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Everyone please applaud this cool new way to kill people.

A railgun is a direct-fire weapon with no explosives -- it won't be used to carpet-bomb civilian targets or wage drone-like terror campaigns. It's pretty much "a way for a warship to blow up another warship."

That's not to necessarily say we should celebrate any weapons technology, but as far as weapons technology goes, this is one that fits pretty solidly in the role of "militaries fighting other militaries." Sure, I guess that the US Navy could use it to blow up an unarmed civilian vessel, but honestly the US Navy could do that anyway.

One concern is that it makes it cheaper for the USN to blow up a vessel; this is way cheaper than the short-range cruise missiles it replaces, so it can be deployed more often.

The costs are not that significant a concern right now [1]. So saving money on the attacks will allow the government to spend more on useful functions, and not so much on more attacks.

[1] "Destroying a $30,000 Islamic State Pickup Truck Can Cost Half a Million Dollars" http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/10/08/destroying-a-30000-islam...

You think the expense of a missile is holding the navy back from sinking more ships? Huh?

I don't see how it's disputable that the less expensive it is for the navy to sink ships, the greater the capability there is for sinking ships.

Because price is almost certainly a non-factor. If the Navy intends on sinking a ship, they're going to do it. They're quite well funded. I can almost promise you that the price of a missile is not coming up in the discussions which take place in the war room.

Ah, I see the confusion; I'm not talking about the Navy sinking a ship today. I agree with that. However, as we get better at sinking ships, the Navy's total capability for sinking ships increases.

This weapon, due partly to decreased per-shot cost, is likely to result in either smaller ships or larger destructive capacity per-ship.

In the event that the USN is capable of sinking every single civilian ship on the planet right now, in which case that doesn't matter much, but if we haven't reached that point yet, then it does make a difference.

I promise you that aggregate logistics, including munitions costs, are important in war planning, operations, and strategy, even if they aren't important considerations in individual tactical decisions.

When was the last time we shot at another warship with a warship? (honest question)

See the last paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship#World_War_II

Also last paragraph of the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf#The_Battle...

Possibly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bubiyan

If ISIS grows to the point they field brown-water and/or littoral asymmetric warfare vessels (very large numbers of small craft carrying highly lethal missiles), then the expanded ammo capacity and stand-off capabilities of the railgun would likely be welcomed by the sailors on the US vessels.

I would be interested in knowing this too, if anybody can shed some light. Falklands war? North Koreans trying to take a South Korean ship?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_naval_battles

The most recent ones are primarily clashes between patrol boats.

The fact remains that the people on the other end of this weapon are still people, and all weapons of this kind are still a deadweight loss, economically speaking.

Think about it in these terms: you have a pile of money and a bunch of smart people. You can invest in a) creating a new technology that will make human lives better and trade with other people to increase global wealth or b) creating a new technology that will kill the people you would have traded with in the other scenario.

It is possible to both recognize that a certain amount of killing people is likely necessary in this crazy mixed up world of ours, and still be saddened by the waste and stupidity that that necessity represents. It is a huge error in economic thinking to forget that killing people is necessarily the result of waste and stupidity, either on their part or ours.

Personally, I won't work on anything whose primary purpose is killing people (and I've turned down jobs and contracts because of that) and I'm always a little saddened when I see good engineers investing their lives in such a profoundly unproductive activity.

With you on the larger point, but for the sake of argument, creating weapons technology isn't necessarily deadweight. Military applications have driven all sorts of technological developments that ultimately resulted in civilian economic growth (the Internet probably being the most salient here). Even this contraption probably required development of new compact power systems that might have all sorts of uses eventually.

And it may well be that the Internet would have happened anyway, but there seem to be some inventions that nobody would have had the drive to produce if not for wars... nuclear power might be a good example.

Nuclear power plausibly would have been created without military incentives--it just isn't that hard, and all the pieces were in place before Manhattan. Nuclear weapons are somewhat harder (uranium bombs are relatively easy, plutonium harder, fission much harder.) So if we're making imaginary arguments, I'm going to imagine a world where nuclear power was invented via civilian research, but limited military research meant no nuclear weapons :-)

The important thing is that it doesn't have to be military research that drives any of this stuff. If you want spin-off benefits--and who doesn't?--invest heavily in space exploration. It would have precisely the same odds of civilian spin-off benefits as military research, and would involve building stuff that a) isn't primarily intended to destroy itself and whatever productively useful thing it is aimed at and b) would get us closer to spreading humanities eggs across multiple baskets.

So "spin off benefits are good" is not a very strong argument for military research. It's a strong argument for research, but why not fund something productive rather than destructive?

I don't think this is really about ship to ship combat, I think this is a replacement for the big guns of the Iowa class in their fire support role during an amphibious assault or supporting ground operations otherwise. It would be substantially cheaper to replace smart munitions dropped from airplanes, which is what primarily fulfills that mission now, with equally-accurate cheap projectiles rapidly fired from ships offshore, over the horizon, reserving the airplanes for special situations.

This technology has potential applications from physics to space travel. Military research isn't entirely bad.

physics

hmmm I am pretty sure it's the other way around.

Well, it is cool, just on its merits as a machine. The fact that it's designed for killing people doesn't suddenly make it un-cool, nor does it mean we're somehow obligated to ignore it or pretend it isn't interesting.

There's a difference between admiring something because it kills, and admiring something for other reasons, that just happens to kill.

I understand your sentiment, but ultimately I fear that the only way humans will stop doing this is to genetically engineer it out of ourselves. Until then, I'd rather be stronger than weaker, since I cannot control what other humans want to do to me.

I don't like it, but I don't particularly feel like being conquered, either.

Regardless of application, science is still cool.

Yes, but deadly weapons are created by people who think, simply, "science is cool". ;)

I might just prefer this to atomic bomb provided it'll kill instantly and painlessly. US could be a little more humane next time.

You might not. One of the problems with dropping tungsten rods from space is how large the rods must be to achieve the acceleration necessary to bust bunkers. With a space-based solar-powered platform, you could accelerate much smaller projectiles for similar effective damage. The logistics may be much easier -- for example, the rods might fit on a SpaceX capsule.

Sure, but what are you going to do about the recoil? Equal and opposite reaction, F=ma, and all that.

The obvious answer is to have a spacegun that can only shoot two shots at the same time in opposite directions.

What about just let them fall to earth from a pretty high orbit?

Things in orbit are already falling. To make them aim at the ground requires a very high speed perpendicular launch.

Hey now, that gun was awesome in Quake.

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