The idea of evacuating the barrel of the cannon won’t help much, though it’ll probably keep the barrel from exploding. The projectile is going to hit atmosphere when it comes out of the barrel, and as noted above, at those speeds it might as well hit a brick wall.
Narile–since the lunar rail gun would probably be a stationary object, its target would depend on what direction the Moon was facing when it was fired. I’m sure that in a best case scenario, the lunar colonists would only fire it when it was “aimed” at a Lagrange point. However, should some civil unrest occur, rowdy Lunarites could fire the gun when it could do the most harm.
You could also change the aim of the rail gun by increasing or decreasing the the acceleration rate, or changing the weight of the payload.
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- Gerald Bull was one of the largest and most well-known proponents of permanently-mounted cannons. As the size of a cannon is increased, less and less of the total price is spent on the cannon, and more and more is spent on the articulating mount. Gerald, like a few others, realized that making a big cannon is pretty cheap if you dig a hole in the ground, put a pipe down the hold and pour steel-reinforced cement around the pipe. You can’t aim the barrel, but you can adjust the point of impact and you don’t have to be exact if you are using chemical and biological agents in the shells. He didn’t tend to openly say this last part; he often tried to point out that it was a true “peacekeeping” weapon since it could only be used to protect critical geographical areas, such as mountain passes from invading forces. - He tried selling it to most NATO first-world countries, but they thought it was dumb and they could afford the real stuff anyway. He then tried selling it to many third-world tinpot dictators, but most of them thought it was dumb also, and they’d rather have the cast-off Russian and Chinese equipment and not get laughed at.
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- You can shoot something into space, but whether it would cost less than using a shuttle or rocket is a matter of debate. This is also much like asking, why don’t we build a bridge from the US to Europe instead of using boats? Because boats, for all their shortcomings, have a number of advantages that bridges cannot match. One not insignificant, is that from a historical perspective the military prefers boats to bridges. As well as rockets and shuttles to stationary spaceguns.
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- During the 80’s the US gov’t did experiment with radar-guided anti-aircraft shells. Some were built and test fired from regular AA guns at land-borne targets. (20mm shells longer than normal, had to be loaded singly) The final verdict was that they did work (how well they worked wasn’t revealed), but were too expensive to produce at the time, even outside of the fact that they wouldn’t feed in any existing 20mm cannon system. - MC
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Regarding the late Dr. Bull: has anybody bought up his patents? If the mossad was so eager to bump him off, he must have been on to something significant.
By the way, has Israel ever come out with any statement about the hit?
The rail gun on the Moon could hit different orbital paths by altering the speed of ejection, irrespective of its “aim” as a rifle. There would be a sheaf of possible orbits, some terminating on Earth, some achieving Lunar orbit, some moving to other Earth orbits. Some of the solutions would be collision paths with either Earth, or the Moon. Stopping the missile at a La Grange point would require a correction when it got there, since it would have to have a different orbit to arrive at the “point” than it would need to remain there. (The La Grange point is not a point in space, but a specific orbit where gravitational forces would make the object more stable with respect to the Earth/Moon system.)
It’s rocket science.
<P ALIGN=“CENTER”>Tris</P>
A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it.
–Anonymous