Shakrai, I'm not sure you understand how the Railgun works. From the article:
"The Marines, in particular, are interested in the potential for rail guns to deliver supporting fire from up to 220 miles away -- around 10 times further than standard ship-mounted cannons -- with rounds landing more quickly and with less advance warning than a volley of Tomahawk cruise missiles."
220 miles! That is not line of site. On the open ocean your line of site is really only a few miles. For example if you were to stand on top of the USS Enterprise you could see just a little over 20 miles, thats still 200 short of what the weapon will fire upon. For comparison the big bad ass cannons on the side of a WWII Battleship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16%22/50_caliber_Mark_7_gun will fire about 20 miles, as far as we know.
Think of the weapon this way it is a small, hard to shoot down, really fast, really long range unguided projectile that will melt faces and sink your battleship.
Although you do raise an interesting point in point-defense technology. The rail gun can be adapted for long range assault and smaller faster versions for final defense measures like the R2D2 CIWS, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS is currently being used for.
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Instead of just making a documented API, they copy the code into all sorts of different places. And slightly differently I might add
Welcome to software development? Any large project that has many programmers working on it will show the exact same characteristics.Shakrai, I'm not sure you understand how the Railgun works. From the article: "The Marines, in particular, are interested in the potential for rail guns to deliver supporting fire from up to 220 miles away -- around 10 times further than standard ship-mounted cannons -- with rounds landing more quickly and with less advance warning than a volley of Tomahawk cruise missiles."
220 miles! That is not line of site. On the open ocean your line of site is really only a few miles. For example if you were to stand on top of the USS Enterprise you could see just a little over 20 miles, thats still 200 short of what the weapon will fire upon. For comparison the big bad ass cannons on the side of a WWII Battleship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16%22/50_caliber_Mark_7_gun will fire about 20 miles, as far as we know.
Think of the weapon this way it is a small, hard to shoot down, really fast, really long range unguided projectile that will melt faces and sink your battleship.
Although you do raise an interesting point in point-defense technology. The rail gun can be adapted for long range assault and smaller faster versions for final defense measures like the R2D2 CIWS, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS is currently being used for.