The Navy is dreaming of the day when a single destroyer can nail just about anything Kim Jong-Il has stored away in North Korea. But to pull it off, the service needs to have a rail gun -- a weapon that shoots its projectiles with electromagnetic fields, instead of chemical powders. If history is any guide, it could be a long, looooooong time before that happens.
These guns have been around, in one form or another, since 1901, as this epic IEEE Spectrum article explains. The electromagnetic weapon record was set back in the 70's -- and hasn't been touched since.
(High five: Adam)
