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The US Navy's Railgun Program
RougeFive writes "Imagine a warship weapon that can launch projectiles at Mach 10 without explosives (more than three times the muzzle speed of an M16 rifle), that has a range of 220 miles and that uses the enormous speed to destroy the target by causing as much damage as a Tomahawk missile. Meet the U.S. Navy's electromagnetic railgun program."
You can take people out of the stone age, but you can't take the stone age out of the people.
You missed one MAJOR feature: cost.
New warfare is going to be all about cost. Nations/organizations battling on a ROI factor.
Case in point - Al Qu--whatever. They got a lot of dipshits who will die for Allah or whatever and they're giving the US a run for their money in those shitholes they're fighting in.
The US has all this high tech hardware that's been proven almost useless - the DRONES are being proven USEFULL.
You got a $190,000,000 aircraft? I got a 10 $10,000,000 aircraft that has a BETTER chance of shooting down the entire squadron of the $190M aircraft. You got ONE F-22 and a bunch of F-15s? So? I got 20+ Migs with assholes who'll die at any means to take YOU out.
And live to see another day.
President Eisenhower wasn't so far off (military industrial complex stuff), but he missed the fact of many many very poor people pissed off at the US for various reasons - and they'll die to hurt us.
People don't get it. They don't. Mitt RMoney is a moron. Obama sort of gets it.
Yeah - but can you replace the rails while underway?
Here's something for you - a DDG carries 56 Tomahawks, but can load up to 96 if they carry nothing but Tomahawks in their VLS. Rate of fire - 1 missile per second.
The real question is, what are you going to shoot at that's only 200mi aways? 200mi might sound "far" but reality is that modern anti ship missiles have range 500-1000 miles.
No DDG is going to sail up to 200mi of a hostile to shoot it with a railgun when then can launch a Tomahawk with it's 800mi range for a Block III or 1500 for Block IIs.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
Not sure if GP was serious or not, but looks to me like the modern US Army and other armed forces go to an unbelievable and completely unprecedented amount of effort to avoid collateral damage compared to every other military force that has ever existed. Those who seriously complain about it either have no idea what they're talking about, or are pursuing an anti-American agenda and don't have the courage to be straightforward about it.
I don't reply to ACs