The famous railgun that seems to come from science fiction or the world of video games could well complete the anti-missile shield of Japan by the end of the decade. The country’s defense ministry wants to use it as a DCA to blast down hypersonic missiles.
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[EN VIDÉO] The American army unveils a vehicle moving at more than 10,000 km / h! A state-of-the-art test center and advanced technologies of the US Air Force has unveiled the video of a mysterious machine moving, on dry land, at a staggering speed of 10,620 kilometers per hour or 8.6 times the speed sound !
With the capacity of missiles hypersonic to evolve at least five times the speed of sound and their trajectory impossible to anticipate, the question of their interception in mid-flight arises. Since anti-ballistic missiles remain expensive and less effective, the Japanese Ministry of Defense may have found a more economical and efficient solution: the railgun, or electric powered gun. electromagnetic.
This is not a new invention, as this type of gun already exists and has been tested repeatedly for decades, but no army yet has truly operational equipment. With him, while a missile anti-ballistic caps at 1,700 meters per second, the ammunition fired by the cannon could evolve at more than 2,000 meters per second according to the Japanese Ministry of Defense. The railgun would also be able to send its ammunition at different speeds by manipulating the level ofenergy and adapting it to the speed of the incoming missile. During the various tests, a prototype even reached a speed of nearly 2,300 meters per second. This high speed also has the advantage of making it possible to increase the range without losing power on impact.
To destroy a supersonic missile, the cannon would act as a fast machine gun to fire a maximum of warheads in a minimum of time, while achieving movements sweep. For this to work, the material from warheads must be both very solid to withstand the power of the shot and also have excellent electrical conduction. Moreover, against a hypersonic missile, the very sustained rate of fire also causes major problems with the cooling of the gun. There remains the question of the energy required to shoot quickly in bursts.
An operational railgun before the end of the decade
To address these issues, the Defense Department’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency has a budget of $ 56 million this year. For the Ministry of Defense, develop such a defensive weapon above all allows to dissuade an enemy from any shot. Its warhead could not, a priori, not pass between the bursts of such guns. This would only be one of the last protections in reinforcement other umbrellas with anti-missile systems. Confident, Japan is already considering operational commissioning after 2025.
If the Country of Sun Levant is looking for ways to protect its territory from hypersonic missiles, this is because several states, including China and Russia, regularly carry out demonstrations of force with very advanced prototypes of hypersonic weapons. Thus, its Chinese neighbor has shown its expertise in matter by pulling last summer a missile from a glider moving at hypersonic speeds over the South China Sea. For its part, North Korea claimed that a missile it launched into the Sea of Japan in September was a hypersonic device.
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