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This should be celebrated. Not spending money on projects that don't have a purpose is obviously the correct choice.

It seems however that it's being deprioritized in place of hypersonic missiles, which are a frightening and potentially destabilizing technology in their own right.

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China already has several variants of hypersonic missile “carrier killers”, DF-21/26 for example; US DoD development of such technology is to maintain force parity, and long range ordinance protects high value assets (carriers) from close range combat.

I hope learnings from this railgun make its way into broad military power control electronics, and trickle down to consumers if there is value.

it won't. its incredibly impractical to power

I've heard that before

The amount of electrical power to shoot a single round was immense, the greatest known energy used to propel a projectile from a railgun was 33 megajoules.

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