ELECTRIC Cannon Uses No Gunpowder

“Silent guns sending their whistling messengers of death into the sky at speeds far beyond those now attained by power-driven shells seems likely for the next war.”

Ah, railguns. [Hacked Gadgets]

1. [Garr]

   I’ve seen footage of one in action. Punched through several plates of iron, each of them about 2-3 inches thick.
   I guess we should be grateful these things need such a huge powersupply as to make them practically useless on the field.
   We’ll probably be dealing with High Energy Lasers on a common basis before these come to market.

2. [Lukstr]

   Coilguns != Railguns

   Note the lack of rails.

3. [Chrs]

   @#1: The particularly nice thing about a naval destroyer is that its engines produce just ridiculously huge amounts of energy. You divert from propulsion to electricity for a moment, and it produces more than enough power. They’re still working on the details, but it’s as far along as high energy lasers.

4. [Anonymous]

   In the interest of accuracy the weapon described in the article is a coilgun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coil_gun and not a railgun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_gun

5. [djn]

   I’m not sure how silent it’d be, either – the projectiles would still make a notable sonic boom.

   Still, I like the idea (and the illustration).

6. [mjfgates]

   I love the arrangement they’ve got with the wires and the generator and those mysterious boxes, all hanging directly off the barrel. It’s got to be HUGE fun to aim all that.

7. [SkullHyphy]

   I don’t think they’d be completely silent, unless they somehow managed to have no friction between the cannonball (bullet?) and barrel. However, localization of the gun by auditory means would be made much more difficult since the sonic boom of a passing cannonball would be much louder, I think, than the initial launching noise and would probably reach the listener sooner, if the cannonball was travelling faster than sound.

8. [Daemon]

   #3: So, they’ll have a main gun mounted on a navel vessel that requires the ship’s engine to stop working in order to fire?

   Somebody’s been watchign Yamato. (aka Star Blazers… which JMS eventually “borrowed” when he write the short-lived Babylon 5 sequel, Crusade)