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Allen McDuffee writes the US Navy's latest weapon is an electromagnetic railgun launcher that can hurl a 23-pound projectile at speeds exceeding Mach 7 with a range of 100 miles turning a destroyer into super-long-range machine gun able to fire up to a dozen relatively inexpensive projectiles every minute. The Navy says the cost differential $25,000 for a railgun projectile versus $500,000 to $1.5 million for a missile will make potential enemies think twice about the economic viability of engaging U.S. forces. "[It] will give our adversaries a huge moment of pause to go: 'Do I even want to go engage a naval ship?'" says Rear Admiral Matt Klunder. "Because you are going to lose. You could throw anything at us, frankly, and the fact that we now can shoot a number of these rounds at a very affordable cost, it's my opinion that they don't win."
Engineers already have tested this futuristic weapon on land, and the Navy plans to begin sea trials aboard a Joint High Speed Vessel Millinocket in 2016. Railguns use electromagnetic energy known as the Lorenz Force to launch a projectile between two conductive rails. The high-power electric pulse generates a magnetic field to fire the projectile with very little recoil, officials say. Weapons like the electromagnetic rail gun could help U.S. forces retain their edge and give them an asymmetric advantage over rivals, making it too expensive to use missiles to attack U.S. warships because of the cheap way to defeat them. "Your magazine never runs out, you just keep shooting, and that's compelling."
(Score: 1) by Hawkwind on Friday April 11 2014, @06:41PM
The Pop Sci article suggests there will be targeting.
"The projectile leaves the barrel at hypersonic velocity—Mach 7-plus—exits the Earth’s atmosphere, re-enters under satellite guidance, and lands on the building less than six minutes later; its incredible velocity vaporizes the target with kinetic energy alone."
But knowing government time it's also not clear if everything has truly been figured out.
"...estimates the U.S. version won’t be “deliverable†until 2015 at the earliest."
(Score: 2) by snick on Friday April 11 2014, @08:46PM
That sounds like a wicked weapon to use against stationary (or very slowly moving) targets. But it doesn't sound like an effective counter measure to a swarm of boats that are attacking a ship as the GP suggested.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 11 2014, @09:05PM
velocityâ€â€Mach 7-plusâ€â€exits the Earth’s [...]won’t be “deliverableâ€
As Slashcode has yet to be fixed such that it handles Unicode properly, the proper way to cut and paste remains dragging and dropping into an ASCII-only text editor.
This will expose all characters that Slashcode will not display correctly.
(It is even likely that it will convert them for you.)
Leafpad, as an example, converts an em dash into a double-hyphen and converts a "smart" quote[1] into a regular quotation mark.
As I recall, Notepad does the same.
Look for anything that hasn't been auto-converted and tweak that by hand.
Only then should you drag and drop your blockquoted text from the text editor into the posting page.
As an alternate strategy, you could PREVIEW YOUR POSTS (especially when you do copy pasta).
Either way, you should look for weird stuff in your text before you hit Submit.
Thank you for your attention to detail in the future.
[1] I call those dumb quotes.
-- gewg_