Dec 102010
The US Navy just fired off a railgun witha muzzle energy of 33 megajoules, with a muzzle velocity of Mach 8. Still a long way to go before it’s an operation weapon capable of blowing the nads off of a giant alien robot clambering over the Great Pyramid of Giza, but it’s a heck of a step. And almost as impressive is the photographic technology that allowed for high-rez, high-speed filming of the round.
[youtube aWAySUnPjqk]
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/video-navys-mach-8-railgun-obliterates-record/
7 Responses to “Behold the Majesty Of Mach 8”
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Gee whiz!
Jim
You would think that there would be a visible shockwave around it as it flies past the trees.
I need one of those. Yeah, what happened to the shock wave?
You can see the shockwave in the head-on views. The side views would probably show the wave if the camera was fixed on the background, not tracking the projectile.
I remember reading about a New York University professor working on a
coilgun project according to a Discover magazine article written in October
1992. They did not go into details about the velocity of the object that
was shot out of it but did give a simple diagram of how it was designed.
Besides from what I heard is that coilguns can be shot repeatedly without
an overheat problem where railguns do have that problem.
Coil guns don’t have the rail erosion problem but they have their own problems.
It’s been a while, but some years ago I read that coilguns had reached some sort of technological limit on speed, somewhere in the 5 km/sec range. Something to do with some magnetic switching somethingorother that they just couldn’t get past.