A committee lwa of the U.s. Senate has approved a smaller budget for defence research. Studies of a free-elektronenlaser and to an electromagnetic railgun of the Us navy will be reduced.
The defense budget for fiscal year 2012 of the American armed forces is provisionally 664,5 billion dollars, 6.4 billion less than what the Obama administration asked for, reports Wired. According to the Armed Services Committee of the U.s. Senate to the research projects to a free-elektronenlaser and an electromagnetic railgun of the US Navy are discontinued.
The committee says that the technical challenges of the two projects is too large to with sufficient certainty to usable weapons. Also, there are still no sufficiently powerful generators for American warships to the weapons at sea of the required energy. According to the American navy, these generators are available in 2020, when both weapons ready for use.
In december 2010, the Office of Naval Research that was successful, with a prototype railgun, a projectile shot with an energy of 33 megajoules. According to the researchers, this was a world record. Also in the research project of the free-elektronenlaser is progress; in February, earned the researchers a new milestone in the field of power. A free-elektronenlaser, in contrast to ordinary lasers, can be set to a desired wavelength. The two weapons should serve as a substitute of missiles.
The deletion of both research projects is not yet final: there should be multiple committees agree with the defence budget before the U.s. Senate there will be about votes. According to Wired, it is possible that the Us navy still budget you can get for the study of the futuristic weapons.