http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20110...rific-railgun/


[SIZE="4"]General Atomics makes a terrific railgun[/SIZE]
by Mark R - on April 19th, 2011

Some of you might remember when we reported about the railgun that can shoot projectiles at Mach 7, and this one by General Atomics is pretty cool too.

You can watch a video of it below if you want to see it in action, and it looks like there is some sort of convention or something that puts this railgun on display. I can’t help but wonder what kind of convention allows a railgun to be put on display? Don’t they know that this can shoot at one mile a second? In fact, Tom Hurn of General Atomics reports “the sabot round went seven kilometers downrange after punching through a 1.8-inch thick steel plate.

It is nice to know that weapons from science fiction movies like Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen are real, and there are different versions of it.

I believe that the plan is that General Atomics wants to put the railgun on a DDG-51 class destroyer by the end of the decade. I’m not certain I want to know what sort of wars would use a railgun. I heard that the Navy’s one can hit a target from 100 miles away.

Who knows what kind of range this has? That’s not a rhetorical question. Does anyone know?

http://www.military.com/video/guns/n.../904431955001/