Despite the big promises of politicos, there are still lots of technical kinks that'll need to be ironed out before a giant rail gun is ready to shoot humans — or weapons — into space, not least of which the spinning and tilt issues demonstrated by the Naval Engineering University researchers in this test.

More on Chinese military tech: China Working on Super-Fast Submarines Powered by Lasers

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

NASA wanted to shoot astronauts into space? Like going from 0 to 800+ mph in an instant type of shoot?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

NASA's design is a few kilometres long and accelerates the vehicle at about 3 G up to roughly Mach 1. The technology is the same principle as a railgun, but it's more like a maglev train with a track that ends pointing upwards a bit

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Mulch + uBlock Origin makes it clean enough.

[–] Warjac 18 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

We're THIS FUCKING CLOSE 🤏 to mecha anime shit and I am ALL for it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

Shame it did not land on the CCP HQ.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

I guess Snake didn't succeed in his mission.

[–] wreckedcarzz 6 points 7 months ago

Imagine how far they could shoot a dumb bomb

[–] Numenor 5 points 7 months ago

I like the glitter. Nice touch.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Oh hey mass drivers. Now they just need another one on the moon and they can shoot cargo up there instead of using a rocket

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

Or they can land really flattened things in new craters.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Of course the Chinese built a railgun. Bet they also called it Biribiri.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Meet your Macher

Who's mocking me and why would I wanna meet 'em?