Electric energy guns as new armament to counter air threats

New developments in guidance, air frame and propulsion technologies for both guided missiles and other airborne platforms, will lead to a definite increase in their manoeuvrability and speed. Together with new opportunities in such areas as (electromagnetic) masking, it is evident that the performance of armament based on conventional technology will become less and less sufficient to counter these air threats effectively in the future. Therefore, NATO and other countries have been considering different principles of physics for new weapon technologies. Leading thought is a system for which both hit probability and conditional kill probability show a quantum leap in attacking the air threat mentioned. During the past ten years, both in Europe and the US, one of the principles considered, i.e. electromagnetic launch technology (EML), has shown its feasibility for weapon application. A significant growth in EML-technology and its early weaponization aspects is taking place there. In the air defence role, next to a high rate of fire and a projectile muzzle velocity in the 3 to 4 km/s range, potential electric energy gun weapon systems offer opportunities for new projectile concepts for hypervelocity flight and terminal effects. Next to classifying the threat, some basic considerations of electromagnetic launch technology and electric gun aspects are discussed in this paper. Furthermore, the results of a performance comparison study between an 'Electromagnetic' and a 'Conventional' version of two medium calibre air defence gun systems is presented. For the evaluation the Monte-Carlo approach was used. As targets both a high diving missile and a fighter aircraft were considered. At present no operational EM guns exist and so, the majority of the gun system parameter values were kept equal to the one's for the conventional version. Parameters that were varied were the muzzle velocity and the gun dispersion, the Jatter being an important parameter influencing system performance. Both systems were generic. The first system is a gun, firing kinetic energy munition at a low rate of fire. The second system is a rapid fire gun in a Close In Weapon System role. The two systems were evaluated against several types of target trajectories, generated with amongst others a 6-degree of freedom simulation model with realistic generic parameters. The hit probability was used as a performance figure. Finally, aspects of the Netherlands Research Programme on EML technology are highlighted.