The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Materials Testing Facility announced that it has fired its electromagnetic railgun 1000 times and reached a materials testing milestone toward the deployment on warships.
Navy officials said that the range of a railgun is up to 20 times greater than that of conventional weapon systems. A projectile could reach a target 290 miles away in less than 6 minutes and impact it with massive force. The idea is to potentially replace extremely expensive Tomahawk missiles,
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/us-navy-railgun-warship-weapon-military,news-13053.html
Wrap a pumpkin in tin foil and you will the most awesome pumpkin chunkin' cannon ever.
Hey! It's about that time of year. I wonder if they've hit mach 1 yet?
http://www.punkinchunkin.com/
<added>
Big10 took 2nd last year
http://www.big10inch.org/
If atmosphere isn't a significant issue, you wonder if they'll load stuff like that up on satellite/orbital weapons platforms.
I'm still trying to put that in perspective; it's like a gun that shoots 3000lb cars at 100mph from D.C. to New York.
Who wouldn't want one of those?
>want one of those
In high school, I built a mortar that fired beer cans a few hundred feet. Does that count?
"7-pound projectile to a speed of 2.4 km/s or 5400 mph. However, rumor has it that velocities of up to 3.5 km/s have been achieved. In comparison, projectiles fired from an M16 rifle top out at 0.9 km/s."
Here's a small pumpkin traveling at about one-tenth the speed of a rail gun projectile and dinging up a car just a little bit:
http://www.big10inch.org/streaming_files/Dama10-2.gif
A friend of mine has a catapult he uses to throw pumpkins. We're old tech around these parts.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1338112/U-S-Navys-supergun--electromagnetic-rail-gun-obliterates-targets-100miles-away.html
It is claimed that it has pinpoint accuracy and in 2010 they fired a 33 MJ shot (over 20x what they're talking about in the article, but presumably a bigger prototype gun).
I've seen discussion that these could eventually launch satellites. If that 3.5km/s speed record is from a 33 MJ shot, then it's going to take a lot of juice to reach escape velocity (11.2 km/s) for a decent sized satellite. Still, it's not that far from becoming a satellite killer. That's an interesting strategic issue since the US military superiority is based mostly on information availability and taking out a bunch of satellites would hurt that. It would need phenomenal accuracy though.
I guess this will hold us over until energy weapons arrive.
These projectiles are probably the CD/DVD of artillery. That is, the last physical format.
Why is it called a "railgun?" It almost sounds like a Big Bertha...does it have anything to do with "rails?"
>> Why is it called a "railgun?"
The projectile touches 2 conductive rails either side of the barrel, and thus completes the circuit for the "firing" current, sort of like a Tube train
To fire a pumpkin from one, you'd need a ferromagnetic sabot (iron, steel), and some serious acceleration padding. The initial impulse of a decent railgun would be in the order of 10,000g. You would, however, easily achieve the World Airspeed Record (Pumpkin)