Moving from Quake and Halo to the present, the Railgun is set to replace the naval rifle that has been in service since the Dreadnought.
A demonstration of the futuristic and possibly inexpensive weapon occurred this winter at the famous US Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) at Dahlgren could be revolutionary. The weapon, a rail gun, fires non-explosive projectiles at incredible speeds, using electricity rather than gun powder. This could increase the range of naval gunfire support from the current 15 miles to as far as 250 miles by as soon as the year 2020.
A rail gun works by sending electric current along parallel rails, creating an electromagnetic force so powerful it can fire a projectile at tremendous speed. Because the gun uses electricity and not gunpowder to fire projectiles, it's safer, eliminating the possibility of explosions on ships and vehicles equipped with it. Instead of an explosive charge a powerful generator is used to pulse energy briefly to power the weapon. The prototype fired at Dahlgren is only an 8-megajoule electromagnetic device, but the one to be used on Navy ships will generate a massive 64 mega joules in one split second pulse. The prototype fired a small projectile that weighed 3.2 kgs/7pounds (about as much as a two liter coke).
The projectile had no warhead as the rail gun is expected to destroy things through a massive transfer of kinetic energy. In other words think about a child's marble. If the marble is tossed softly to you it won’t hurt. If it is fired at you at supersonic speeds, you better hope you have burial insurance.
While this may seem like pie in the sky the Navy expects to test a much larger 32-megajoule lab gun in June 2007. Remarkably the project has gone from the drawing board to being test fired in only one year. The basic concept of the weapon demonstrated at Dahlgren yesterday has been the stuff of science fiction. Space man Buck Rogers used a rail gun in a sci-fi novel and Rail guns are also portrayed in the "Stargate" TV series and in many video games, including Quake III and "Halo 2." This phenomenon can be observed many times in history. Turn of the 19th/20th Century authors such as Ivan Bloch (Future War, in 1899) and H. G. Well’s (War in the Air, in 1908) foretold of the tank, chemical weapons, airborne troops, military flight and all of the other innovations of the 20th century as many as fifty years before they took to the field
It seems that it is more Science Fact now.
