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Navy Tests Mach 8 Electromagnetic Railgun
hargrand writes "Wired magazine has a story and publicly released video of the Navy test firing of a 32 megajoule electromagnetic railgun: 'Reporters were invited to watch the test at the Dalghren Naval Surface Warfare Center. A tangle of two-inch thick coaxial cables hooked up to stacks of refrigerator-sized capacitors took five minutes to power juice into a gun the size of a schoolbus built in a warehouse. With a 1.5-million-ampere spark of light and a boom audible in a room 50 feet away, the bullet left the gun at a speed of Mach 8.'"
Mach 8 = 2 722.32 m/s.
Escape velocity being 11.2 km/s, so the answer is no.
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If something is thrown or shot, the orbit will go through the point the shot was fired. You have a problem if that is on earth surface. Even if you are fast enough for a stable orbit you need a rocket to shift that orbit away from your starting point.
While the defense budget is no doubt way out of control, this is not at all the sort of thing that worries me. It has no practical military value in the near term, and at least produced interesting results.
I'm more concerned about other high-tech anti-personel weapons or robots, that will inevitably be pointed at people, possible even at our own citizens before long.
Speaking of waste, and far more disturbing at that, take a look at what the anti-terrorism efforts have spawned. I really had no idea of the scale of it. Having this turned against our own citizens as the fascism ramps up is truly frightening.
The energy is not the same, however, it might not be less.
When you launch with a rocket, the rocket accelerates throughout the journey, making the maximum in atmosphere speed lower.
If you launch with a railgun, it starts _really_ fast and then slows down until it hits orbit. The fastest part of this trip is done at the highest air pressure. Which is really bad due to the exponential increase in drag as you increase speed. You would also need to take into account the added weight of heat shielding.
The comparable amount of energy would be launching a rocket with one large explosion on the ground. I would imagine that many of the same problems would exist whether this was done with a railgun or a bomb. I would not assume that the energy used was less.
Now if you launched from the moon (or anywhere else without an atm) then the railgun would have energy advantages.
Morpheus, God of Dreams.