real life rail gun

[Deuce11]

[url]http://www.reuters.com/video/2012/02/28/us-navy-kicks-off-rail-gun-tests-with-a?videoId=230957596&videoChannel=2602[/url]

[LordMcSpank]

Yep, the Navy has been working on these for years. Pretty cool stuff.

[Nightspawn]

Very cool.

[ZenPaladin]

We can make rail guns sure. But can we make sure they are only fired in the service of the greater good? That's a lot tougher.

[heretic marine]

that looks awesome.

[DarkLink]

It's also a huge step forward for naval firepower. A gun that can hit a target over the horizon using nothing more than a chunk of metal is a massive improvement over multi-million dollar missiles crammed with high explosives and fragile electronics.

[Roma89q]

Very cool indeed, simple yet devastating. Maybe they'll save us money which they can redistribute into education! Or more rail guns!

[Criger]

Pretty sweet. I wonder if these navy researchers play 40k...

[Wildcard]

Another major branch of investigation from the navy has been laser based weaponry. The current situation is that there has been developed a laser that can track down enemy airborne units (both planes and missiles). This method however can mostly be used as a defensive measure, and against smaller targets:

[url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqLkpcHavZE[/url]

However, the navy has made remarkable progress in the high power laser weaponry, that could be used to replace some of the battleship / cruiser - class ships ship-to-ship and ship-to-air weaponry. (apparently not all the projectile based weaponry, since laser requires line of sight to its target and there can be situations where such a LoS cannot be drawn.):

[url]http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/18/navy-breaks-world-record-futuristic-laser-getting-real/[/url]

Some juicy bits from the article (that is over a year old, so there must have been improvements in that sector over the year that has passed:

And that new record moved them one step closer to proving the "holy grail" of laser guns is real.

FoxNews.com saw scientists blast unprecedented levels of power into a prototype accelerator, producing a supercharged electron beam that can burn through 20 feet of steel per second.

Thats 6.1 meters per second

“It’s huge in regards to upgrading the laser power beam quality,” he said. According to ONR officials, that laser beam will eventually perform at a staggering “megawatt class,” a measure of the laser's strength.

While Rear Admiral Nevin P. Carr Jr., Chief of Naval Research acknowledges that this is not “something that we are going to wave a wand at and it’s going to appear” -- in fact, the Navy doesn't expect to hit the ultimate megawatt goal until the 2020s -- there have been several incremental victories that have pushed this project ahead of schedule that have scientists and program managers excited.

There, quite frankly I am both enthralled and scared from the news.. Seems it wont be (relatively) long before we get to see Lances on our ocean faring ships

[DarkLink]

Pretty sweet. I wonder if these navy researchers play 40k...

40k didn't exactly invent [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun"]railguns[/URL]. They've been standard fair of science fiction for nearly a century.