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I'm a bit offended that they claim that safety was a concern in creating the weapon, when it should be very clear that the purpose of this weapon, as with any weapon, is quite the opposite.
 

Bryon_Soulweaver said:

It's a railgun. About as big news now as military drones were before Afghanistan. (or in other words--yeah, I already knew about them.)

The real intersting things about these is that they could make a battleship a worthwhile investment again. Give a battleship a second nuclear reactor, and a few as big as you can make them railguns, and you wind up with a huge weapon that can hit things hundreds of miles away.

It's not being in the Bronx and being hit by a shell from at sea. Its being in Albany and being hit by a shell form at sea. (I'm exaggerating for the first two or three generations -- but by 2060, if all goes well, I won't be.)
 

Dread isn't a railgun -- it's a centrifugal system. And it has some real problems from a weaponization standpoint, but it looks good on paper to the uninformed. The projectiles are not powered, so they exit the rotating disk with only the velocity of the outer edge of the disk, which makes supersonic projectiles highly unlikely given the forces involved across the disk if the outer edge were to be supersonic and the center subsonic. It would tear itself apart.

It can throw a lot of projectiles really fast at high subsonic speeds, but they're using sphereical projecticles, which are fairly useless to get actual range -- sort of like having a pistol that fires a lot of rounds really fast, but with pistol lethality and pistol ranges, at a weight of several hundred pounds. I'm glad these guys haven't come pounding on my door yet trying to sell us the system (the Metal Sotrm guys have, and their system, while still far-fetched, has actual potential).

Railguns, OTOH, if you can ever solve the power source problems, actually have real potential.
 

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