Recoil is also an issue. If the railgun can fire a projectile with much more energy than even a 50 cal sniper rifle then it would pretty much rip your arm off when fired.
no way. we don't have any power source with that kind of density. And if we do, there are much better uses than powering a rifle.
Recoil is also an issue. If the railgun can fire a projectile with much more energy than even a 50 cal sniper rifle then it would pretty much rip your arm off when fired.
I doubt it. Civilian research labs and universities are where a good deal of the latest advancements have come from. The government (DARPA especially) does help fund some of those projects, though.
I'll keep on enjoying the frequent life changers like GPS and the internets while you wait for the civilian research labs to match it.
Neither of which are recent developments. Might as well talk about the space race.
And anyway, companies like Xerox/PARC, Bell Labs and IBM have noted contributions to computing and communications, and the development of the internet was a combined effort by ARPANET with universities.
Would rather invest money into Infrastructure than pointless weapons.
CLICK MEno way. we don't have any power source with that kind of density. And if we do, there are much better uses than powering a rifle.
Then get off the internet you fuckstick.
I can't wait until scientists refine supercapacitors to the point where they have near-zero internal resistance and are dense enough to provide twenty shots from a magazine-sized bank.
I fail to see what getting money from a tiny bank/atm has to do with rail guns
By the sounds of it, this thing needs a lot of power to fire just one slug. I don't know how much wattage the 32 megajoule blast converts into, but that energy burst seems to last a fraction of a second so, probably, this cannon eats up hundreds of megawatts on a single shot.
If that's the case, high power lasers could be a much more efficient method of defense (more so because they already exist and are practically combat-ready now).
Which means that naval artillery is pretty much the only military application for a rail gun ... dunno, doesn't really seem that useful when compared to other weapon systems like ship to ship missiles and naval aircraft.
By the sounds of it, this thing needs a lot of power to fire just one slug. I don't know how much wattage the 32 megajoule blast converts into, but that energy burst seems to last a fraction of a second so, probably, this cannon eats up hundreds of megawatts on a single shot.
If that's the case, high power lasers could be a much more efficient method of defense (more so because they already exist and are practically combat-ready now).
Which means that naval artillery is pretty much the only military application for a rail gun ... dunno, doesn't really seem that useful when compared to other weapon systems like ship to ship missiles and naval aircraft.
No one thinks that lasers are an effective means of defense. No one. Good luck getting over the horizon shots with a laser.
corwin said:1 watt=1 joule/1 sec
Due to the how fast it's fired I would guess that it would take about 32 megawatts per shot at most...and I would think the kinetic energy of the impact would be much greater than the pinpoint beam of a laser.
Railguns and other weapons like this would make anti-ship missiles obsolete. Missiles and aircraft can be shot down by precise shots from these weapons. These new weapons also travel so damn fast, much faster than any missile and can inflict way more damage. Much like after world war 2, when carrier based aircraft and later anti-ship missiles supplanted battleship naval artillery, these new weapons would turn the tide again and armored big gun warships would re-appear.
Looks like another waste of US tax payers money courtesy of the Military.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Well to get more technical a Joule is a measure of energy produced not power itself, 1 joule of energy is produced from 1 watt of power for 1 second...so technically it could require 128 megawatts of power for .25 seconds or whatever but averaged out it would be 32 MW for one second...so I guess it could be all in how you look at it as to how much "power" it needs, essentially a crap load for a very short period of timeSounded like a lot less than a second to me ... anyway..