http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/01/u ... vents.html

"The mighty railgun, that hitherto-unfeasible weapon most beloved of gamers and geeks the world over, is now a functional reality thanks to the U.S. Navy, which has produced a working 8-megajoule electromagnetic mass driver."

Discuss!

This is surprisingly old news, or rather the invention of a working railgun by the military is. There was video footage released awhile back on weapons of the future show where they talked about a stealth tank armed with one of these. In the picture shown on your link the same casing and shell were used in the firing. If anyone has a link to video of this weapon actually firing it would be an even greater push to discussion, I'll take a look around myself but someone else may have an easier link to this. It shows the weapon actually firing and the shell and casing up close.

One of the things they realized was that without a much more powerful energy source these weapons could not be based on tanks and the casing required to insure the shell fired straight was a bit bulky for your average tank to carry around. It actually fell on the Navy to pick this one up for the time being, just wait till they try and make it man portable, lol. It is quite cool and the weapon has unbelievable penetration power, eneogh that no armor known to date could shrug it off no matter the thickness or angle of defensive capability.

From Wiki:

"The United States Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division demonstrated an 8 mega-joule rail gun firing 3.2 kilogram (slightly more than 7 pounds) projectiles in October of 2006 as a prototype of a 64 mega-joule weapon to be deployed aboard Navy warships. Such weapons are expected to be powerful enough to replace BGM-109 Tomahawk missiles at a fraction of the operating expense."

The railgun has been around for awhile. Back in the '90's the Army was testing it on a Bradley, vaporizing significant portions of steel targets. There were issues with weight and power requirements which would be more easily dealt with using a ship as a platform.

Since the railgun is direct-fire weapon I find it difficult to see it as any sort of replacement for Tomahawk for most missions. Many targets would have some sort of terrain-masking (as well as earth curvature) and many require a kill mechanism for which a relatively small hypervelocity projectile would be unsuitable.

Here's an article which seems to cover most of what i heard about railguns at the time:

I'm not surprised the Navy is the first force to play with this tech. They'll be the first to use actual combat lasers for the same reason: they're the only ones who can lug around power plants the size of a small building.

Once the bugs are worked out, I could see railguns being moved to satellite deployment around the time they go on the Main Battle Tanks. You don't need the high power to use the satellite based railguns, you are essentially firing 'down' at your target, gravity will do most of the acceleration for you, you just need to be able to compensate for crosswinds, which most 'dumb' bombs used today can do.

Do you realize the kinetic energy in a 30lb steel dart traveling at terminal velocity from Low Earth Orbit? You wouldn't want to aim it at anyplace with noncombatants nearby, This thing could level small cities.