http://www.wired.com/2014/04/electromagnetic-railgun-launcher/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAFaQgITBkI I would not want to be in its path.
That's what we need more of: weapons. Although I give you that it seems cleaner and cheaper than others, on a round-per-round basis. And it looks like we'll be needing such weapons quite soon.
No mentioning of BAE Systems there. http://www.baesystems.com/article/B...west-naval-railgun-prototype-fires-first-shot
Unfortunately the way the world is Weapons are lucrative, a number of our so called "civilized" countries participate in the creation and selling of weapons. Weapons contracts are a multibillion (name currency of choice) industry. One of the pro's of Electro-magnetics is the reduction in both fuel and explosives necessarily contained on any given vessel, reducing the chances that such a vessel would be sunk/destroyed by the ignition of it's own ordinance. Another is the potential usage of Railgun's to deal with Impacting largescale meteor's since conventional explosives (that rely upon atmospheric pressure) would suffer from reduced efficiency.
We Brits (presumably BAe [as it was then], and/ or DERA [now Qinetiq]) managed to have a "working" rail gun [sup]1,2[/sup] back in 1980 [sup]3[/sup]... It was demonstrated at Kirkudbright. It's not surprising therefore that BAE Systems had some input. 1 From memory: 4 km/ sec, nearly twice as fast as the USN's latest toy. 2 Admittedly it wasn't - then - viable as weapon due to the power supply requirements. But still... 3 This is not to say that the US didn't also have their own projects under way at the time.
Probably not necessary, but I'm wondering if this could be scaled down to rifle size? Just plug your machine-gun into an electrical socket, and start firing away. Or use a portable generator. It would certainly reduce the cost of ammunition.
I would love to see some kind of anti-meteor plan using railguns. I admit - unlikely, sure. But to say that the consequences were "unthinkable" would be to do poor justice to the word. Imagine this, too: several meteors are meant to be on crash courses with Earth at some point. We know about them, and we might even stir towards some kind of long-range technological plan to destroy them in a hundred years' time. Meanwhile, the oil runs out, and technological civilisation ends. Whoops! Anyone remember that meteor in a couple generations? Cause it's still coming.
So would I. But from a safe distance, say, Alpha Centauri or thereabouts. Regardless of how fast we consider a rail gun projectile to be it's still less than a meteor. (Minimum would be 11 km/ sec - and that's only if it started "stationary" relative to us [sup]1[/sup]). The engagement would have to be endoatmospheric and bunging more-or-less solid projectiles [sup]2[/sup] at large masses isn't going to do much. If the meteor is small enough to be affected (to any degree that renders it "safe") it's probably just as well to let it hit. (Unless it's coming down on somewhere civilised Birmingham, London, NY, Scunthorpe etc [sup]3[/sup]). If it's not small enough "ignore" chances are that all would be done at "best" would to break it up into some sort of celestial cluster bomb - less concentrated damage; far more widespread. 1 And the faster we make the projectile the better the chances it burns up due to atmospheric friction (I believe that the current limit is slightly above 4 km/ sec for any materials we have that are strong enough mechanically to be used as projectiles). 2 Any explosive payload would be be almost negligible compared to the mass involved - as would the transferred energy if it didn't simply punch through anyway). 3 Heck, Norway was hit a few years ago by one that impacted at roughly 20 kilotonnes (larger "explosion" than Hiroshima) and it barely made the internet, let alone front-page news [sup]4[/sup]. 4 Whether this says more about the place of Norway in the world's consciousness than it does about the impact of the, er, impact, I couldn't say.
