General Atomics’ New Railgun

[Bruv119]

I knew Dr Evil was on to something.   Quite scary the human innovation to be able to better kill one another.

[moot]

This is pretty vanilla compared to many of the things we'll have available in the century ahead.

SF: There are other themes in Rainbows End I want to get to, one of them being terrorism, which plays an important role. Do you think terrorism and warfare aids technological advancement of slows it?

VV: Historically, warfare has pushed technologies. We are in a situation now if certain technologies become cheap enough, it’s not just countries that can do terrible things to millions of people, but criminal gangs can do terrible things to millions of people. What if for 50 dollars you buy something that could destroy everybody in a country? Then, basically, anybody who’s having a bad hair day is a threat to national survival. I think John Brunner had this rather vividly set out in one or more of his books. He saw it as the end of civilization. You draw one line that shows the cost of a terrible device, and the corresponding line is how many people in the world could get it. He had a very vivid story in which a time traveler comes back from a point in time in which humanity had killed itself, and it wasn’t really because of a nuclear war. It was just because the weapons got so cheap, whether they were nuclear or not, that various disinfected individuals had just wiped out civilization. When it gets down to 40 or 30 dollars, how many days would civilization have left? At present I don’t think this is actually that big an issue.

Much like back a few centuries ago, people might've had pictures of doomsday black powder or steam power machines, today people are too fixed on today's paradigms.  Information technology is one of the most eminent domains where warfare of both the big govt way and decentralized guerilla tactics will become a real mundane risk.  Already you've got people's identity being very readily tampered with.  Now it's coming to legislation concerns here and now that the same P2P networks used to infringe copyright will soon have more tangible things to swap, e.g. blueprints for fast fabrication which is another eminent tech.  You could conceivably download the blueprints for something like a designer piece of furniture, and print it, dodging the designer price.

Technological progress is accelerating, and there's no going back from technology. Other than luddite repression/escapism or some grey goo techno cataclysm.  The thing is that the intellectual potential for augmentation techs are unavoidable.  Short of an immense improvement in discipline (meaning something truly draconian), humans as they are today are just out of their depth tech/science wise.  Unlike a century or more ago, there's now probably thousands of tech/sci domains, and each one takes basically a whole lifetime to master.  The only way to make sense of all the information, pertinent information, that's available today is to either be some once in a century prodigy, or to jack your brains up artitificially.

[Bruv119]

when am I getting a carbon neutral flying vehicle?   Plus some way to "backup" my brain's thoughts, feelings and memories and transfer them to a new Physical being?

I want to live forever and explore the stars.  

I don't however need a rail gun to zap some terrorist from 6 miles away.      (Unless we are under attack from some Alien force with better weapons than our own)   then this is good research. 

[moot]

The extra short route to indefinite lifespan might be lab grown replacement organs.  Some other stuff like brains'll prolly be a lot more difficult, but there's got to be some health benefits to complex stuff like brains, on top of extra lifespan, from having healthy "simple" organs for your whole life. After that you have to get into gritty stuff like extra and intra cellular junk, and of course cancer, etc.  The important thing with living forever though, today, is that there doesn't need to be an immortality tech right away.  You only need to survive long enough on less-than-perfect intermediate techs to eventually see the day some technology enables proper indefinite lifespan.

I don't know about brain uploading.  There's just too much unknown at this point..  What if you very gradually replace your brain with synthetic stuff?  In theory you can cram as much computational power as a whole brain into something the size of a grain of sand, if quantum computation works as it's supposed to.

The thing that I'm really curious to see with railguns is what these capabilities will do for major conflicts.  Where with nukes you had such massive collateral damage and lasting scorched earth effects, with this one you've got dozens of megajoules focused in 15 feet error margin, and no current way to counter them.  IOW you can rod the enemy with impunity..  That sounds like it could make blitz strategy more viable.. IOW the first one to fire could win an engagement.  A country in a situation like North Korea's would probably love this kind of ability.
Could make for some cool war footage 30-50 years from now if lasers are the best countermeasure to railguns.

[Rash]

I read where they have a sabot and a fragmentation version of the projectile.  It will have a guidance system.  They will cost about $10,000 per projectile, plus takes about 30kw of power to fire 12 rounds per minute.  Looks like heat is the big obstacle for having a higher rpm.

[AAJagerX]

Moot's thinking again...  Who flipped the darn switch???  Someone shut him down before he overheats.  

[Lepape2]

I read where they have a sabot and a fragmentation version of the projectile.  It will have a guidance system.  They will cost about $10,000 per projectile, plus takes about 30kw of power to fire 12 rounds per minute.  Looks like heat is the big obstacle for having a higher rpm.

What kind of electronic device can whitstand 50,000Gs of acceleration?

[Rash]

I thought it was like 40gs?

[Motherland]

They will cost about $10,000 per projectile,

That's a lot less than a half-a-million-dollar-per-unit cruise missile.

[oakranger]

Maybe you are thinking about this one? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_cm_K_12_%28E%29

It also have a muzzle velocity in the 1600 m/s range.

Yea, that might be it.  I was not sure if it was the same concept. 

[moot]

Does the 500k figure include associated costs, e.g. support crew?  Same deal with the projectile.. Maintenance crew etc.  Accelerating something almost instantly to M-7 can't be easy on the rail.

[phatzo]

I'm surprised this technology has taken so long considering we had a basic rail gun in our high school physics room. I'm now 44.

[Reschke]

The biggest thing to overcome has been the sheer size of the power plant and the platform to mount it on; from what I remember reading in the past. They are trying to drop these in size so that they can be used on land based vehicles as well; but again you get into power plant sizes and its just not possible right now.

[moot]

It's the same deal with e.g. exoskeletons.  Laser batteries are probably held back by it too.