Navy Rail Gun

In reply to yamaha:

Sort of. But not the kind of energy it had when fired. Check out how much a .50 cal projectile slows during a 1000 meter shot. And it's starting at a positively sluggish 2,500 FPS but down to like 900 FPS at one mile.

I read a sci fi/military fiction and a story a few years ago about mounting tungsten rods in the space shuttle on lobbing them down on the bad guys. Made for a pretty wicked kinetic boom.

Gravity.... It's not an opinion

Spinout007 wrote: Gravity.... It's not an opinion

Heinlein is way ahead of you... (One of my all time favorite books)

Kinetic Bombardment

In one of the Mass Effect games (2, I think, but not sure) there is a side conversation on a space station where a gunnery sergeant is teaching recruits about the shipboard artillery they'll be using. A slug accelerated to near-relativistic speeds in a vacuum makes for quite a boom when it contacts a target.

One of the more interesting and practical potential uses I have seen is using one on the Moon to shoot payloads into lunar orbit. With a bit of a booster (or a really big gun) you could evem put them into Earth orbit. This was shown in the movie Moon (which was created with a lot of help from NASA scientists).

How do you protect against EMF disrupting other systems on board ship? Will sailors need to wear lead vests?

Any military ship should be pretty well hardened against EMP's. Otherwise any nukes going off in the general vicinity would wipe out the fleet.

vwcorvette wrote: How do you protect against EMF disrupting other systems on board ship? Will sailors need to wear lead vests?

EMF will only disrupt the "fabulous" sailors:

aircooled wrote: One of the more interesting and practical potential uses I have seen is using one on the Moon to shoot payloads into lunar orbit. With a bit of a booster (or a really big gun) you could evem put them into Earth orbit. This was shown in the movie Moon (which was created with a lot of help from NASA scientists).

I thought the theory in vacuum was once in motion it will stay in motion till acted upon by an outside force? Therefore in theory you wouldn't even need the booster.

Beer Baron wrote: In one of the Mass Effect games (2, I think, but not sure) there is a side conversation on a space station where a gunnery sergeant is teaching recruits about the shipboard artillery they'll be using. A slug accelerated to near-relativistic speeds in a vacuum makes for quite a boom when it contacts a target.

Gunnery Chief: This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight. Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kilotomb bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton's First Law?

First Recruit: Sir! A object in motion stays in motion, sir!

Gunnery Chief: No credit for partial answers, maggot!

First Recruit: Sir! Unless acted on by an outside force, sir!

Gunnery Chief: Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this husk of metal, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!

Second Recruit: Sir, yes sir!

I berkeleying love that game.