Mach 8 anyone?

[White-Light]

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/navy-ele...news-9382.html

[Stuka]

That would probably REALLY hurt bad for about .00001 seconds...

[White-Light]

Hurt your relatives for longer though. Imagine the clean up. More mop than brush pan and brush.

[drlava]

To hit something 100 miles away with a 6 minute flight time, I would expect it would need a guidance system. It's impressive that they can design a guidance system that can take those incredible acceleration forces at launch.

[DMills]

That is a solid fin stabilised round they are firing.

Just getting the gun to work is a challenge (at least more then once, railguns have a way of blowing up when they fire), and building one with rails that give it a reasonable barrel life is a MAJOR problem.

Sure, to make it a viable system it needs active guidance (good luck with that, never mind the acceleration, the EMC environment is not too healthy during launch either), but there are far more critical engineering issues to be overcome first.

These things typically store the energy not in a vast capacitor bank as might be expected but as kinetic energy in the rotor of a thing called a compulsator (Compensated Pulsed Alternator), very nasty if something happens to the bearings while the thing is at full speed.

Incidentally, you see the two big groups of bus cables linking to the back of the rail, the forces between them are of the same order as the force on the projectile, I was surprised by how little they flexed.

It is one thing to demonstrate a single shot in a lab (when you don't see all the explosions, misfires, short circuits and other general cockups), it is quite another to have a weapon system that can be deployed in a salt water environment and fired repeatedly with excellent reliability by sailors as opposed to scientists.

Cool tech, but I am not expecting to see it deployed on a surface platform any time soon.


Regards, Dan.