And thanks to Sean Price for sending me this one. I’ve seen this on You Tube but now apparently they’ve broken their own record. This was a 33 megajoule firing and: ‘A single megajoule is roughly equivalent to a 1-ton car traveling at 100 mph. Multiple that by 33 and you get a picture of what would happen when such a weapon hits a target.’ Ouch.

A theoretical dream for decades, the railgun is unlike any other weapon used in warfare. And it’s quite real too, as the U.S. Navy has proven in a record-setting test today in Dahlgren, VA.

Rather than relying on a explosion to fire a projectile, the technology uses an electomagnetic current to accelerate a non-explosive bullet at several times the speed of sound. The conductive projectile zips along a set of electrically charged parallel rails and out of the barrel at speeds up to Mach 7.