One Thousand Mile Cannon Could Bring Back Battleships | Hacker News Reader

One Thousand Mile Cannon Could Bring Back Battleships

popularmechanics.com

9 pointssquidlogic6 comments

The main point of a battleship is that it can withstand the rounds fired from an opponent battleship when they are within range of each other. If a projectile has enough kinetic energy to travel 1000 miles, I doubt any armor would be able to survive the impact.

I'd opt for many small fast ships with a small crew, and one or two guns, and just enough armor to keep them from being sunk by pirates, etc. There should be enough storage on board for about 1000 rounds for each gun. I don't know how fast hydroplanes are, but that's the kind of speed I'd shoot for... 100 knots, so you could be anywhere in the world within a week.

Battleships are romantic, but they are obsolete. You can't make armor thick enough to stop today's missiles.

Atmospheric drag is too difficult to overcome to achieve the projected range. I would guess the cannon functions similar to an ICBM. Hurling a projectile into low earth orbit where it can travel long distances without expending too much energy. Re-entering the atmosphere to impact its target.

Part of the problem is the F-35 lacking the range to compete with china and russia's fighters. While a 1000 mile range is impressive. The accuracy could not compete with the laser precision of guided munitions launched by aircraft. Significant disadvantages over the long term.

I question if it is even possible to build the cannon with 50x longer range than the current ones. And if it possible, will the system be more efficient that a missile-based one.

I mean it's going to be accurate. I think from a cost stand point it's a lot cheaper to lob a shell than fire a cruise missile from the same range. Also it would be impervious to ECM as there's no guidance system (That's if they don't put anything in the shell)

What kind of accuracy can it have? It will have to pass through many different layers of air, moving very fast. Even a small nudge will be magnified when you multiply it by 1,000 miles.

I assume that they'll have models that correct for all of that, and I assume they'll have satellite weather included for up-to-the-minute data on all of the factors involved. (Either that or I'm guessing wrong about the effects of those things.)

Assuming all of that... what kind of precision are we talking about? Can they hit a building? A tank?

It really does sound like bullshit at first glance. Just the most basic projectile motion shows you need a muzzle velocity of something like 5km/s, without factoring in drag, friction, etc. With those, you probably need more like double that. What kind of projectile is going to handle being accelerated to that speed over the length of even a very long gun barrel, in sea-level air? 10kg at 10km/s is 500 megajoules of kinetic energy. What the hell is going to be propelling that thing?

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