re: #351 GlutenFreeJesus

Battery powered? An EMP would make that thing useless. Needs a gunpowder backup at least.

There’s a whole bunch of problems with the railgun concept which prevent it from becoming a real thing on board ships etc. Chemical-propellant weapons have a number practical advantages over electromagnetic guns such as simplicity, energy density (the propellant cartridge holds all the propulsive energy needed for the shell, no nuclear reactors or giant battery required) and they dissipate a lot of the heat of each shot by blowing the hot gasses out the end of the barrel, not something the railgun or gaussgun can do so it needs a lot of active cooling of the barrel to achieve a rate of fire better than ten shots an hour. In contrast a modern 5” self-loading naval gun can fire at a rate of forty or fifty rounds a minute.

The railgun’s projectile is fast, faster than a burning-propellant shell can achieve due to the limitations of the speed of sound and KE = 1/2 MV^2 but air resistance increases as the cube of velocity so all that extra speed is bled off quite quickly as air friction, enough to melt the projectile in extremis. It’s also unguided which means that at extreme range the circular error probable (CEP) expands massively to the point where it might not land in the correct country. In contrast a modern guided missile can hunt down a moving target or choose which window of a building to impact and do that from a range greater than a railgun’s projectile can comfortably achieve even on a semi-ballistic trajectory out of the atmosphere.