I always wondered how the GPS package of the Extended Range Guided Munition (ERGM) could be hardened sufficiently to survive the “instant on” acceleration of being shot out of the barrel of a 5″ naval gun.
Turns out they couldn’t:
After more than a decade of research and $600 million spent, the Navy said yesterday it will cut off funding for a long-range naval weapon designed by Raytheon Co. that has repeatedly failed to perform as advertised in field tests, according to Navy and company officials.
The Waltham-based defense giant has long struggled to develop the Extended-Range Guided Munition, a high-tech projectile designed to be fired from Navy destroyers up to 50 miles offshore in support of ground troops. Most recently, in February, the guidance system, the rocket motor, and tail fins all flunked demonstration tests at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico…
The weapons’ Global Positioning System satellite guidance system failed to survive the thrust of being shot out of a shipboard gun. Ultimately, the target date for reaching “initial operational capability” was extended by a decade, from 2001 to 2011.
Bummer.
That’s interesting. I saw a “Future Weapons” episode on Discovery that showed that the Army was having quite a bit of success with a GPS guided artillary shell. It seems to me that although the forces would be greater in the Naval gun, the forces should also be along the same axis and therefore the two should follow the same design principle. Too bad they couldn’t make it work. That would have been a great asset to have in support of amphib troops,and quite a bit cheaper than a TLAM.
Jim C
Ummm….I would not treat anything you see on television as gospel. Whether the Army’s shell really works is TBD.
That being said, the acceleration involved in a 5in/54 or 62 cal gun versus a 155mm howitzer may be significant enough to make things difficult for the design team.
Hmm…Wonder how that affects the (DDX)DD1000, or is it the DD21program? Not sure whether the two programs are one and the same.
All of this creates a question in my mind. Is there a difference in the DDX (DD1000) and the DD 21 programs? Are they the same ship, just on different tracks, or are they entirely different?
Thanks
Nevermind….I just found this at FAS.
DDG-1000 Program
Origin of Program. The program known today as the DDG-1000 program
was announced on November 1, 2001, when the Navy stated that it was replacing a
destroyer-development effort called the DD-21 program, which the Navy had
initiated in the mid-1990s, with a new Future Surface Combatant Program aimed at
developing and acquiring a family of three new classes of surface combatants:1
Amazing that with our current materials capability we can’t create a GPS sensor that can withstand that kind of launch. Of course, that’s a whole kettle of fish different from the VT fuze. The VT was oneof the top three or four breakthroughs of the WW-II era — an active proximity fuse with batteries and (ahem) vacuum tube based electronics, all created in the laboratories of the Crosley motor car company.
Too much boom and not enough zoom, I guess.
Rail gun time!
For the life of me I can’t figure out why the engineers couldn’t figure out a “soft(er)-launch” out the barrel without compromising range capability. Don’t know the G-load on a standard 5″, but wouldn’t ramping up the acceleration up at a bit slower (ala Space Shuttle throttle down/up) pace improve circuit board/other hardware launch survivability?
I want to see someone take an LHD Amphib of some kind and chain down an Army MLRS on the aviation deck. That cold be some fun fire support for Marines.
$600M? That’s a lot of Guinness.
Rockwell claims their NavStorm “Artillery G-Hardened GPS” works. I think this was the one they used for the Extended Range Guided Munition-Risk Reduction, where they reported success.
As someone who built a GPS receiver back before there were dedicated chips, I’d say the crux move is the local oscillator design. (Checking, I found in a blurb about Navstorm that one of the keys was their “artillery GPS oscillator design”.) I could see how maybe not every company could make that magic work. Although I would have bet that $0.6B would have been enough. I suspect that “project management” might have been as important as technical difficulty.
Lost my next bet too: the current market cap for Guinness Anchor Berhad (GUMS) is $1.6B, so it wouldn’t have been enough to own Guinness. I didn’t think they were quite that big.
I’m with ELP on this one. The shoes like their NSFS, but, man, deck guns seem like the weapons from a bygone era. I’m willing to bet $600M would have put us a good ways toward implementing a plan to slice off the deck guns and replace them with missile launchers, which could be fitted with GPS guided munitions that are already in inventory. Sure, a 50 mile precision gun is hot stuff, but a 50 mile missile? Cake. And with the same outcome.
