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OK, I dig the fact that it fires a projectile using mag-lev to propel it past the speed of sound.

What nobody can seem to tell me is, if it uses mag-lev, then why is there a massive fireball that follows the projectile out the muzzle of the weapon?

It's real! Navy test-fires first working prototype railgun | Fox News

First google result

One big question this video begs is, what causes the giant fireball? Rail guns are supposed to be powered solely by electricity, and don't use explosives of any kind for propellant. Babb told PopSci the answer: The flames are from pieces of the projectile disintegrating; the 7-pound slug is jammed so firmly between the rails that when it's fired, pieces shear off and ignite in the air. There's been some speculation online that the flames come from some sort of gas that's been used to increase conductivity. Wrong: The EMRG uses no secondary propellant — just electricity.
 
Fine if you're shelling stationary targets. Not so good on the water where other boats tend to move around.

Unless, of course, you're bringing back the glory days of battleship-to-battleship broadside shooting.
 
Fine if you're shelling stationary targets. Not so good on the water where other boats tend to move around.

Unless, of course, you're bringing back the glory days of battleship-to-battleship broadside shooting.

Those projectiles are moving quite a bit faster than your old battleship gun. Those could launch a VW Bug weight projectile around 750 m/s; these have a muzzle velocity around 1.5 Km/s. It still takes some time to reach a target 60 miles away, but I can't see how current tracking technology, like that used in the M1A2 Abrams, would have difficulty putting rounds on a moving target like a warship.

I want to hazard a guess that the origin of the fireball is not just pieces that ignite like when you're grinding, but that the friction between the barrel and the projectile vaporize both some amount of the barrel/rail and the projectile. Vaporized metal, provided a significant amount of energy like in this situation could burn with the oxygen in the air as a fuel-air mixture. That kinda thing could account for the propellant-like flame. How's mah science?
 
Shoot Me In The Belly!: Navy Tests Latest Railgun | Geekologie - Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome

It fires a 40-pound metal slug up to 5,600 miles per hour from New York to Philadelphia, slamming into its target with 32 times the force of a "1-ton car being thrust at 100 mph."

The plan is to continue testing over the next five years, ramping up the energy level to 32 megajoules and beyond. How to power such an extraordinary gun is another question entirely, however. The Navy is hoping for an ambitious rate of ten rounds per minute, but at the moment, there's nothing in our fleet that could deliver that kind of juice.

I want one
 
To answer the fireball origin question.....From Wired:

"The dramatic mini-inferno in the wake of the slug fired from the railgun is the result of "1 million amps flowing through" the gun, said test chief Tom Boucher, the hypersonic speed of the shot, and the actual aluminum of the bullet — "reactive in the atmosphere" — burning off."

Anything traveling over 52,493 feet (16,000 meters) per second is going to generate a lot of heat in the atmosphere.

Learn more here: HowStuffWorks "How Rail Guns Work"
 
Question here...
Is a benefit the ability to use greatly reduced size/weight projectiles with greater results than with current weapons?

Like someone else said, the technology is not there yet but it sure looks promising. Cool factor is off the charts.

I look at it like using a 5.7x28mm over a .45 from a handgun perspective. Lighter, more capacity, hyper-velocity that has characteristics closer to much larger rounds than most smaller. And maybe that's the wrong way to look at it, but in my head that's how I look at the bennies.

Military technology - specifically bomb technology - has given us so much great stuff. Most of the consumer gadgets and gizmos we have are pioneered of military tech; the benefits of successful electromagnetic technology (better rail systems? Better automobiles? Buck Rogers-kinda stuff) lets me daydream in a way I haven't gotten to do since reading future comics as a kid.
 
Good question about how the thing flies straight out of a smooth bore. It looks like the projectile will have internal guidance. A figure I found said it'll be accurate to within 5 meters. If you thought about it too much, that works out to a hair over 1/2 MOA at 20 miles. USA Electromagnetic Rail Gun

Also, the muzzle energy of 63 megajoules translates to about 14 kilograms of TNT. The problem is I don't blow up enough things, especially TNT or other HE to have an idea what that translates to in terms of damage potential. I think looking at a calculation like that alone significantly undermines potential damage from the momentum of a 15 kilogram mass of metal moving at better than Mach 5. In 2007 the Navy said their 3.2 kg would have the damage potential of a tomahawk. This latest test's projectile is about 5 times larger. <broken link removed>
 
I look at it like using a 5.7x28mm over a .45 from a handgun perspective. Lighter, more capacity, hyper-velocity that has characteristics closer to much larger rounds than most smaller. And maybe that's the wrong way to look at it, but in my head that's how I look at the bennies.

Military technology - specifically bomb technology - has given us so much great stuff. Most of the consumer gadgets and gizmos we have are pioneered of military tech; the benefits of successful electromagnetic technology (better rail systems? Better automobiles? Buck Rogers-kinda stuff) lets me daydream in a way I haven't gotten to do since reading future comics as a kid.

I would venture to guess that if you backtrack the technology, you will find that most of it originated with NASA, not the military. From the time when I was an editor and proofreader for a publications company working on the Annual Report on Independant Research and Development (in the 80's) many of the classified projects were (and probably still are) offshoots from the space program. There are and have been portions of missions and whole missions devoted to classified projects. The best and the brightest wanted to work at NASA, it is very sad that so much funding has been pulled from these very productive people.

To clarify, the IRAD, as it was known, was produced soley for congress. The 2 years I worked on it it was 5 volumes (about 300 pages each) 2 of which were classified "confidential" or higher. They were produced to give congress an account of how the money was spent.
 
NASA was founded in the late 50's, I think. The development of jet engines, nuclear power, and the early, early concepts behind computers were an offshoot of nuclear development. That may be the case for more current technologies (80's/90's) but the big wars is where some of the groundbreaking, really cool stuff came from.
 

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