Blowing things up from far away
Everyone knows spaceships will have laser guns that go “pew, pew” and kill the fat guy in the x-wing. But until then, we’ll have to make do with blowing the crap out of stuff at 220 miles with the most powerful rail gun ever. The 32-megajoule Electric Laboratory Rail Gun (a name only a military bureaucrat could love) is four times more powerful than the previously-most-powerful rail gun, capable of accelerating steel slugs to Mach 7.
The scary thing is, this model is only half as powerful as the specifications given by the Navy - they want a 64 megajoule weapon. BAE’s got a ways to go, the current model only lasts a few shots before blowing itself out of alignment.
(story and image via DailyTech)
December 3rd, 2007 at 2:38 pm
That is incredibly cool, in a very scary way. I can’t help feeling that their plans to put it on a boat could go horribly wrong (recoil = capsize). It looks a lot like the Midgar ray from Final Fantasy VII…
December 3rd, 2007 at 5:07 pm
“Electric Laboratory Rail Gun (a name only a military bureaucrat could love”
Actually, it would be right at home in an anime series.
December 3rd, 2007 at 9:51 pm
True, Steve, but in Japanese, it’d probably be a 3-syllable word. I had a student ask me one time if some 28-or-so letter word was real, and the translation next to it was 3 kanji long. It had something to do with a disease caused by small particles of volcanic rock that can get lodged in the lungs.
December 6th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Geat comments. Wikipedia has some interesting background on the challenges of making these things work. Apparantly greasing the rails isn’t enough.
-d