They were doing exactly that. The pairs of pipes coming out the sides of the barrel are more charges, being timed to go right after the projectile goes through.
Didn’t work well also barrel life of like 5 shots and you can’t aim it or move it. Dumb, like everything they did.
Yeah. Now it’d be easy to programmably trigger each charge on the order of microseconds or less, and we can make some pretty fast-shutting valves. Barrel wear is harder and would probably involve simulational fluid dynamics. More likely we’d just build a coilgun, which removes that issue very nicely, and uses similar control electronics.
Of course, if you want to destroy a city there’s also nukes now, and anything else tends to either move or be very well protected. People have talked about this for space travel, but the trade-off between G-forces and length hurts at least as much as the rocket equation (despite being “only” quadratic instead of exponential).
Ah yes, the Canadian guy working with Saddam to start a novel space program (that totally for sure wouldn’t be repurposed as a weapon). Too bad he was assassinated, that would have been really interesting and probably wouldn’t have been a major military risk to anyone.
They were doing exactly that. The pairs of pipes coming out the sides of the barrel are more charges, being timed to go right after the projectile goes through.
Didn’t work well also barrel life of like 5 shots and you can’t aim it or move it. Dumb, like everything they did.
Yeah. Now it’d be easy to programmably trigger each charge on the order of microseconds or less, and we can make some pretty fast-shutting valves. Barrel wear is harder and would probably involve simulational fluid dynamics. More likely we’d just build a coilgun, which removes that issue very nicely, and uses similar control electronics.
Of course, if you want to destroy a city there’s also nukes now, and anything else tends to either move or be very well protected. People have talked about this for space travel, but the trade-off between G-forces and length hurts at least as much as the rocket equation (despite being “only” quadratic instead of exponential).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon
if you’re interested, a more modern take on the concept was attempted using conventional explosives.
Ah yes, the Canadian guy working with Saddam to start a novel space program (that totally for sure wouldn’t be repurposed as a weapon). Too bad he was assassinated, that would have been really interesting and probably wouldn’t have been a major military risk to anyone.