BAE Systems thinks about the possibility to put electromagnetic railgun on armoured vehicle 2811144

This fascinating technology, which uses high-power electromagnetic energy instead of explosive chemical propellants to launch projectiles farther and faster than any previous system, is currently in Phase 2 of the program. During this phase, we will advance the railgun by maturing the launcher and pulsed power from a single shot operation to a multi-shot capability. Auto-loading and thermal management systems will also be incorporated.

On December 10, 2010, the U.S. Navy made history at the Naval Surface Warfare Center-Dahlgren Division with our Laboratory Railgun. A 33-Megajoule shot was fired, the energy equivalent of 110 nmi range. In 2012, during Phase 1 of the INP program, engineers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center successfully fired our EM Railgun prototype at tactical energy levels.

A railgun can accelerate a projectile to much higher velocities than a traditional gun, too: BAE’s prototype has a muzzle velocity of up to Mach 7.5, which results in a range exceeding 200 km. And even without any kind of payload, that speed results in a projectile with a stupendous amount of kinetic energy, making railguns very effective at doing what weapons systems are supposed to do.

BAE feels like the benefits of railguns are too significant to restrict to just the Navy, and the company is pitching the system as an option for the U.S. Army’s next generation Future Fighting Vehicle (FFV), which could show up as early as 2019. While BAE seems confident that it would be possible to scale its railgun down to something tank-sized, there are some significant problems that would need to be solved. A naval railgun sucks down about 30 MJ of energy with each shot, which might not be an issue for a ship with a small nuclear power plant, but it’s unclear how a tank-sized vehicle could repeatably meet those power demands, even if it was firing smaller rounds at lower velocities.

The U.S. Army hopes to make a decision on its FFV program sometime in 2016, at which point we should start to get a better idea of how realistic the idea of a railgun as a deployable weapons system is based on the shipboard trials.