China Uses Giant Rail Gun to Shoot a Smart Bomb Nine Miles Into the Sky

0nekoneko7@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 134 points –
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It's not the absurd amount of energy that's the problem. It's the absurd amount of energy that has to be STORED AND RELEASED within a fraction of a second in a controlled fashion.

If you wanna go electric, you would need a stupendous amount of capacitors and a gun that won't get destroyed due to the immense energy release.

If u wanna go chemical (like an actual gun), u r faced with the same problem of the gun exploding.

The only approach that MIGHT work is the Spinlaunch thing, where u essentially store this energy as angular momentum in a THICCC carbon fibre rod. Spinlaunch is still yet to demonstrate anything remarkable, so there's that.

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