Disclamer:
I am drinking an adult beverage
I have been drinking adult beverages prior to sunset
The sun has set in my timezone
I ain’t read the “boston.com” article
OK, that’s outa the way, my comment on “weapon selection by goverment”
I don’t know much, but a co-worker at one point was a “rocket scientist”. He worked on a US weapon system (starts with a H, has hell in it)long story short, they were given spec’s, including how they would be tested. During the test, it required it “reject” spurious input, AKA the SUN. My co-workers company used a armature pen over paper to determine interferance, they got a bunch during the daylight tests. The competion used a LED, they got NONE during the daylight test. Go figure…..
Mike M., according to StrategyPage (which admittledly has its own accuracy issues sometimes), the Army GPS shell saw operational use earlier this year.
It looks like they’re all stuck on stupid. Why insist on GPS in the shell? Could one launch a decent UAV from the giant destroyer and have it laze your targets 30 or 40 miles inand? Put a laser seeker on the little shell and you’re in business! Plus it is netcentric! Interoperable! A family of systems! It’s clearly a winner. To whom should I submit my unsolicited proposal?
Sorry about your ERGM.
I mainly came to wish ya’ll a Happy Easter!
Let’s not forget that powder burns differently, so it may not be the fault of the chips so much as how they’re launched. Reloaders know that pistol, rifle and shotgun powders have different characteristics, and using one instead of the other can result in some serious problem.
Perhaps they merely need a slower-burning powder, and perhaps a longer gun, to ease these shocks. It’s also entirely possible it’s a problem that’s not going to be solved this way and another method needs to be tried.
Usually doesn’t take 10 years go discover this sort of limitation. Kind of makes one wonder…
– Max
The Navy’s been smoking crack on this whole NGFS bit. Probably to make up for the decades of neglect prior to this progam being initiated.
There are far too many compromises involved to get a shell to travel so far. 110 km?! They’d have been far better off adopting the Army’s MLRS system even if it did initially only have 30 km range. I’ll concede that space and weight are always tight on a ship, but they’d have gotten far more for their $600 million. And the new GMLRS rockets have 70 km range and are combat-proven with their GPS guidance systems.
Besides this program really isn’t about supporting the Marines as they get ashore, since they can use their own artillery once that happens, but rather about the Navy trying to replace short-range air strikes with long-range artillery to justify its existence and funding in the GWOT.
Look, you don’t need to send a B-2 to hit that terrorist camp, we can do it cheaper with ERGMs!
Re: Comment #40
Lasers don’t work so well through clouds, smoke and dust…that’s why the Copperhead arty shell went away.
The Army’s GPS round works…I have seen the results firsthand.
I didn’t realize that a naval gun had such a difference in muzzle velocity…I guess hardening the GPS is a bridge too far technology wise right now.
OK, I’m a shoe so I may be biased. However, the ERGM isn’t the only NSFS arrow in the quiver, just the cheapest. A Naval version of ATACMs is possible as well as a land attack version of the Standard, the LASM. One of the stated purposes of the Electro-Thermal Chemical Gun program was to produce higher muzzle energy with a tailored acceleration curve to make electronic packages more survivable. ERGM was driven by bean counters, just like everything else acquired by DoD.
The thing doesn’t have a rotating band, right, so it’s only linear acceleration involved?
As SJ pointed out, they made vacuum tubes work out of 5″/38s back in 1942.
It is linear acceleration, but the ERGM is fired from the 5″/62, and has twice the muzzle energy as the 5′/54. (Don’t have the exact numbers at my fingertips, but I think it is 18 Mega Joules vice 9 Mega Joules)
..or you could always put a topo map guided M1A1 tank out there and they could pound the target with 120mm precision fire all doo-daa day, and then grind the remnants into itty-bitty crumbs of dust with the track…..
Stretch a little bit and take this ERGM “not being ready for primetime”, technically/physically and parallel it to this whole fascination with pilotless vehicles for autonomous missions- UCAV specifically. Think about it.
But hey. A billion here and a billion there…
On the other hand, how long did it take ballistic missile shootdown capability to come to fruition terchnically (not IOC), what, 25 years and hundreds ofbillions? What about the V-22 commenced in 1968 and dozens if not hundreds of billions later? I think R&D is important but not paramount on a resource constrained playing field.
Bottom-line: IMO, only dope smokers and those with profits to gain, preach “skip a generation” of proven weapon systems during time of hot war. Of course some still even can’t accept the fact that we are in a hot war….
b2
I wonder how their railgun is coming along? Wouldn’t that make this issue moot? The railgun is supposed to have a more gradual acceleration curve than the current guns.