I think it’s safe to say that we here at GeekTech aren’t generally weapon-y people. We tend to make tech, not war. But when a weapon is just in testing and it’s this science fictional we’ll make an exception. Railguns, so named because they fire a projectile along rails using electromagnets, have existed for almost 100 years but most people are familiar with them from fiction. But this gun is real–and powerful.
The railgun itself is the size of a bus, and in recent tests it fired a projectile at over 7 times the speed of sound and with 33 megajoules of force, setting a world record. Most impressively, it provides this force with no moving parts or explosives; all of the force is generated by the sheer speed of the object, leading to the project’s Latin motto, velocitas eradico–speed destroys.
The test was conducted by the Naval Surface Warfare Center, which hopes to eventually deploy the railgun onto ships. Since the force of the projectile also translates into the distance it can travel the Navy thinks the railgun could be used as a long range weapon, safely firing on targets over 100 miles away.
[via NewScientist]
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