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from the is-that-a-railgun-or-are-you-just-happy-to-see-me? dept.
The Motley Fool's Rich Smith writes:
For more than three years now, I've been tracking the U.S. Navy's progress toward building a working electromagnetic railgun prototype — a Mach 6 cannon reputedly capable of striking targets 110 miles away with pinpoint accuracy.
Each railgun projectile would cost about $25,000 to produce — and if you're keeping track, then yes, success on the railgun project would yield a weapon boasting nearly twice the 67-mile range of Boeing's (NYSE:BA) Harpoon II missile but costing just 1/48th the Boeing missile's $1.2 million cost.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/04/22/navys-new-mach-6-em-railgun-almost-ready-for-prime.aspx
Electromagnetic Railgun - First shot at Dahlgren's new Terminal Range https://youtu.be/Pi-BDIu_umo
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday April 27 2017, @05:29AM
To be fair, "Well, we can still hit the earth" a hundred miles away, might be considered a decent achievement for a Blue Water ship.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that the railgun would be the only toy onboard. But one of the points of creating the all-electric multi-billion-dollar Zumwalts was to enable these futuristic MegaWatt weapons (lasers and railguns).
It's already a weird thing that doesn't seem to fit its official purpose (or category size) well, if they don't put a new weapon on at least one of them, they will have a big credibility issue for the next round of futuristic designs...