20mm autocannon is enough to render trees, brick walls, APCs, hiding behind other people and trench periscopes irrelevant anyway, with higher rate of fire and explosive capabilites. Heck, 12.7mm M2 Browning does the job completly fine too, for a fraction of the cost of a railgun.
Also, such small projectiles might actually have lower ranges than conventional ones, since at the railgun speeds air resistance could very well be enough to cause the projectile to burn up.
At shorter ranges and thinner walls/trees/A.P.C.s/etc... An autocannon is ultimately in the mess of everything and its shells get stopped by plenty of stuff. A railgun could park outside of the battle and start rendering terrain irrelevant to one side. And that is just the proof of concept design an not one of the ambitious ones.
As to whether the air-pressure prevents them from functioning, that is a matter of whether the G.M. wants us to play with this sort of thing or not. I think that we are supposed to do interesting things rather than endlessly repeating historical designs in order to create a cherry-picked military of all the most lauded military equipment of the period.
The power needs of a late-WWII vessel are probably not that far off from a nuclear-powered vessel
Lol, no.
Nuh-ah!
and railguns are, to the best of my knowledge, mounted onto vessels with no modifications to their power-plant. so, in short, the power was already available.
There was one ship (short of the Aircraft Carriers) in US Navy capable of mounting their railguns shooting 10kg projectiles, the Zumwalt, and while they theorize they could get the Arleigh Burke to shoot it, it would require very significant upgrade of it's power systems.
We are talking about a fictitious weapon. I never said anything about ten kilograms. Please try to be relevant. It is nice that you found data that something much more ambitious is not feasible for designs without them being specifically engineered for the purpose, but it really adds nothing to the conversation.
Unless someone can actually cite the power usage of a railgun, or at least nuclear power plant from a military vessel, compared to the powerplant of our current vessels, it seems to be blind assumption that we cannot currently power such things from naval vessels, especially if we are looking at lighter projectiles than are currently being proposed for a very very different battlefield.
25 megawatts
Great! We now have a quote for what a large railgun requires, now we need to know what the power output of period-appropriate naval vessel's power-plants was and we can get cracking!
RAM, just don't make assumptions, alright?
You assume that I am shooting ten kilogram projectiles at 100kilograms. I never suggested anything like that. I know that it is natural for humans to be hypocritical and that it is extremely difficult to avoid, or even notice, but some effort would be very nice if we want to have a remotely coherent conversation. I am making speculation, in a speculative wargame, avoiding such feel really stupid to me. Should this game perhaps be relegated only to people with current professional qualifications in military engineering?
Why would you link the Paris Gun? It's not a railgun, and it's not a useful idea anyway. It's not accurate enough to hit a ship with---they literally pointed these things at a target from a set distance, a target that was LITERALLY the size of a city, and fired for as long as they wanted to.
And yet they hit it, and they did aim, and their spotters were not all that great. The fact is that they have methods for doing so and those methods can be refined. And we already have basic computers at that! The Paris Gun proves that guns can be aimed at such ranges, which is enough for the purposes of the game...
You aren't going to get enough power or power-generation out of a Salamander for even a small railgun.
Nuclear power is incredible, it is far, FAR more efficient than coal or oil or gas.
By what metric?
The only relevant metric is per volume. And my proposed fuel is jet fuel, into jet turbines, which are, as I understand it, more volume efficient than steam turbines, although I could be wrong on that. Fuel efficiency would be very sad, but then it doesn't need to be turned on all the time, and I also proposed capacitor banks much larger than the weapon itself. Instead of a truck with a gun on it, it would be about 40-70% gun-by-volume once one factors in the electrical systems. And we could probably revise better capacitors if they are the only things stopping us.
RAM, I don't know what you know and what you think you know about railguns, but it's not enough.
As got said, an 8mm projectile would literally be vaporized into a fine plasma-y mist.
Granted I don't know the subject well enough to say for certain what would happen. On the other hand, given that we do not have leading experts from every relevant field and people who served in every relevant role during the entirety of the relevant time-period I think that a certain level of reduced expectations of realism ought to be expected. If you happen to have the equipment to perfectly model all of the game's aerodynamics in all potentially-relevant atmospheric conditions, then I guess we should have you run everything through the super-computer that you have this perfect physics simulation running on and then we don't need to have any inaccuracy at all.
I feel that the projectile completely vaporising feels a little pessimistic, but it would be a matter of G.M. fiat. Either it does or it doesn't, nd I doubt that reality will be the deciding factor.
assuming LINEAR power/weight (And this is ENTIRELY false and just for raw comparison ONLY)
RAM, just don't make assumptions, alright? Rail guns are ENORMOUSLY hard to power, use, and build.
Entirely false you say? Well that is no good, and I don't want to make assumptions. So what is the EXACT Power to weight ratio?
Do the projectile's dimensions modify the outcome? What about altitude? Aid density? Air composition? Suspended particle granularity? Interference from sonic stimuli? What is the error of margin on our capacitor output? We gotta factor in minimum and maximum input rates...