Torpedo Launch and Velocity
NeerajA's picture
Posted on:
Friday, November 9, 2018 - 13:32

The launch system planned for torpedoes is railgun based, which relies on a magnetic field to amplify initial velocity from an explosive launch. This should give us launch velocities of at least 10K km/sec, depending on the length of the railgun.

The magnetic field will be produced by QCD-derived superconductor electromagnets which produce incredibly powerful magnetic fields (even more powerful that those used in the fusion reactor). This will give us those fantastic launch velocities but will also be incredibly power intensive.

To provide the burst of intense power needed for launch, some kind of store-and-dump power system will be needed, most likely solid state (ie a capacitor). This has the advantage of allowing different power levels to be allocating to charging each railgun's capacitor - if you allocate less power to the charge, it will just take longer.

You could also launch a torp at charge levels below 100% - you'd just get a drop-off in launch velocity.

The only other thing to consider with velocity is that a torp's actual velocity in space is a combination of launch velocity and the launching vessel's own velocity. So the faster the ship is going at launch, the faster the torp will be, which would decrease evasion or countermeasure option for the target.

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Slydev's picture

Would heavier payloads have a lower velocity with the railgun?

A lot of these cool things haven't been considered in the MVP as we are just putting together a basic system but moving onthe V2 we will have to get all of this information together (along with what we have learnt from the MVP) to make a complete version that works with the simulation. Exciting stuff.

NeerajA's picture

Most likely. As the railgun has a multiplier effect on the intial eplosive launch velocity, even a small decrease in initial velocity could have a significant effect on final launch velocity.