US Navy releases the Kraken - a railgun superweapon

from theblogprof by The blogprof


US Navy releases the Kraken - a railgun superweapon: "Gotta love tech (and I so do). From Fox News via memeorandum: Navy Sets World Record With Incredible, Sci-Fi Weapon. Included in the piece is this awesome vid:

Watch the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com">video.foxnews.com</a>

I remember having a rail gun in the video game Quake (2? 3? It was years ago). This sound just like it, but bigger:

A theoretical dream for decades, the railgun is unlike any other weapon used in warfare. And it's quite real too, as the U.S. Navy has proven in a record-setting test today in Dahlgren, VA.

Rather than relying on a explosion to fire a projectile, the technology uses an electomagnetic current to accelerate a non-explosive bullet at several times the speed of sound. The conductive projectile zips along a set of electrically charged parallel rails and out of the barrel at speeds up to Mach 7.

My nerd brethren call Mach 7 and beyond 'hypersonic.' Because it sounds cool. Which it is.

The result: a weapon that can hit a target 100 miles or more away within minutes.

'It's an over-used term, but it really changes several games,' Rear Admiral Nevin P. Carr, Jr., the chief of Naval Research, told FoxNews.com prior to the test.

...An electromagnetic railgun offers a velocity previously unattainable in a conventional weapon, speeds that are incredibly powerful on their own. In fact, since the projectile doesn't have any explosives itself, it relies upon that kinetic energy to do damage. And at 11 a.m. today, the Navy produced a 33-megajoule firing -- more than three times the previous record set by the Navy in 2008.

'It bursts radially, but it's hard to quantify,' said Roger Ellis, electromagnetic railgun program manager with the Office of Naval Research. To convey a sense of just how much damage, Ellis told FoxNews.com that the big guns on the deck of a warship are measured by their muzzle energy in megajoules. A single megajoule is roughly equivalent to a 1-ton car traveling at 100 mph. Multiple that by 33 and you get a picture of what would happen when such a weapon hits a target.

Pure awesome. No explosives. Lower cost. And you can use the enemy's own weapons against them. Shoot on of these hypersonic solid projectiles at a bomb on board an enemy ship and pass the popcorn...

UPDATE: Allahpundit posts this video:

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