Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported last month that the U.S Navy Office of Naval Research (ONR) had achieved a breakthrough in capacitor design which is an important step forward in facilitating the use of electromagnetic railguns in future warships. The new capacitors are compact yet capable of delivering 20 megajoule bursts of electricity. ONR plans to increase this to 32 megajoules by next year.
Railguns use such bursts of energy to power powerful electromagnets capable of accelerating projectiles to hypersonic speeds. ONR’s goal is to produce railguns capable of firing 10 rounds per minute to a range of 100 miles.
The Navy initiated railgun development in 2005, intending to mount them on the new Zumwalt class destroyers. Since then, the production run of Zumwalts was cut from 32 to three. With the railguns still under development, the Navy has mounted 155mm cannons on them in the meantime.
Development of the railgun and a suitable naval powerplant continues. While the Zumwalts can generate 78 megajoules of energy and the Navy’s current railgun design only needs 25 to fire, the Navy still wants advanced capacitors capable of powering 150-killowatt lasers for drone defense, and new generations of radars and electronic warfare systems as well.
While railguns are huge improvement over chemical powered naval guns, there are still doubts about their effectiveness in combat compared to guided anti-ship missiles. Railgun projectiles are currently unguided and the Navy’s existing design is less powerful than the 1,000 pound warhead on the new Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM).
The U.S. Navy remains committed to railgun development nevertheless. For one idea of the role railguns and the U.S.S. Zumwalt might play in a future war, take a look at P. W. Singer and August Cole’s Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, which came out in 2015.
