The Army's 1,000-Mile Cannon Is Coming, and It Could Bring Back Battleships
Big guns made battleships obsolete decades ago. But what if the very same weapon that killed them ultimately ushers in their return?
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The Army's 1,000-mile cannon
- Thread starter Forerunner
- Start date
www.popularmechanics.com
So many questions
this is classic explosive base propellant, so how can it achieve this range ?
shells MUST have guidance and correction flight capabilities for any sort of precision at these range because weather and winds will affect trajectory on these flight time
no, it wont bring back battleships. This is far from battleship caliber. Battleships are obsolete. At best it will be tested agains navy rail guns on existing ship classes and upcoming plateforms but battleships are a relic of the pre jet and missile era
this is classic explosive base propellant, so how can it achieve this range ?
shells MUST have guidance and correction flight capabilities for any sort of precision at these range because weather and winds will affect trajectory on these flight time
no, it wont bring back battleships. This is far from battleship caliber. Battleships are obsolete. At best it will be tested agains navy rail guns on existing ship classes and upcoming plateforms but battleships are a relic of the pre jet and missile era
Homing/guided artillery shells have been a thing for a while, so I would expect it would be something along those lines.
Battleships are never coming back. There is no role for them anymore and they're too vulnerable to today's weapons. Smaller destroyers are better.
It's coincidental that that tweet's avatar is a Zumwalt. I'd imagine if they built something like this, it would end up just like the Advanced Gun System from the Zumwalt class - a gun that requires projectiles that cost a million dollars each, something too outlandish even for the US military. Instead, now we have three pretty ships with guns that literally have no ammunition to fire and likely never will.
military pornographers unite. Let's throw another 50 billion on military r&d so we can kill some more brown people in our thirst for Empire while bemoaning the cost of heathcare.
I feel ships as weapons platforms is long since past its hey day. I figure dropping weapons, even just large masses, from orbit will be the future and far more devastating. The whole rods from the gods idea.
The application of such a gun on a "battleship" is so clearly different from the historical connotation of the word - ship to ship combat and decisive battle doctrine vs the land based potential targets mentioned in the article - that I'm a little confused people are jumping at the chance to point out that such ships aren't coming back, as if the historical term was what was being referred to. Like, ok, maybe a little anachronistic in the naming, but, comeon, these weapons could clearly work on a sea-based platform. The longest range anti-ship missile gets to about 625 miles; the 5th gen seafaring jet mentioned in the article maxes out at 750 miles. 1000 miles for a cannon, if indeed possible, seems like a pretty good thing to stick on a ship, especially given than they're apparently small enough to otherwise be carted around with a [heavy duty] truck.
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I know it's silly, but I have at least a little hope that the world can maybe agree to avoid such things, as that's an open invitation for aggressive use of anti-satellite weaponry and a quick and inevitable initiation of the Kessler syndrome, thus shutting off our access to space for generations, if not forever.
The Rebuild of Evangelion movies! Specifically, the first movie.
Okay. I've heard of that brand of movies. I'll give it a look!
"Rods from god" aren't going to happen because it takes wildly more work and planning to actually get the rods into orbit and then launch them than it takes to just launch a bunch of missiles. Or just shooting a really big gun like this one.
They'll only be a feasible weapon if we, I dunno, start mining asteroids or something and don't have to push the material into space.
I'm confused...how is this better than a missile? There's no way these are not rocket rounds with guidance so what exactly makes this better than a middle battery? Did they just minituarize a standard guided missle and give it a little boost with a conventional cannon? Very odd.
I'm guessing that on a per-round cost and size/logistics basis these are vastly more efficient. A guided artillery shell is ~$70k; a tomahawk cruise missile is ~$1.4M. Some leeway since there's, you know, obvious differences here and this is new tech, but you'd have to stretch things pretty far to have it budge up against cruise missiles. Historically speaking, large gunships have had a few hundred rounds, whereas ships carrying such long range missiles have, like...20. At most. Actual explosive impact of the two is almost certainly in favor of the cruise missile, but when you can can launch between 1-20 such rounds to get in the same range of cost/logistics, that's a good deal more flexibility.
This.
Any mention of how the battleship was rendered obsolete is missing why this could bring it back. This is an *enormous* amount of force projection that could just sit somewhat safely in a carrier group or another more modern ship formation. Battleships were rendered obsolete because the sheer cost and scale of them was too great once sea-launched carrier aircraft that could outrange them proved effective in taking them out. This is a powerful enough new role that doesn't necessarily have the same drawbacks. That said, I think this could go on a new class of ship not necessarily as analogous to a battleship as the article implies as well.
It's like the Shagohod from Metal Gear Solid 3.First thing that came to me when hearing this.
And, of course, it's extremely visible. You can't exactly hide that sort of spacecraft launch or the satellites. Sure, publicly you can say that the satellite is a GPS unit or something, but the other armies of the world should be reasonably savvy to notice when something fishy is going on. And once people know what you have it's going to be hell in terms of international politics.
Conversely, Earth based weaponry can just be planted and hidden on home soil.
I read this at first as a cannon that was 1000 miles long and thought "that's a bit overkill isn't it?" Lol.