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The Navy's Railgun is finally dead
- tschwimmer 5y agoThis should be celebrated. Not spending money on projects that don't have a purpose is obviously the correct choice. It seems however that it's being deprioritized in place of hypersonic missiles, which are a frightening and potentially destabilizing technology in their own right.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoChina already has several variants of hypersonic missile “carrier killers”, DF-21/26 for example; US DoD development of such technology is to maintain force parity, and long range ordinance protects high value assets (carriers) from close range combat. I hope learnings from this railgun make its way into broad military power control electronics, and trickle down to consumers if there is value.
- h2odragon 5y agoIn almost total ignorance of the Navy and its affairs, the news coverage over the past few years sure paints them as utterly boned. If the problems aren't as severe as they seem then it must have taken some effort to look so fucked up. Paranoia might suggest its a sucker play; they're waiting for an excuse to reveal the hovercarrier tech [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-56286719 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-56286719
- ladyattis 5y agoRailguns are interesting devices but it was clear there was never going to be a viable combat model. At best, these might be used to do more research for a launch platform used by the space transportation industry. It really is useful there.
- ArkanExplorer 5y agoRailguns just seem to have no advantage compared to missiles. The only locations where railguns seem to make sense are in space, or low-gravity environments like the moon - specifically for launching cargo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver Even on Mars, to reach escape velocity you would need a 200km long track: https://marspedia.org/Mass_driver https://marspedia.org/Mass_driver