12-02-2018, 04:18 PM
Abstract
A railgun is an electrically powered electromagnetic projectile launcher based on the same principles. A railgun comprises a pair of parallel conducting rails, along with a sliding armature that is accelerated by the electromagnetic effects of a current that flows down one rail, in the armature and then back along the other rail. Railguns have long existed as experimental technology but the mass, size and cost of the power supply have prevented railguns from being practical military weapons. However, in recent years, significant efforts were made as possible. For example, in the late 2000s, the U.S. Navy tested a railgun that accelerates a 3.2 kg (7pound) protile to hypersonic velocities of approximately 2.4 kilometres per second (5,400 mph), about Mach 7. Military applications for the addition, railguns are the orbit; However, unless the launch was tracked very long, and the acceleration required spread over a much longer time, such launches would be necessarily be restricted to unmanned spacecraft.