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The U.S. Navy just unveiled a new weapon “that could well change the future of military combat,” Pentagon officials say.
It’s called the railgun, and it’s capable of launching a 25 pound projectile at Mach 6 — 4,500 miles per hour, or more than a mile a second — through seven steel plates.
And it does it without gunpowder or any other explosive — it’s powered by electromagnetic rails along the 32-foot length of the cannon’s barrel.
While a conventional cannon projectile loses speed the moment after the gunpowder is set off, a railgun projectile gains speed as it travels down the barrel’s length, accounting for its staggering velocity.
Clip via The Wall Street Journal.
“This is going to change the way we fight,” U.S. Navy Adm. Mat Winter, the head of the Office of Naval Research said, according to The Journal, which reported:
Navy developed the railgun as a potent offensive weapon to blow holes in enemy ships, destroy tanks and level terrorist camps. The weapon system has the attention of top Pentagon officials also interested in its potential to knock enemy missiles out of the sky more inexpensively and in greater numbers than current missile-defense systems—perhaps within a decade.
Of particular concern is maintaining worldwide effectiveness with declining numbers of ships and troops, a hard reality when fixed military budgets butt heads with rising costs.
“I can’t conceive of a future where we would replicate Cold War forces in Europe,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work, one of the weapon’s chief boosters. “But I could conceive of a set of railguns that would be inexpensive but would have enormous deterrent value. They would have value against airplanes, missiles, tanks, almost anything.”
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Clip via Fox News Channel.
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