It sounds like the gun we're seeing now is most likely to be a railgun, if they've gotten past the durability issue. A reconnection gun might be a next-generation solution to the railgun's range problems; it needs to achieve a range of at least 1000 km to be a viable anti-ship weapon, but a railgun as an initial weapon might be worth exploring.
PRC/PLAN Laser and Rail Gun Development Thread
- Thread starter SinoSoldier
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The guy is a Chinese speaker, but not a Chinese in strict sense if we leave out the political dimension of what China and Chinese is.
Why I say this? Because I want to emphasize the apparent Nay-saying smell all over his article. That sentiment discredits him being objective, he is saying no not because of evidence but because of wanting no.
No need to read more, just the part "額外的環形外罩，應該是綫圈，所以“電磁”兩個字並非不合理" (coil like casing on the barrel) is enough to tell. Firstly, coil gun or rail gun are all EM guns, there are no fundamental difference. Using "coil gun vs. rail gun" to somehow play down the gun is "鸡蛋里挑骨头" (searching for bones in the egg), deny for the purpose of denial. Secondly, it is known that China has tested a hybrid EM gun that employs coil and rail, there is nothing bad of it from technology perspective which should the only consideration of debate.
P.S. his Chinese is not good either, 並非不合理 is opposite of opposite which is confirmative, he is essentially saying the opposite of what he actually wanted to say.
This is not to dispute what you are posting, but merely to borrow your lists of the 4 types to illustrate my thought.
My understanding is that there are only two major categories of EM gun. Rail gun is in its own, the others are all kind of coil gun. The difference is that in rail gun, the rails and the projectile make a closed loop for current, projectile itself is part of the wires. In others, the coils make up the current loop, the projectile is not part of it. Any type of coil gun is essentially like maglev train or EM cat (linear motor), the coils make up the rail track or Cat track, the projectile is the train or sled (right name?) pulling the aircraft.
Yes they are both EM guns but they are specific detail subset difference, straight rail is railgun, which has the advantage of being easier tech wise but also disadvantage of being less useful, coilgun also called a Gauss gun named after the prince of mathematics Gauss himself is more advanced but also more difficult to build. Just like Chinese and Japanese are both yellow skin asians but I am pretty sure you wouldn't want to be mistook as the other. The author's point is saying as a purely EM gun by itself is still not useful because the technology is not stable mature and very expansive, so rather make it a pure EM gun, and to showcase the Chinese ingenuity after observed USA's failure with a pure EM gun, it would be best to make a EM Modification enhancer hybrid on the existing system, like makeing a hybrid car first instead jump a bigger technological leap and making a failure hurting your crotch doing so like USA. I think what this author's opinion is very valid foundation, making a pure EM gun is too expansive and technology not mature and stable, but making a hybrid EM modification enhancer has the best overall cost performance enhancing firepower on a weight basis making a small destroyer ship has the punching power of a battleship turret. Maglev and EMcat is like railgun, you got it wrong opposite, you can just over simplify analogy, railgun is smoothbore, and coilgun is rifled
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Hybrid systems for coilguns have been proposed, i.e, a chemical propellant gets the projectile up to normal speeds, then the coilgun kicks in and adds additional acceleration. But the design clearly shows that it's likely to be a railgun instead of a coilgun system, since the terminal barrel is rectangular. Moreover, the limitation on railguns is a matter of durability at high energies, so it's difficult to see how a hybrid railgun would have advantages over a pure railgun.
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
I dunno about that range necessity. Ship-to-ship hostilities don't always start at 1,000km out. Sometimes, they get much closer to intimidate, warn, pester, bully each other before things turn ugly and the shooting starts, in which case, the ships would be easily within view of each other at the onset of fighting.
But in any case, I don't think there is any point in further stressing that the rail gun is not a technology that supplants the missile. It's just a big upgrade over the conventional gun and we should be happy for that.
I am not sure about it being a pure railgun at this moment. It can still be a coil gun or hybrid of both. The partial rectangular shape of the barrel is not nessesarily the definition of it being railgun.
As Kurutoga's post 278 and 279 demonstrated, only the pure coil gun has a circular barrel all the way, the other type like the one in post 278 has rectangular barrel. Like I said in post 283, all of them are essentially coil gun, not rail gun.
I am afraid that unless some technician in the project eventually was allowed to tell something in a future CCTV interview or similar circumstance, we will never know what type this gun is.
Jura The idiot
General
... which would be about the size of
!
(was now looking into Campbell's Naval Weapons of WW2 to check)
I of course refer just to the longitudinal dimension, don't know how wide the gun house is ... anyone?
so far I liked most the pair of doors though:
