US Laser and Rail Gun Development News

strehl said:

I found one of the better pictures I have seen of "LAMP" primary mirror. This one is good enough to make out the small circular patches on the surface. These are Hartmann sampling apertures for a wavefront control system. This mirror would have been the beam director for the Space Based Laser which used the Alpha Laser, a 2.2 Mega Watt Hydrogen Fluoride chemical laser (actually built and tested by TRW). This was still a demonstrator program and a full scale laser would have been much more powerful. This is why chemical lasers were pursued so avidly. No electrically powered laser is able to match them for size and stored energy. The Free Electron Laser is the exception and it can scale to enormous power levels although it is very large and heavy. The FEL would have formed the ground based laser segment of SDI and would have used orbiting "Battle Mirrors" to relay the beam over large distances. I have no idea what they do with leftover hardware from these programs but I suspect they are simply scrapped.

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USNI News said:

Next year Naval Sea Systems Command will conduct the first at sea test of its electromagnetic railgun, hurling a guided 44 pound projectile and hypersonic speeds off the coast of Florida, NAVSEA officials said on Tuesday.

The BAE Systems designed test weapon will be mounted on the newly delivered Joint High Speed Vessel USNS Trenton (JHSV-5) and taken to Eglin Air Force Base’s maritime test range off the Florida panhandle late in the summer of 2016. The Navy originally planned to use the JHSV USNS Millinocket (JHSV- 3) for the test.

“It’s a naval surface fire support demonstration, the Navy’s first to engage an over the horizon target [with a railgun],” Capt. Mike Ziv, NAVSEA’s program manager directed energy and electronic warfare program office told attendees at the Navy’ League’s Sea-Air-Space 2015 Exposition.

The test will validate the assumptions the Navy has made in the decades-old pursuit of the railgun not only as a long range weapon to support troops ashore but start testing new ideas of using the weapon as an anti-surface warfare (ASUW) weapon, a ballistic missile defense (BMD) tool and as a close in weapon system for cruise missile threats.

NAVSEA outlined the expanded mission set for the railgun — beyond naval surface fire support — in a request for information issued earlier this year.

Traditionally, the Navy has used missiles to intercept targets but the railgun promises similar results for less money.

“There’s a tradition that every time an enemy throws a threat at us our counter to that threat is one order more of magnitude expensive than the threat costs. This is a technology where we’re engaging threats at similar probabilities of kill for a cost that’s about two orders of magnitude less,” Ziv said.
“Looking that the missions sets the railgun will be able to achieve the ship or land based facility, it will be able to store a lot more rounds and consummate a lot more engagements than a traditional missile-type system.”

NAVSEA is also working with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) to create a modular railgun system for both at sea and on land.

The Florida test will place a static floating target at a range of 25 to 50 nautical miles from the test ship and fire five GPS guided hyper velocity projectiles (HVP) at the target as the final part of 20 planned firings for the railgun at the Eglin range.

“It’s an over the horizon engagement. We’re firing on a ballistic trajectory and guiding into intercepting that target,” he said to reporters following the briefing.

“Eventually when we have a little bit more advancement in the projectile there will be some ability to communicate with [the round].”

As the program develops, the Navy is zeroing in on about 10,000-ton sized guided missile cruisers and destroyers as the anticipated platforms to field the weapons.
NAVSEA is currently conducting an in-depth study of including the railgun on the Zumwalt-class (DDG-1000) guided missile destroyers for the first platform for the weapon.

Earlier this year, Vice Adm. William Hilarides indicated his preffered option would be the third Zumwalt — Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002) — currently under construction at General Dynamics Bath Iron Works (BIW).

The

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on the 16,000-ton ships– powered by two massive Rolls Royce MT-30 gas turbines and two smaller Rolls-Royce RR450 much more electrical power than the current crop of U.S. destroyers and cruisers.

“They all believe that’s the right ship but I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves we do need the right analysis to say ‘yes’,” Ziv said.
“I plan to have that study done by the end of this fiscal year.”

