The US is working on a 1000 mile range super-cannon but appears to be behind China for railguns.
China has been testing a railgun on a naval ship for over a year. They claim that railguns will be deployed by 2025. They will be landbased and on ships. China also has a patent for smaller plasma cannon that will fire hypersonic shells from a tank.
China, Russia and the USA will have hypersonic weapons. The US will test a hypersonic missile by 2023. China and Russia are ahead with deployment of hypersonic missiles.
The US is spending $1.4 billion on research on hypersonic weapons and another billion on the long-range super-gun.
The US has been developing railguns for a long time but is lagging in deployment and testing.
China’s railgun
SOURCES- Breaking Defense, DOD,
Written By Brian Wang
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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15 thoughts on “China’s Railguns vs US 1000 Mile Range Super-cannon”
I don’t think the US Navy has ever taken the railgun seriously.
The Chineese are more interested in our technology than our leaders are.
And it shows….
No. So sez the facts.
But ad hominems are the best you can do, given your lobotomized intellectual capacity to construct any other argument.
Canada, Germany, one of those countries that are always up to no good.
I can see why Combinatorics got them mixed up.
But… WW2 Battleship 16″ guns are proof that you can use a gun with that barrel life and win a war with them. Unless you mean those dodgy Italian guns that had a life of 80 rounds.
I actually prefer the Chinese approach. Get +something+ out there quickly, and then iterate on the design to get something that is immediately relevant.
Obviously it works best for high-volume systems, but the Chinese are expanding fast enough that I think they have have enough demand for LRIP and fast iterative development cycles across multiple Block improvements.
I think it’s reasonable to suggest that the Chinese will more readily approve LRIP than the US. We could probably mount a railgun +today+ on the Zumwalt and call it operational. However, since barrel life is only similar to that to of a WW2 battleship 16″ gun, it’s not good enough for the Navy. That, and energy storage is a hard nut to crack.
We can only do one photo per post? Lame.
The US has had supergun technology for over 65 years. See “HARP” project, and, for example, the AEDC Range G guns:
All the railguns in the world isn’t going to prevent China from undergoing an economic contraction crisis like Japan did because Trump is doing a real number on them in trade negotiations:
Didn’t Saddam get that technology from a German engineer? Who died under mysterious conditions?
Now we know the real reason for the Iraq War, it was to steal Saddam Hussein’s sweet supergun technology.
Unless the Chicoms have figured out how to make enough shots out each barrel worth it, you see how the US is slowly moving away from the gun and using the hypervelocity shells on older guns instead.
“China also has a patent for smaller plasma cannon that will fire hypersonic shells from a tank.” Here is where China is going to learn the hard way to respect other peoples intellectual property. China’s patents are not going to be good anywhere in the world but in China, while the rest of the world is now going to steal all their inventions and produce them in low labor cost countries for a fraction what China can. In the West it’s called “hoisted on their own petard”, or what goes around comes around. Karma’s a female dog, so to speak.
I don’t think the US Navy has ever taken the railgun seriously.
The Chineese are more interested in our technology than our leaders are.
And it shows….
No. So sez the facts.
But ad hominems are the best you can do, given your lobotomized intellectual capacity to construct any other argument.
Canada, Germany, one of those countries that are always up to no good.
I can see why Combinatorics got them mixed up.
But… WW2 Battleship 16″ guns are proof that you can use a gun with that barrel life and win a war with them. Unless you mean those dodgy Italian guns that had a life of 80 rounds.
I actually prefer the Chinese approach. Get +something+ out there quickly, and then iterate on the design to get something that is immediately relevant.
Obviously it works best for high-volume systems, but the Chinese are expanding fast enough that I think they have have enough demand for LRIP and fast iterative development cycles across multiple Block improvements.
I think it’s reasonable to suggest that the Chinese will more readily approve LRIP than the US. We could probably mount a railgun +today+ on the Zumwalt and call it operational. However, since barrel life is only similar to that to of a WW2 battleship 16″ gun, it’s not good enough for the Navy. That, and energy storage is a hard nut to crack.
We can only do one photo per post? Lame.
The US has had supergun technology for over 65 years. See “HARP” project, and, for example, the AEDC Range G guns:
All the railguns in the world isn’t going to prevent China from undergoing an economic contraction crisis like Japan did because Trump is doing a real number on them in trade negotiations:
https://patrick.net/post/1323270/2019-03-21-trying-to-avoid-their-own-plaza-accord-lost-decades-the-chinese-consult-with-japan
This is unfounded and unlikely to be true. Except for being seen on a ship, we know nothing about the Chinese railgun.
Canadian. Gerald Bull. Assassinated in Brussels; likely by Mossad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull
Didn’t Saddam get that technology from a German engineer? Who died under mysterious conditions?
Now we know the real reason for the Iraq War, it was to steal Saddam Hussein’s sweet supergun technology.
Unless the Chicoms have figured out how to make enough shots out each barrel worth it, you see how the US is slowly moving away from the gun and using the hypervelocity shells on older guns instead.
“China also has a patent for smaller plasma cannon that will fire hypersonic shells from a tank.” Here is where China is going to learn the hard way to respect other peoples intellectual property. China’s patents are not going to be good anywhere in the world but in China, while the rest of the world is now going to steal all their inventions and produce them in low labor cost countries for a fraction what China can. In the West it’s called “hoisted on their own petard”, or what goes around comes around. Karma’s a female dog, so to speak.