For decades, the military has been dreaming about a cannon that uses electromagnetic pulses to fire, instead of gunpowder. Later on today, the Navy is going to test its most powerful EM rail gun yet, at 10 megajoules. Here's footage of a recent test:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=&rel=1
Spencer Ackerman wonders what the hell the railgun is for – given our current fights in Iraq and Afghanistan. Simple: laying waste to North Korea, and maybe Iran.
One of the big selling points of the Navy's new destroyer is that it can rain a whole lot of hell – 20 rocket-propelled artillery shells, in less than a minute – on targets up to 63 nautical miles away. Fully armed, two DDG1000s should have the firepower of an entire, 640-man artillery battalion, the Navy promises.
But really, that's the start. The ship's real power will come when the railgun comes aboard. With an electromagnetic rail gun pushing the rounds out at six kilometers/second, the number of rounds fired per ship would jump from 232 to 5000, Navy planners believe. (Military.com has a primer on how it works.)
Because they travel so fast – nearly Mach 7 – the destructive force those rounds deliver would more than double.
And they would fly almost three to five times farther – 200, maybe even 300 nautical miles. That's enough to put 100% of targets in North Korea "at Risk"
from a single battleship, a Navy briefing notes. Also, because the railgun fires inert rounds – instead of high-explosive ones – there would, in theory, be less collateral damage from the strikes.
Electromagnetic weapons have been around, in one form or another, since 1901, Spectrum notes. And military tests have often produced some pretty humorous results. (Click the link; I don't want to give away the punch line.)