The eventual goal is to have an operational 32 megajoule weapon that would be capable of firing a guided round almost a hundred nautical miles by the mid 2020s.

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The U.S. Navy’s deck guns could take on new relevance if ongoing tests to fire a guided round at five times the speed of sound from their muzzles are successful, USNI News has learned.

Using rounds initially designed for the service’s emerging electromagnetic railgun, Naval Sea Systems Command are now in early testing phases of using the planned hyper velocity projectile (HVPs) with the service’s existing gunpowder-based deck guns found on almost every U.S. Navy surface ship, NAVSEA told USNI News.

The HVPs from a traditional deck gun will be slower than one launched from a railgun — a little over Mach 5 versus Mach 7 — but still double the speed of an unguided regular shell from the service’s Mk 45 five-inch gun found on its guided missile cruisers and destroyers, according to information from NAVSEA.

While deck guns are standard through out the fleet, they lack the range precision of the guided missiles found on cruisers and destroyers and have had shrinking utility in high-end warfare.

A high speed guided round from a deck gun could give U.S. ships more options to deal with air and ballistic missile threats while the Navy continues to refine the railgun design.

According to a service wish list for

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, the Navy wants a “multi-mission railgun weapon system to support detect, track and engagement of ballistic missiles and air and watercraft threats” by 2025.

A guided HVP round from a standard Mk 45 deck gun could bring a significant margin of the railguns promised capabilities to the fleet sooner, USNI News understands.

Unlike standard high-explosive rounds, the speed of the HVPs doesn’t need explosives and relies on the force brought from its speed to destroy targets.

The addition of the HVP to the arsenal could mean instead of sending a Standard Missile to interdict an air threat, a ship could instead fire a much more inexpensive salvo of guided shells from the deck gun to handle an enemy aircraft.

According to NAVSEA, the service is also investigating using HVP in larger guns than the MK 45.

“The round is being designed to be compatible with multiple guns in the U.S. inventory,” read the NAVSEA statement to USNI News.
NAVSEA didn’t specify, but USNI News understands the Navy is looking for alternatives to the $400,000-per-round guided rocket assisted Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP) fired from the 155mm Advanced Gun System (AGS) of the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyers (DDG-1000).

Testing for the inclusion of the HVP in standard is ongoing and a timeframe as-of-yet for completion hasn’t been established. Likewise, there is no program of record for the effort yet, NAVSEA said.

Both BAE Systems and General Atomics have worked with the service on railgun and projectile technology, though NAVSEA did not specify any companies working on the effort.

“This is a government-led effort, and we are working to involve a number of different defense contractors at this stage,” NAVSEA said.

A BAE Systems designed railgun will undergo a first round of at-sea testing next year.

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The Navy is pursuing a multi-pronged approach to fielding energy weapons by the end of the decade, with the hopes of upgrading its 30 kilowatt laser gun to 100 kw or more, and giving its electromagnetic railgun a higher repetition rate.

Rear Adm. Bryant Fuller, chief engineer at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), said in a panel presentation at the Directed Energy Summit, hosted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Booz Allen Hamilton, that both follow-on technologies should be in the hands of sailors in the fleet by 2020.

The Navy sent a 30 kw Laser Weapon System (LaWS) to U.S. 5th Fleet on the interim Afloat Forward Staging Base USS Ponce in September 2014, where it has proven it can augment ship self-defense as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance for better maritime domain awareness, Fuller said. LaWS was only supposed to stay out for a year, but despite the harsh environment in the Persian Gulf, it has performed well and fleet leadership agreed it will stay operational as long as Ponce remains at sea – until Fiscal Year 2017 or longer, he said.

“Sometime in the very near future” the Navy will award a development contract for the larger follow-on system, a laser gun of 100 to 150 kw. That weapon will go out to sea for a demonstration by FY 2018, he said, keeping in line with the goal of transitioning technology from the lab to the warfighter as quickly as possible for operational testing.

