Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!amdahl!pacbell!att!cbnews!military From: budden@manta.nosc.mil (Rex A. Buddenberg) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: Particle Beam Gun Message-ID: <10232@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 14 Oct 89 01:56:19 GMT Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego Lines: 35 Approved: military@att.att.com From: budden@manta.nosc.mil (Rex A. Buddenberg) There are occasional references to particle beam weapons in open literature. Naval Institute Proceedings has notes on the subject occasionally. It's obvious that we're not hearing the whole story. A couple issues ago, there were some notes about the next generation of Navy ships and there is an interesting wrinkle in the logic. Most of the verbiage referred to the process of defining the problem. The disconnect is that one has crept in -- electric main propulsion. But the benefits apparently make it an attractive enough concept to build around: - electric power, particularly in an era where high temp superconductors appear to be becoming a practical technology, allows great flexibility in machinery plant arrangements. Wonderful news to naval engineers who can benefit by having some of their design constraints go away. And shaft alignments are real problems when they come as battle damage... - ability to diver this large bagful of kilowatts to an electrically driven weapon for short periods of time. Particle beam weapons, lasers and related technologies will require large amounts of power and the ability to dual-use what you've already put there as propulsion power is a further economy. Now, unless the Navy has some black program out there, this isn't likely to happen for a few years. The DDG-51 class of destroyer is gas turbine propelled and has a weapons suite that looks fairly familiar. And lead ship is at the christening stage about now. So it'll be a few years before the Navy gets to the next break point in construction where something like this might be programmed for production. All from memory... Rex Buddenberg