For this year’s Fourth of July feature, The Cipher Brief revisits its coverage on electromagnetic railguns. Capable of firing projectiles at speeds of Mach 7 to strike targets over 100 miles away, electromagnetic railgun systems for the Navy and the Army are now reaching the final stages of development and could become operational for roles ranging from missile defense to naval surface warfare within the next few years. The Cipher Brief spoke with John Finkenaur, Director of Advanced Technology Programs at Raytheon’s Integrated Defense Systems business to discover just how revolutionary this new technology is, and how close it is to completion.
The Cipher Brief: Can you tell me a bit about the electromagnetic railgun and how you think this technology will shape modern warfare?
John Finkenaur: There are a number of things about the railgun that are unique to prior weapons systems.
First off, it uses electromagnetic energy to launch a projectile, which therefore means that there is no explosive charge required. On a ship for instance, you can therefore store more rounds in the belly of the ship than you could with conventional munitions and, of course, it’s much safer to store.
Given the way that the system operates, you can also scale the firing velocity of the projectile just by how much of the system you charge up. Ultimately what powers the railgun is these large pulse power modules, which are comprised of a number of energy storage components. These modules store the energy needed for each shot and, depending on the kind of velocity you need, the distance, etc., you can charge up either a segment of the system or charge up the whole system. So the railgun is very unique in that regard.
The weapon can also be used for naval surface fire support where you’re having to launch hundreds of nautical miles downrange, it can be used for shorter-range engagements, and anti-missile defenses – for instance shooting down anti-ship ballistic missiles. In addition, since the size of railgun-fired projectiles is much smaller than current missiles, your magazine can be much deeper, and eventually, we should be able to achieve a high rate of fire – one round every few seconds. Finally, the railgun can fit a number of different functions simultaneously, firing one salvo for surface fire support, the next for missile defense, and the next for close engagement, etc.
TCB: What role does Raytheon play in developing this technology?
JF: We are involved in providing the pulse power infrastructure – the pulse-forming network – that is used to ultimately fire the projectile. We are also involved in the projectile itself, we’ve helped the government with integration – how you would actually integrate the railgun into a naval ship- or land-based installation – and we’ve also supported the government in some live-fire testing of the railgun. Finally, we’ve provided radars to actually track these projectiles, which are traveling many kilometers per second down the track.
TCB: Can you describe a little bit more about the pulse power system that Raytheon has developed?
JF: In order to launch the railgun projectile, you need to have very high pulse power input, which is generated by these pulse power modules, and it can take hundreds of these pulse power modules to generate one pulse. Feeding these modules is some sort of energy storage device.
There is a ship out there called the Zumwalt, for instance, which has all the energy storage that you might need onboard to feed the railgun, but you don’t have this on most other ships. On other ships, you would need as large an energy storage magazine, if you will, as you do the pulse power subsystem in order to launch the projectile. And the way this whole thing works is, again, the energy storage magazine stores up enough energy for a certain number of shots, and then every shot bleeds off some amount of energy with a short recharge time between shots. But, on a ship like the Zumwalt you wouldn’t need that secondary energy storage infrastructure, just the pulse power modules to deliver the current to the rails.
Pulse power - Image courtesy of Raytheon
TCB: In terms of the power that you’re talking about to fire one shot, how much is that? And how does the need to pulse that amount power into the weapon in such a short timeframe (split second) affect your thinking with this technology?
JF: Yeah, you’re talking about tens of megawatts of power, which is very large. And of course, usually this power need is measured in megajoules, which measures watts used in a certain time period, and that number is used to denote how powerful the particular railgun system is. So the power needs can really change depending on how far or how fast you want to launch the projectile.
TCB: And your focus has really been to make that operational, to create a system that can provide that kind of split-second power?
JF: Yeah, well technically the biggest challenge was trying to get the barrel right. When you look at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) video test-firing a 32-megajoule railgun, when the projectile gets launched there are a lot of gases expelled and the air begins to burn up around the barrel. The projectile itself rides on a sabot, which is a carrier that glides it along the rails, and as that shoots out and pushes gases out, there’s a lot of wear and tear on the barrel. Now they’ve put a lot of effort into improving the barrel, which has really come a long way with thousands of shots per barrel. But when they first started firing these systems you would fire one time and then have to completely rebuild the barrel.
The other major part is the pulse power, and it’s always a challenge to release that much energy at one time. Just getting to the point where you can fire once, and have all these pulse power modules working together in concert, is a real challenge. Then, once you get to the point where it works once, you want it to work many many times, and get it to the point where you can fire a round every several seconds.
Those are the challenges and we’re getting a lot closer. They’ve got a new test range set up at the Naval Research Support Facility at Dahlgren, Virginia, where they’re actually starting to do full-scale live-fire shots, ramping up to full power. It’s still an incremental process but we’re moving forward. And I think the biggest challenge to successful deployment is getting the system to perform at a high rep rate, where we can fire several shots per minute reliably.
There are also just so many components to this system. The pulse power system, for instance, is made up of hundreds of modules, each one of which has to be individually controlled so we have to be very precise at every stage.
TCB: How long do you think it will take before an electromagnetic railgun system becomes operational?
JF: I could see a smaller scale railgun becoming operational in the next five years or so. Getting a full-powered railgun – i.e. 32-megajoule ship-mounted system – up and running will probably take maybe 10 years or so. But we could certainly see a small-scale railgun operational sooner than that, perhaps even a land-based system. Actually a land-based railgun could probably be operational within the next five years because you don’t have the challenge of making the system seaworthy.
The technology is certainly there and you could definitely see a land-based railgun operational in five years, and a sea-based system within 10.
TCB: What gets you most excited about this project?
JF: For me, personally, it’s very cool to see an idea that you put down on a white paper several years ago coming to fruition. To see that white paper evolve into real hardware and things that are firing and shooting projectiles is pretty cool. It’s not too often that you get to see the whole evolution of a program like that. We actually have a pictorial history of our involvement in the program going from ideas on paper to wooden boxes built to the size of the actual components to check for mechanical spacing, then of course we took those wooden boxes out and actually made the real modules, put those in containers containing dozens of modules, and actually shipped them out to the government. And then finally, it has been great to see the interest and awareness for this technology grow.
TCB: Last thoughts?
JF: Really, the most useful and interesting thing about the railgun is its scalability, and the fact that it’s so modular; you can really shape the technology to fit so many uses from smaller systems, to something that can shoot over 100 nautical miles, to a something that could even launch a payload into space.