The other half of the Navy’s push to deliver energy weapons to the fleet is the electromagnetic railgun. A manual-load version will go to sea on a Joint High Speed Vessel next year, but the Navy is already working on a version that would allow for 10 shots per minute. This “rep rate” version, despite challenges including thermal management in the barrel, is expected to go to sea by FY 2019.

“Get it to sea, see how it operates in a marine environment and put it through its paces,” Fuller said.

During the conference, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said the Navy had been working on directed energy since the 1980s but needed to find ways to move technology along faster to keep up with global threats.

Frank Kendall, under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, told USNI News at the same conference that the Navy’s multi-prong approach is the best way to ensure rapid fielding.

Despite a new emphasis on speed to market in the Pentagon’s newest Better Buying Power guidance, “there’s no magic that’s going to allow us to go much much faster; but in some areas, we’re probably going to want to take more risk and maybe use multiple approaches to try to get to the same place and try to move the technology forward as quickly as we can,” he said. He added that a roadmap of directed energy weapon efforts has several technologies reaching the demonstration phase within the next five years, which he believes is the right pace.

Once the Navy reaches the higher-powered laser gun and the more operationally useful “rep rate” railgun, the service will have to figure out how to deploy them. Fuller said the Navy just wrapped up a feasibility study on the Zumwalt-class DDG-1000 destroyers, and leadership will be briefed on the results soon. Other studies, including one on the Arleigh Burke-class DDG-51 destroyers, are ongoing. The results will help the Navy identify where to put these weapons when they first go out to sea and what challenges they may face – with power conditioning and integration being a big concern for the Navy at this time, Fuller said.

The railgun may also make an appearance in Army ground units. Army Brig. Gen. Neil Thurgood, program executive officer for missiles and space, said at the same panel presentation that his service would like the railgun to address the short-range ballistic missile threat. The Navy is taking the lead on development but the Army is already working on doctrine and tactics, techniques and procedures for using such a weapon. It will help the Army conduct missile defense with more rounds shot off faster, that can hit incoming missiles farther out from their target, and at a lower cost per engagement, Thurgood said.

The Navy, in addition to developing the railgun itself, is working on a hypervelocity projectile (HVP) that will support both the railgun and conventional 5-inch guns. The GPS-guided round will fly at hypersonic speeds, but the Navy is still working with the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office to close the fire control loop between the gun and the projectile. The Army would benefit from this work even if it chooses to use a different gun design than the Navy’s ship-based weapon.

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TerraN_EmpirE said:

There are three theories of missile defense.
Theory 1) is where systems like the Phalanx fit. The lead wall theory where you spray a area of the sky with armor piercing rounds in the hopes that enough hit the target to break it.
Theory 2) is similar but uses bigger rounds and a lower rate of fire with high explosive punch and proximity fuses in hopes of knocking the target out of the sky.
Theory 3) is where rail, counter missile and lasers usually sit. Point defense. Using precision targeting to intercept. Whether a missile with a missile or a laser against a missile or a rail gun shot against a missile. The point is to hit a bullet with a bullet. Now the advantage is that these systems are aimed to longer ranges then CIWS.

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Brumby said:

I thought CIWS stands for close in weapon system and primarily are designed to stop leakers. Additionally, they are bolt on so they are independent from the main electrical power source in the event the mains are disabled. Extending CIWS to longer ranges itself is self contradictory.

The idea of rail gun and lasers in my view would force a rethink on the whole idea of missile defence rather than some straight forward replacement.

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Japanese team fires world's most powerful laser
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers and engineers at Japan's Osaka University

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that they have successfully fired what they are claiming is the world's most powerful laser. In their paper published in the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion in 2012, the

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their laser and how it works.... to read more

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A 2 petawatt laser for example, would require more energy to run continuously, than is currently produced by the whole world, thus giant lasers used as weapons to take down aircraft, drones or missiles (or the Death Star) at great distances are not likely to happen any time soon.

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