General Atomics electromagnetic rail cannon

[McCoy]

Re: General Atomics electromagnetic rail cannon

 

At what point do you stop pouring money into a hole?

 

cheers, Mark

Guess it depends on the spin-off potential. Sounds like a lot is being learned from every test. (OK, mostly what's being learned is how not to build a railgun, still --)

 

How many prototypes did Edison destroy before he had a practical light bulb?

 

(And how many did Tesla destroy, but we don't have a Tesla available for this project.)

[Markdoc]

Re: General Atomics electromagnetic rail cannon

 

Yes, I know it wasn't anywhere near to completion. Yes, I know the project was likely to be discontinued given the current economy; I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. Still, it would have been cool.

 

And between this and the cancellation of Project Orion, I have to do some serious revisions on my hard sci-fi campaign.

 

Well, the basic principle is sound, you just need to goose the timeline a bit.

 

The thing about railguns (and effective weaponisable lasers, for that matter) is that right now, we don't actually have good materials to make them out of.

The sensible thing - for me - would be to initiate a material science program: basic nose-to-screen science, with the goal "Make high potential lasing materials" or "Make me an efficient electrical conductor that is light, strong and flexible". You're looking for a genuine breakthrough, and we know how to fund breakthrough science - keep it cheap, keep it simple and throw lots of money at it, so multiple groups can get in on the action. Most of 'em will fail, but you simply want proof of principle, so only one has to work. Once you have your breakthrough - then you build on it.

 

In contrast, the laser and railgun programs in the US have been all about weapons ... weapons built using technologies we don't actually have yet. Programs like that are almost guaranteed to fail, because you can't predict breakthroughs. And without the breakthrough, it's like Victorians trying to make a moon landing by building really big cannon: no matter how much time and money they lavish on it, it's never going to work. The people running these programs aren't idiots (well, probably mostly not idiots). They know this as well as I do. They also know that a materials science program might get - if it's lucky - a few million a year, while a weapons program can attract ten or twenty times as much. For the people who run them, they are goldmines. And military research programs are notorious for their lax timelines and lavish budgets. I worked with the DoD in Kenya. The army got things done fast and they got them done well - but in 6 months they blew through enough cash to keep a similar-sized civilian program going for 7 years (and I know, because I ran a civilian program as well).

 

It's interesting: in the US a lot of money is spent on military research, but the success rate is horrible. Many companies and any decent university outperform it by huge, huge margins, and almost none of the breakthrough military technologies for the last half century actually come from the DoD's program - they come from outside and are then adopted. I think it's due to the system - to the way the projects are set up and run.

 

So railgun technology could well suddenly become feasible next year. Or in 20 years - we can't say when the needed breakthroughs will come. All we can be certain of is that it probably won't come from DoD

 

cheers, Mark