You put it well. The problem of of putting energy into projectiles caused a move from kenetic to chemical weapons (missiles).
But delivering chemicals to a target is expensive and at some point scaling it up becomes politically dangerous (you cannot just lauch even a conventional icbm without all sorts of risks).
Scaling up kenetic weapons ended up with huge battleship guns that did almost as much damage to the ship itself as the target (OK, a bit of an overstatement but I doubt any of those sailors left the navy with hearing intact). They were slow to fire, extremely heavy, and required a lot of dangerous chemicals to be stored. One mistake and the ship would blow up.
This allows deep penetrating weapons containing huge amounts of energy to pierce bunkers from way over the horizon.
This is the kind of weapon the Navy will want if the Korean peninsula ever heats up to a boil.
Edit: I suspect I am being downvoted because I am discussing weapon systems. There is a difference between advocating for weapons/war and discussing them. It is better weapons are discussed in the open, than developed in secret where the public cannot weigh in. Truly horrifying things are born in the dark.
> ...huge battleship guns ... were slow to fire ...
I was curious about how fast battleships could actually fire, so I googled around and found a couple stats.
On an Iowa class battleship:
- Armed with nine 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 guns [1]
- Each 16" gun is quoted as having a firing rate of 2 rounds per minute [2]
- Each shell weighed between 1900lbs / 865kg and 2700lbs / 1225kg pounds [3]
So math says 2 rounds/minute * 9 guns is 18 shells/minute. That is 34_200 lbs (18 * 1900) and 48_200 lbs (18 * 2700) of ordinance per minute. I would not want to be on the receiving end of that!
EDIT: fixed some numbers I goofed after @CapricornNoble was kind enough to point them out. Thanks!
A few minor corrections. The 16-23 rounds/minute is for the secondary battery of 5" guns, not the primary battery of 16" guns. If you watch a video of the loading/firing process of a 16" inch gun you'll quickly see why a firing rate of 1 round per 3-5 seconds is physically impossible.
So 2/min * 9 guns * [900kg;1225kg]/gun =
16,200kg/min high explosive broadside or
22,050kg/min armor piercing broadside
Your concluding sentence is 100% correct: best to be somewhere else.
Interesting but I don't think that's sustained fire.
You see crazy him rpm for firearms. The rate of fire is restricted by the magazine size (ship guns do have magazines) and how fast the gun can cool.
The US Army changed the barrel of the M4 Carbine (automatic rifle) after some troops during a sustained defense of some hill had barrels failing after glowing white hot. Machine guns often have barrels that can be replaced during prolonged engagements.
A hot naval gun could detonate the charge if it overheats. It has happened although I don't remember how long ago.
Good point. I removed the reference to sustained fire. Still a lot of ordinance for the receiving end to dodge! The dent those guns put in the water when firing is mind boggling to me => http://i.imgur.com/5aKQulg.jpg
A fun fact is you can figure out why battleships became obsolete just by comparing Iowa's guns to more modern systems.
A 16", 2,700 pound AP shell from an Iowa class battleship contains 40.9 pound of high explosives as the payload. A 1900 pound HE shell contains 153.6 lbs. of high explosive payload. The AP shell travels at a velocity of 2,425 fps on average. The HE shell travels at a velocity of 2,615 fps on average. An Iowa class ship traditionally stored powder and shells to fire each of its 9 guns 130 times before needing to be re-supplied. The maximum range of the cannon was 24 miles.
By contrast, a Tomahawk cruise missile has a range of 1,550 miles and contains 1,000 pounds of high explosive. An Ohio-class guided missile submarine carries 152 of these on board. A single Ohio-class submarine can put more explosive payload on target than 3 Iowa class battleships firing their entire magazines dry (assuming AP shells), it can unleash its entire devastating salvo in about 2.5 minutes (as contrasted against an hour+ for a battleship), and it can do it from over 64 times the range as the battleship's cannons. Oh also the missiles are guided, and so can actually hit targets at extreme ranges where-as battleship were notoriously inaccurate outside 20 miles. At the Battle of Calabria the battleships on both sides fired a combined total of 335 large caliber shells, to one hit!
