The U.S. Navy’s experimental railgun is getting new upgrades to make it fire more powerful shots, and fire them faster. It’s the latest bit of progress on this still-landlocked weapon, but when and where it actually would be installed on a warship is not clear.
Defensetech reports the Navy wants to push the Office of Naval Research’s prototype railgun from a science experiment into useful weapon territory. The goal, according to Tom Beutner, head of Naval Air Warfare and Weapons for the ONR, is ten shots per minute at 32 megajoules. How much power is that? One way of looking at it is that a .22 bullet has 1,000 foot-pounds of force at the muzzle. A 32 megajoule railgun shot: 23,601,988 foot-pounds. | More… (incl. video)
The New Media Militia 