Seems to me like a cleaner, more "futuristic" weapon. The "hobby" version of this weapon photographed in the article already looks quite clean.
Coil/rail guns that achieve velocities comparable to real firearms are actually quite loud, as the air is compressed and superheated in front of the projectile, which creates a report at the muzzle. However, most man portable variants are limited to around the energy of a .22 LR. Even air guns are more powerful and practical.
As an example of a weapon that's practical yet not portable, take a look at the Navy's 155mm rail gun. https://youtu.be/O2QqOvFMG_A
It’s the same reason why we don’t use coilguns anywhere else, why fix what isn’t broken?
I'd hardly call ordinary sporting or pest control as "worst case scenario". Indeed, your comment betrays your nationality!
Not particularly powerful and it's unclear that any amount of engineering can make it deliver more power to each round while still keeping it man-portable.
The advantage would be better efficiency, similar to how hybrids are more efficient than ICE, which are only 35% efficient on a good day.
They get their efficiency from smoothing out upscs & downs and letting the power source run more steadily and spend more time in it's own sweet spot. IE the ice engine is less efficient when changing and when running at any rpm other than the peak of it's curve. The battery lets the the ice run steady at it's one best rpm and the battery does all the stop & go.
There is very very little opportunity for "flattening out peaks & valleys" in a single pulse, and no chance at all to do it enough times to regain so much energy that way that it more than pays for the conversion loss.
And in any event, coils are just super super fundamentally inefficient at bursts. The term is literally called impedance, because it litetally impedes energy flow. It's similar to resistance and is even measured in ohms. It's like a spring. You put the energy in and it doesn't immediately come back out, it eventually comes back out, slower and a bit less of it than went in. Converted to mechanical energy instead of picked up by another coil or bounced right back out the same wires where it went in and you you almost none of the energy back out.
They basically make something in a rifle form factor. It's still limited to 75m/s. That's low end air rifle speed.
Many designs that achieve respectable velocities use a multi-stage coil, which requires precise timing for each magnetic field, a lot of power, and high current capability. Generally, that means large batteries for a power source and large capacitors to feed the coils, which becomes heavy and expensive.
Even rifle variants rarely make more energy than a .22 LR, a feat which is easily overshadowed by air guns several hundred years old.
I think these might be classifiable as assault weapons.