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January 31, 2008 - The US Navy gave some new hardware a try-out, and it looks like the test was a success.
The new hardware was a long electromagnetic railgun. Railguns have been a staple of science fiction for a long time now, but they are inexorably transitioning into science reality. In a nutshell, a railgun uses a succession of magnetic field bursts along a barrel (or tube) to propel a projectile to incredible speeds. While conventional chemical-propellant guns are more severely limited by the amount of explosive power they can direct at a projectile, a railgun could in theory be any size and shoot shells at incredibly high speeds.
The railgun the Navy test fired out a slug at a blistering fast speed of Mach 7.5. The muzzle energy produced by this slug-launching was around 10.6 megajoules.
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