Congrats to China, it certainly looks "cool", but then you have to ask yourself, "What kind of capability are we getting out of these guns?" How many shots are we getting out of this in a minute? Have we solved the wear and tear of the interior barrel after every shot? How about size, weight, and power issues to turn this into a real operational weapon, not a test bed?
The US has decided to take a different approach. We've decided to take the hypervelocity projectile developed for the railgun, and fire it out of US Naval deck guns and US Army howitzers at Mach 3+ at a range of 40-50mi for missile defense. This capability offers only slightly less performance than a EMR, but I can distribute these HVP's to 1,000 guns in the US inventory, compared to only a handful of railguns at most. So why would I pursue railguns when I get a similar capability out of HVP's and can distribute them to 1,000 guns at a much faster and cheaper rate? Here's a quote from Bob Work:
“We thought railguns were something we were really going to go after,” then-Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work stated at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. in May 2016. “But it turns out that powder guns firing the same hypervelocity projectiles gets you almost as much as you would get out of the electromagnetic rail gun, but it’s something we can do much faster.”
The potential for rapid fielding across both the Army and Navy proved an alluring prospect for SCO’s mission, one that trumped the railgun’s hype. When asked about the organization’s priorities, SCO spokesman Chris Sherwood confirmed to Task & Purpose that the office is focused on “developing the [HVP] for use in existing powder gun systems to give the Navy and Army near-term, cost-effective long-range fires and missile defense solutions.” Translation: Why invest in an expensive gun if the bullet alone can get the job done?
DOD computer modeling has even shown that HVPs can destroy 95-98 missiles of a 100 missile raid:
The Raid Breaker exercise would demonstrate the capabilities of the Hypervelocity Gun Weapon System program. The DOD wants to conduct an exercise against 100 cruise missiles and ballistic missiles and be able to knock down 95 to 98 of them.
DOD’s modeling shows that “if we can close the fire support with a controlled solution,” the weapon would be able to shoot down most of a 100-missile raid.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/...ize-south-korean-missile-defense-in-2018.html
If HVP potential is fully realized, it will revolutionize US missile defense and at a much faster and cheaper rate than EMR ever could.