Of course the one advantage of the battleship is its shells are travelling on average ~3 times faster than the cruise missile is, and so it's far easier to shoot down a missile than it is a shell. But I hope with the above math you understand why naval planner's response to this was basically "Well if you can shoot down one of my missiles with 50% probability, we'll just fire off 5 at once and we'll still have >95% chance of landing a hit". And unlike with battleship shells, when a single missile hits you you're dead as a dodo - 1000 pounds of HE vs. 40 or 153 pounds for battleship shells.
Even if submarines and airplanes had never been invented, the big gun battleship still would've been rendered obsolete just from missiles alone. Even railguns aren't likely to change this, as we happen to have perfected hypersonic missiles at roughly the same time railguns became practical and HSMs are...I mean basically take all the advantages of a gun, and all the advantages of a missile, and put them into one thing. Hypersonic missiles are amazing/terrifying, and they will be the 'defining weapons' of 21st century naval war.
Also as an aside, can we talk about how damn cool the Ohio class SSGN is?! It's by far the coolest thing the navy currently owns IMO. It can hide in the ocean depths impervious to harm, pop to the surface and fire off 152000 pounds of high explosives, and then retreat to the safety of the ocean darkness again before its enemy even knows what happened. I own a model of it I keep on my desk and it's one of my favorite possessions.
Note: On Los Angeles class submarines the vertical launch tubes can be fired with ~1 second delay per round. So assuming the navy's technology on the Ohio's is still held to the same standard, that's 152 seconds to fire all 152 missiles or 2.5 minutes to fire the whole stock.
>And unlike with battleship shells, when a single missile hits you you're dead as a dodo - 1000 pounds of HE vs. 40 or 153 pounds for battleship shells.
I'm curious if this would be true for a heavily armored target like a battleship, though. AFAIK no modern missile is designed to penetrate ~12 inches of hardened steel armor, as no targets have that kind of armor any more.
On 10 November 1942 the Vichy French Battleship opened fire on Allied landing vessels in Casablanca after being re-floated following her sinking on 8 November. TBF Avengers were dispatched to deal with her, but they lacked AP bombs and were relying on 1000lb general purpose bombs instead. Jean Bart was struck by one such bomb on her starboard side toward the rear:
The rearward hit would go on to sink the battleship, this time permanently.
On 22 May 1941 the HMS Warspite was struck by a 500 lb from German bombers, and had her side ripped open and had to immediately steam home least she possibly tear her own guts out. It would take 4 months of repairs before she was ready to be sent back into the fight.
In both instances we're looking at about 1/10th the payload of explosives of a Tomahawk crippling or sinking a well-armored battleship with 1 or 2 lucky hits. The reason is because WW2 battleships employed "all or nothing" armor, where some parts of the ship were extremely well protected (turret, belt) and others had extremely thin armor - which meant even a non-AP bomb could sink a battleship if it was simply big enough boom to rip the ship open in these non-armored areas.
A Tomahawk is guided and carries a very big warhead, so assuming it was programmed to know where the armor on the ship it was fighting had a weak point I wouldn't be surprised if it was able to cripple or kill an Iowa class vessel in just one hit.
Also we do actually have plenty of modern missiles able to penetrate 12 inches of hardened steel armor. The AGM-65 Maverick has penetration against rolled homogeneous steel armor of between 1000 to 1500 mm, or between 40 inches and 60 inches of penetration. It's designed to kill tanks that are using modern composite armor, and needs that level of penetration to do its job. Against simple steel armor, of the kind on a WW2 battleship, it would slice through it like a knife through butter.
Right, but those bombs may have been designed with armor piercing in mind. Battleships' main batteries fired both AP and HE shells, the latter being unable to penetrate heavily armored targets.
I take your point re the Maverick. But you do need to make a big hole in a battleship to actually sink it. To kill a tank you just need to make a small hole and spray the insides.
