Re: It’s not 15 years
Nah, the power supply is not the issue: they tend to be big and bulky but on an aircraft carrier there’s plenty of space. And on some you already have a nuclear reactor on board —the worse that can happen is that you can’t charge fast enough and then your gun is rate limited. In general, as long as you don’t want to switch off a current of several thousands of amps, you’re fine.
Also heat build-up due to electrical resistance is not _such_ a big deal —it’s not as bad as keeping cool a superconductor, not make it quench and figure out a way to have a working sliding contact between the rails and the armature (*) across a thermal gradient of a couple of hundreds of degrees. Having to do that at room temperature with copper is already bad enough.
The problem is that you have to open the gun and change the rails every 1-20 shots, because they simply wear out (they will melt, develop holes, get smeared with whatever you’re using as the armature and not flatly or uniformly enough) and they don’t contact any more. And that’s no fun when you’re in a battle.
~~~
(*) the projectile is not used to close the circuit but there usually is another piece of metal behind it, for lower speed railguns. Once you start going above 3-4 km/s, you have to use a big fat spark between the rails which ionises whatever it’s in there and turns into plasma. Which as cool as it sounds, it will fsck up your rails even faster.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
