I've heard talk of mounting an electromagnetic cannon on the FCS, the M1 tank replacement, but no talk of mounting it on the M1. As it is, the first variant of FCS will still be armed with a conventional 120mm cannon, and will be fitted with an electromagnetic cannon later.

a railgun? like those laser guns in video games? well, ive read that the a3 would have updated armor pacakge, integrated gps navigation, FLIR2 for cold target tracking and engagement and a better engine-off generator. other than that, i think its still gonna be a 120mm smoothbore, 7.62mm on co-ax and loader and a browning .50 on the commander.

A railgun is not a laser. It is a weapon that launches small projectiles at super-fast speeds, up to the speed of light. A railgun is ideal because, well, starting at the speed of light, all you would need to shoot is a grain of sand to destroy something.

Railguns certainly do not launch projectiles at the speed of light; not by many orders of magnitude. And, they never, ever will. The versions tested seem to have "muzzle" velocities an order of magnitude greater than conventional weapons. This is a big difference. So great that the projectiles don't have to be metal to be effective, given the kinetic energy involved. But, we're still talking thousands of miles an hour; not 186,000 miles per second. Railguns are kinetic energy weapons. Magnetic cannon. Lasers are energy weapons. They use no "material" projectiles. They "shoot" photons, which, by definition, propagate at the speed of light.

There is no such thing as a railgun that can accelerate a projectile to light speed (and Mr. Einstein's various works on Relativity will tell you why). There are two versions of the rail gun under development. One is the plasma rail gun. This gun uses a conductive projectile situated between two rails. Once a very large electric current is applied to the rails and flows through the projectile, the special coating on the back of the projectile is instantly heated to very high temperatures to generate plasma, which expands explosively to push the projectile out of the barrel at hyperkinetic speeds (Mach 12 or so). The other rail gun concept being developed is the Gauss Rifle. It uses a series of electromagnets to accelerate a projectile out of a barrel. Not as explosively powerful as the plasma rail gun, but can still get hypersonic speeds (faster than Mach 5). Both technologies are still in their infancy. And there is no power source small or powerful enough to fit in an M-1 chassis to drive a rail gun.

Actually there is a power source. It is called an AMPS(Autonomous Marine Power source). It is a reactor using 'slowpoke' neutron fission that delivers 1.5 MW. While still bigger then a turbine power plant, it is small enough to be put on a chassie and used as a power source, although you would not want it crewed by humans that were still of breeding age. T.

Well, you definitely don't want to put a nuclear reactor on a tank. :-) A destroyed tank will pretty much contaminate a couple square miles of the battlefield for a couple thousand years.

Evidence? Humans have been living and working at ground zero of both previous sites since a few minutes after the Pika-Dan. And those were dirty bombs, as such things go. Try decades, not eons. And rail guns are a long way from being used on a battle field. Railguns are more of a space based weapon, and they still are not fast enugh to compete with Directed Energy Weapons. The first HEL is scheduled to go operational this month in Israel. I havn't seen anything in the media since December, so I assume they are still on schedule. One day here in the near future some raghead is going to twist the firing key on his missile launcher and get a real suprise a few seconds later. T.

Previously, tomanbeg wrote: > Evidence? Humans have been living and working at > ground zero of both previous sites since a few > minutes after the Pika-Dan. And those were dirty > bombs, as such things go. Try decades, not eons. I think you are confusing something here. An atom bomb like those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are NOTHING like a ruptured nuclear reactor. If you want evidence, check out the Chernobyl area. It will remain contaminated for a couple thousand years.

I am electric engineer,I studies electromagnetic cannon for 8 year. I have very fine design for an electromagnetic cannon with strentgh over 500 km.can you help me?