Modern Naval Vessels

[boogieman]

A 32 MJ railgun with a useful rate of fire (say 10 shot per minute) will require 17 MW of ship power
and will induce a cooling load of 10 MW. There's nothing in the US fleet aside from (maybe) three Zumwalts
or the Ford class that would come close to being able to accommodate those loads.

Right. I'd add that as an AAW weapon geared to intercepting hypersonics, you may well need an ROF even higher than that, making it even more impractical.

That leaves lasers and HVPs. I am not sure about how useful the latter would be for HGV/HCM interception, while the former probably won't achieve the needed range for some time.

[madrat]

10 MW is paltry to cool with the ocean as your heat gradient. That is going to be one of the easier engineering issues to tackle for this technology. Concentrating 17 MW in a minute span is going to be much more difficult challenge.

[boogieman]

The word from the program seemed upbeat 3 years ago:



Seems to have gone suspiciously quiet since then, save for this a year later:

[KamenRiderBlade]

How's the Barrel Life on the Rail Gun working out to?