Navy Quietly Fires 20 Hyper Velocity Projectiles Through Destroyer’s Deckgun

In 2014, the Myth Busters dynamic duo of Jamie Hyneman & Adam Savage built an extremely long air cannon in order to launch a ping pong ball and measure its muzzle velocity. It clock-out at a world record setting, supersonic 1100 MPH! The ping pong projectile struck a 3/4 inch plywood backstop with such force it made an indentation in the wood, and the ball disintegrated.

A paint ball has more mass than a ping pong, and stings pretty bad on impact. Imagine being struck by an supersonic 1100 MPH paintball. You'd be dead, as if shot with a bullet from a traditional handgun.




This is the principle behind cannon-sized 'kinetic weaponry.' There's no explosive chemistry in the projectile, like gun powder, to destroy a target. There's just the mass of a projectile launched at super or hypersonic speed to obliterate a target.

Militaries across the globe have long been experimenting with these types of weapons, including ship mounted electromagnetic rail guns to launch hypersonic projectiles to damage or destroy other ships or land based targets.

These hypersonic projectiles are cheaper to manufacture and safer to store because there's no 'static' explosive component, like gun powder and detenator.

The U.S. military is retro-fitting its legacy weapons, like tanks, track howitzers, and deck guns to use supersonic projectiles.

Here's what the Navy has done lately.

From USNI News: "The test, conducted by the Navy and the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office as part of the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2018 international exercise, was part of a series of studies to prove the Navy could turn the more than 40-year-old deck gun design into an effective and low-cost weapon against cruise missiles and larger unmanned aerial vehicles.

While the HVP was originally designed to be the projectile for the electromagnetic railgun, the Navy and the Pentagon see the potential for a new missile defense weapon that can launch a guided round at near-hypersonic speeds."

In 2015, a terrorist in Syria learned first hand the deadly truth about kinetic weapons.

From Tom Jocelyn at the Long War Journal:  "The Defense Department announced today that Muhsin al Fadhli, a longtime al Qaeda operative from Kuwait, was killed on July 8 “in a kinetic strike” while “traveling in a vehicle near Sarmada, Syria.”

Kinetic strike. Some armchair analysts surmise that weapon was the legendary 'rods from god' launched from a satellite in Earth orbit. But more than likely it was a supersonic projectile launched from a U.S. ship off the coast of Syria that smashed Mr. al Fadhli into worm food.

Because rods from god are science fiction, right? Right??