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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

I can't decide which I'm more excited about, railguns or lasers.

Do the Navy's railgun prototypes take a special type of ammunition or are they just launching precision machined blanks of common metal?

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It's not common metal. The design of the slug is much of the work in creating a railgun because the electromagnetic push comes from generating back-currents within the slug itself. It has to be good at being pushed, then good at flying, all without melting.

Another very serious design problem with high power railguns is making a gun where firing it doesn't destroy the rails after five shots.

They were looking at GPS guided projectiles http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/guided-supersonic-bu...

I am excited about future weapons, but I lament the existence of the military industrial complex and the military innovations that goes with them.

Do you also lament the creation of things like the fore-runner of the Internet that was created by the military industrial complex? Or the countless other advancements we use every day that were driven by military R&D? Or are you just completely and totally unaware of the significant contributions that military R&D has made to civilian lives?

The option isn't military or no military, it is military or spend the money on something else. There are plenty of other ways the same money could have been spent which resulted in similar civilian improvements.

According to the internet the slugs are mostly aluminum and/or copper. I'm sure it's more complex than that, but that's the ELI5 answer I guess.

According to a quick internet search, $25,000 a round.

That sounds insanely expensive but cruise missiles are half a million dollars each, not sure what an LRAP costs or what 'traditional' artillery shells used on ships cost.

I guess half of that is amortized R&D costs, and then some more cost padding so that various people in the military supply chain can have their cut.

Also, I'd assume no one is mass producing these rounds yet, so they're all small scale production which greatly increases the unit price. Once the military puts in the first order for a few million rounds the price will go down a lot.

"Rail guns, ..., fire a projectile at six or seven times the speed of sound - enough velocity to cause severe damage."

I'd imagine so!

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