A 16" AP shell weighs about as much as a Tomahawk and is traveling much faster. Sure, it has a smaller charge, but also a lot more kinetic energy. In fact, the charge itself was irrelevant to the shell's armor piercing capacity, as AP shells were fused to explode after the armor was penetrated.
Point of order in the definitions here: an explosive projectile is still a kinetic weapon and is notNOT a chemical weapon. A chemical weapon causes chemistry to happen in/on the target: mustard gas, VX nerve gas, etc.
This is not my opinion. This is widely accepted and a matter of many international treaties.
I fully understand what OP was trying to say. The problem is words. You can think whatever you want. If you want to deal with other people in a shared reality and influence the arc of history, I suggest learning to identify, adopt, and use rigorously defined words as intended, wherever possible, because that frees up your very limited intellectual capabilities to focus on the things you actually want to change.
Electric weapons are super neat. Their specs can put the projectile very kenetic, they can uitilize more exotic energy sources, etc.
However, in terms of a man portable gun, they just really don't have the specs needed. Sure, we can make them more ruggeded and more effective at lower KE output. But a major issue for a man portable gun is heat. Heat causes expansions and affects ductility, ductility and expansion cause jams. Jams mean you're dead.
It turns out that the brass cartridge is really really good at getting hot and then taking that heat with it as it is ejected. The HK-G11 is a good example of the issues that the lack of heat ejection can cause [0].
As we do not have super-conducting materials that can be man portable and at room temperature, there is significant heat build up in the copper rails of the rail gun. With catridges you can throw that heat away easily, with rails, you have to have a cooling system in them to continue to use the gun. Either that or you have to stop the warfighter from using the gun until it cools. This, especially when lives are on the line, is non ideal.
Hence, railguns are mostly used in much larger applications like ships. There you can have the cooling equipment to keep the gun functional and operating and you can use the ocean as a heat sink. Your heat issues are still present though. More exotic materials than cooper are used for the rails, things that need to be at LN2 temperatures. But on a ship, you have the room and weight to carry the LN2 cooling equipment. Currently, railgun tech is still being developed. Reliability is a big issue, one that was solved in chemically launched projectiles through decades of tial and error. Rail guns are likewise going to need those decades of learning to occur.
The weapons we have today are very well engineered (cheap, reliable, understood tolerances/ranges, etc). As such, where railgun tech will be used is in limited cases as compared to the well developed cheamically launched projectiles. That means that there are less cases where the railgun can be used and then learned from. Especially with weapons, you need real life testing in order to understand the engineering issues, as lab testing is generally forbidden due to loss of human life. Hunting deer and boars will only give you so much. Fortunately, we humans don't go to War too often these days (though this is very debatable to a lot of real people). Unfortunately for railgun engineers, that means there is not a lot of real world testing in the panic that is a battle.
Like, fire one of these railguns that are ship-based in rough seas at a hostile target that is shooting at you too. There's smoke, flak, little wires, mist, spray, etc in the air that can gum up the gun and jam. Does firing one of these things in a storm have interactions with lightining effects? How does that big of an EM field affect sailors over time, like the concussive blasts affected sailors previously?
But that's already something that a person can think of. It's the stuff you cannot think of that are the main issues. When the panic sets in and the battlefield is very live, what happens that will affect the armaments that you did not think of?
But delivering chemicals to a target is expensive and at some point scaling it up becomes politically dangerous (you cannot just lauch even a conventional icbm without all sorts of risks).
Scaling up kenetic weapons ended up with huge battleship guns that did almost as much damage to the ship itself as the target (OK, a bit of an overstatement but I doubt any of those sailors left the navy with hearing intact). They were slow to fire, extremely heavy, and required a lot of dangerous chemicals to be stored. One mistake and the ship would blow up.
This allows deep penetrating weapons containing huge amounts of energy to pierce bunkers from way over the horizon.
This is the kind of weapon the Navy will want if the Korean peninsula ever heats up to a boil.
Edit: I suspect I am being downvoted because I am discussing weapon systems. There is a difference between advocating for weapons/war and discussing them. It is better weapons are discussed in the open, than developed in secret where the public cannot weigh in. Truly horrifying things are born in the dark.