http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2007/012007/01172007/251373/index_html?page=1 "The biggest thing is it's real--not just something on the drawing board," he said. The railgun works by sending electric current along parallel rails, creating an electromagnetic force so powerful it can fire a projectile at tremendous speed. Because the gun uses electricity and not gunpowder to fire projectiles, it's safer, eliminating the possibility of explosions on ships and vehicles equipped with it.
I guess that there will still be wars by then... Was the SDI not built to be used against Missiles? Therefore only useful against other countries assaults, not against terrorist attacks... I'm not going to comment on any of the wars that have been/are being fought, but can this kind of thing really be justified? How long will it be before someone else gets hold of/builds their own? I dread to think what happens then Edit: Loose nut at the keyboard who can't trype...
a magnetic acceleration device like this could be retooled to have useful applications in non-militaristic fields, but lord knows when we'll get around to receiving research grants for pacifisim.
I found this link about the history of magnetic levitation and it was originally researched around the early 1900's. Japan hold the current speed record at 343 mph. Magnetic monorails Looks like the wheel has been invented, again.
I don't think the US Navy claimed that they invented the technological concept, just that they invented a device that utilizes this technology.
Ah, so you go for the childish solution. Very well, I shall be forced to reply in kind. Mommy, mommy, mommy! Joculator is mean! He throws stuff at me!
I remember that State of the Union Address so clearly, I was just sickened by it. I started writing letters that I couldn't send for fear I'd be charged with making terroristic threats or something, I was so mad. I never bought the line Reagan was selling and that SDI BS just took the cake as far as I was concerned. He was willing to take the USSR's place in the world is what it seemed to say to me. Instead of letting things move foreward from the end of the cold war he wanted to drag everyone back to the starting block and try it again. I know everyone credits this SDI business with ending the cold war but I thought it was pretty inevitable that Russia would be reaching the end of its experiment in Communism. They were just having so much trouble getting anything to work there, if they did grow a decent crop of wheat then somebody had neglected to provide enough fuel to haul it off the fields, or some other snafu. Reagan had very little to do with the real reasons Communism ended in Russia.
It brings forward a scary reality where a warship can assault a coastal city from 200+ nautical miles. On top of this it is a silent weapon, no exhaust to track, no targeting system that could be jammed. Just a metal slug + warhead flying at supersonic speeds. The only real restriction is that the rail gun fires the projectile in a straight line. This would make hitting a exact target (say within the metre) tricky. Unless the warhead produces a big enough bang that hitting in the general area is enough (ie a nuke). Not quite a metal gear but not far from it.
depends on how fast its going, man. it'll be moving at a good enough clip to have a major impact from just one shot. build a bigger one, or fire a salvo of em, and you could do some major damage.
The internal economic issues were part of it, yes. But the SDI was certainly also part of it. One can endure mismanagement if one has the funds to invest in its correction. If said funds go to military projects instead (as they did in the USSR) then that allows the rot to remain, and in fact spread. The Communist Party "apparatchiks" ended up turning the economy into a never ending series of efficiency bottlenecks. There were also many internal political issues, a generation that grew up on American pop culture and pirated music/movies... The factors were many, and it's difficult to say how big a role the SDI played. Maybe it shifted the scales, maybe it didn't. It's certain though that by the time Gorbachev attempted to reform the Soviet Union's economy, there was little left to salvage. All he managed to do was turn a stagnated economy to a crashing one.
