China’s Navy Researchers Claim to Have a Hypersonic Railgun Firing 120 Rounds

A group of Chinese navy engineers claim to have built an electromagnetic rail gun that can swiftly fire a multitude of projectiles without sustaining damage. There were older photos that China had mounted a full-sized railgun onto a navy ship.

IF the China’s navy railgun breakthrough claims are true then China has a massive lead with working railguns. The guns will out-range regular US Navy guns by 120 miles to 16 miles while being able to shoot hundreds of shots.

The US had worked on railguns for many years and tested them at land based facilities. The US canceled it railgun program because the US could not prevent too much damage to the railgun barrel.

The China Navy railgun reported the ability to achieve continuous firing. The weapon retained a remarkable level of shooting accuracy while rapidly firing. The shells shoot out of the barrel at 2km per second (mach 5.8 which is hypersonic speed and about 2.5 times the velocity of regular Navy guns), which means any target within 100-200km can be hit.

In comparison, regular artillery shells usually have a limit of tens of kilometers and have a muzzle velocity of about 805 meters per second. A US 15 inch naval gun has a muzzle velocity of about 2640 feet per second and a range of 16 miles or 26 kilometers.

In one of the tests, the Chinese rail gun proved its mettle by firing off 120 rounds – or close to what some of the artillery in service today can do. The entire railgun system remained intact.

“Similar work has never been publicly reported before,” the team with the National Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Energy at the Naval University of Engineering said in a paper published on November 10.

The new china navy railgun has a very sophisticated measurement and diagnostic system. The system is capable of collecting and analyzing data from more than 100,000 component points simultaneously. That is nearly 10 times the number of sensors on a modern aircraft. The many sensors have AI monitoring and control. Lu’s team said this clever system had saved the pricey weapon three times already. And with every little problem found and fixed, the electromagnetic gun works smoother. In the last 50 shots, there had not been a single glitch.

Back in 2011, the US had spent four years shooting off 1,000 test shells. By 2018, they were aiming high – building something that could fire 1,000 rounds easily. But engineering, tech and money got in the way. The US military gave up on it in 2021, and some critics warned that China could use this as an opportunity to catch up and maybe even surpass them.

China’s researchers also want to make larger electromagnetic railgun like systems for boosting larger rockets to space. These would replace the first stage of rockets and could increase the payload fraction. Normally, multistage chemical rockets only get about 1-3% of the total mass of the rocket as payload.