Re: Legions of Soldiers with Railguns (Future of Warfare)
Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Fri, 15 Nov 1996 18:44:23 -0500
Chris Hind wrote:
>
> In addition to my Global Climate Manipulation & Control thread which I
> REALLY REALLY HOPE receives replys this time I was also considering
> the thought of the near-term future of warfare, such as say a decade
> (no nano, or AI perversion attacks). I watched "Eraser" for the first
> time yesterday and I began wondering about the prospects of railguns.
> Are they feasible? I remember from reading "Snow Crash" that they were
> able to puree a boat with a high-speed railgun. Also for those of you
> living on the west coast of the United States, remember the blackout
> that occurred twice in seven states and the press never fully
> explained the reason or went indepth? The military have already
> considered the idea of creating electromagnetic pulse pipebombs to
> knockout communications and electricity and experimenting a physically
> harmless device on the populous wouldn't be that bad so why not black
> out seven states? What about soldiers being equipped with augmented
> reality displays to enable them to see in infrared, and nightvision or
> a combo of both superimposed on each other for maximum vision? I'm
> sure developments such as these will eventually be commercialized and
> drift down to the masses. To recap, are railguns physically possible?
> Would the military experiment on us like that? and was that 7 state
> blackout really an EMP pipebomb? Welcome to the new era in Information
> Warfare!!
The problem with rail guns is not the size of the rail. You can build
one the size of a pistol to give equivalent muzzle velocity. The problem
is in the power supply. TO give sufficient gauss, with current capacitor
technology, you would need a backpack full to get enough power for a few
blasts, plus a power supply to "reload".
With EMP weapons, these are possible, though you need to place your
weapon in very close proximity to avoid inverse squared dissipation,
unless you created a special focused device that used two transmitters
to create scalar zones. I invented one of these to work with my radar
detector against cops while I was in the Air Force. THe US DOD now owns
the designs...... ;-)
Mike