<story><title>US Navy&apos;s Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico</title><url>https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28669/navys-railgun-now-undergoing-tests-in-new-mexico-could-deploy-on-ship-in-northwest</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>I find the physics of rail guns pretty fascinating. For something nominally invented in world war 1 (1918) which is now &amp;quot;only a few years&amp;quot; away from possible deployment. We are talking literally a 100 years later. We went from powered flight to flying in orbit in less time, think about that.&lt;p&gt;Is it a compelling weapons concept? Of course it is, you don&amp;#x27;t need explosives to shoot things that is pretty huge. Are wars bad? Of course they are.&lt;p&gt;That said, the concept has been around for a hundred years, so people &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; going to work on making a practical weapon out of it. Which means that at some point its going to be a component of a military action. And not having one of your own, will change the calculus of what you can and cannot do.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mabbo</author><text>The concept is the same for any projectile weapon: I&amp;#x27;m going to convert stored energy into kinetic energy.&lt;p&gt;Bow and arrow? Stored energy in the bow turned into kinetic energy in the arrow. Handgun&amp;#x2F;cannon&amp;#x2F;musket? Stored chemical energy in some compound, quickly converted into kinetic energy in the bullet via exploding.&lt;p&gt;A rail gun isn&amp;#x27;t much different- it&amp;#x27;s just a different means to store the energy (in electrical storage) and a different means to apply the energy to the projectile (magnets). The real problem is that these two changes require a lot of overhead in terms of gear to make it work. It&amp;#x27;s only worthwhile to do it if you intend to really, &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; add a lot of kinetic energy to something.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the same reason the electric car has taken 100 years to finally be worthwhile- chemical energy is much more dense and easy to convert into kinetic energy. Battery tech is only now catching up to the point that it&amp;#x27;s worth doing.</text></comment>
<story><title>US Navy&apos;s Railgun Now Undergoing Tests in New Mexico</title><url>https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28669/navys-railgun-now-undergoing-tests-in-new-mexico-could-deploy-on-ship-in-northwest</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>I find the physics of rail guns pretty fascinating. For something nominally invented in world war 1 (1918) which is now &amp;quot;only a few years&amp;quot; away from possible deployment. We are talking literally a 100 years later. We went from powered flight to flying in orbit in less time, think about that.&lt;p&gt;Is it a compelling weapons concept? Of course it is, you don&amp;#x27;t need explosives to shoot things that is pretty huge. Are wars bad? Of course they are.&lt;p&gt;That said, the concept has been around for a hundred years, so people &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; going to work on making a practical weapon out of it. Which means that at some point its going to be a component of a military action. And not having one of your own, will change the calculus of what you can and cannot do.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>derefr</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not like the technology behind railguns hasn&amp;#x27;t been stable and ready to use for decades now. It&amp;#x27;s just that, until the more recent invention of ancillary technologies like supercapacitors, it&amp;#x27;s been so costly to fire them that there was no logical place for them on the battlefield, so we never bothered to operationalize them.</text></comment>