The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) has unveiled its advances in electromagnetic cannon technology, widely seen as the future of naval warfare. The first official images of the turret-mounted electromagnetic cannon mounted on the test ship JS Asuka have been released to the public. The Japanese Defense Ministry’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency (ATLA) has been intensively working on electromagnetic cannons that could be used on both naval and land platforms since the mid-2010s. The development comes even more notably after the U.S. Navy suspended development of similar projects in the early 2020s due to technical difficulties.
The electromagnetic cannon being integrated into JS Asuka by the JMSDF was photographed during a visit to the ship by Self-Defense Fleet Commander Vice Admiral Omachi Katsushi on April 9. Ship spotters in Japan first began viewing the new system on JS Asuka earlier this month.
The test ship JS Asuka, with a displacement of 1995 tons, which entered service in 6.200, has been actively used for the development and testing of various weapons and naval systems since then. In a brief statement from the JMSDF, it was stated that Commander Omachi Katsushi visited JS Asuka to inspect the latest status of the electromagnetic cannon under development at ATLA.
The full-scale electromagnetic gun development project, led by ATLA’s Ground Systems Research Center (GSRC), was launched in 2016 under the name “Electromagnetic Acceleration Systems Research” and continued until fiscal year 2022. The main goal of this research was to achieve a muzzle velocity of 2000 meters per second and to ensure that the barrel has a life of 120 rounds. In other words, the aim was to achieve stable firing performance of up to 120 rounds at a constant firing rate.
Challenges in the Development Process of Electromagnetic Cannons
According to information reported by Naval News, while the damage caused by the high pressure caused by the explosion of gunpowder in the barrel in traditional firearms poses a significant problem, this is eliminated in electromagnetic guns. However, the heat caused by the high current passing through the rails and the wear caused by the contact between the armature and the rail stand out as one of the main difficulties to be overcome in the development of electromagnetic guns.
Wear on the rail surface can lead to performance losses over time, such as a decrease in muzzle velocity. For this reason, while copper was initially used as the main material for the barrel rails, various experiments were conducted with different metals and mixtures of other materials throughout the research process. As a result, the tests successfully confirmed that there was no significant damage to the barrel rails even after 120 rounds were fired.
In 2023, ATLA announced that it had successfully test-fired a prototype electromagnetic cannon at sea from an unspecified platform. At the time, the agency claimed that this was the first of its kind for any country. The images ATLA released from this test show that the cannon was mounted on a different test rig than the turret currently found on JS Asuka, suggesting that different test configurations were used at different stages of development. Japan’s advancement in electromagnetic cannon technology has the potential to profoundly impact the nature of naval warfare in the future.
