U.S. Navy Fires the World's Fastest Railgun

And at a range of 200 nautical miles the chance of hitting the target will be SFA. Unless it's big and stationary (and hopefully has been correctly identified first)

..isn't that what GPS is for--"Gun Pointing System"? (joke)

The warheads are "smart". Lobbing dumb explosives is so 20th century.

'Unless it's big and stationary'

Afghanistan?

I looked at the article. I am not so sure about throwing something 200 miles unless it wa straight down.

Hi,

in CR4 thread 17208 from Feb.2nd., some film clearly shows that this is not a railgun and a knowledgable commentator is stating which type of navy gun was used for this tets.

It seems that this test was intended to show the possibilities of light conical passive projectiles to have stable flight at very high velocities.

An actual railgun will not exist (my opinion) but may be a coilgun.

Wait and see.

RHABE

And a Rail Gun is different because it is or does what? I am not up on modern weaponry having been raised on bolt action rifles, cookie cutters (revolvers) and crack barrel shotguns.

Thank anyone with a good picture or explanation.

A lot of the Research and development on the rail gun was done here in Austin, Texas.

I saw a silent tape of a projectile that supposedly achieved "about 1/72 of light speed." I don't know what the clearance level was, but I was told that it was above mine and I had to sign a statement saying I would not talk about what I saw or heard. I was called to a conference room in or near Concord, CA, to run the tape in about June 1981. I worked for Systron-Donner, but I was chauffeured to some other place because they needed a projectionist tech with clearance and the guy they got from Alameda couldn't do it. The machine was some old VHS system with which I had no experience. The problem was that no one in the group of four engineer-types knew how to hook the thing up to a TV. I got lucky, but the connection was "positional," so I was asked to stay. Unfortunately, I didn't understand most of what was said, but this is what I recall: The object looked about 2' long and 6" diam at the middle. It was white and pointed at both ends like a spindle. A model or sectioned duplicate showed that the white part (ceramic?) was a casing for a smaller gray metal version (titanium?) about 1' long and 2" diam. The demonstrator and two other techs wore hazmat or radiation suits. The object was cradled in a heavy-looking curved metal trap in a !' diam. hole in the side of a metal (steel ?) device about the size of a large diesel train engine that joined together like a vault after the object was placed in the hole in one half. The device was in an enclosed space that I think was underground, but I can't remember why I think that unless it was something I heard. One end of the device was against a cinder-block wall. The filming kept cutting, so I don't know if it was always the same three or four techs. The techs kept pointing at things and just standing still for a while, like they expected a narration. Then it cut to another chamber with a 3' covered hole, like a hatch, in a 20'x20' metal wall about 100' (hard to estimate) down a cinder block tunnel from a pile of dark-gray-metal 1/2'x1'x3' blocks about the size of a bus, each block had to weigh as much as two anvils and there must have been several hundred of them. There was only one tech here and he just pointed to these things. Then it cut to what looked like high-speed film in which the hall suddenly went white. It was a weird perspective, like from a slit trench cut in a wall aimed at a curved reflector. Then it went through a frame-by-frame and you could see that the white came from the hole-wall in one frame. Next was a look at the hall after the firing. It looked burned and the hole in the wall was deformed and sunken or melted. Then they must have cut out the wall next to the pile to show that the projectile had gone all the way through it lengthwise, making a rough tunnel big enough for the tech to crawl through. They didn't show where it went after that. The camera was hand-held. From the conversation I understood that the power source had been an underground nuclear blast and that the projectile had traveled in a vacuum and that it had reached "about 1/72 of light speed." That's the thing that really stuck with me because the engineers kept recalculating it and seemed very impressed with it.