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For the curious, the key specs mentioned in the article:
200 rounds per barrel takes the gun into practical territory. I bet Taiwan could use a fozen of them.
Interesting to hear what the true range ends up being.
200 rounds per barrel
That's a pretty respectable life for a railgun. Dunno what the material cost is coming up to.
Now, how well can it intercept?
Would be really interesting to learn about how stable the ammunition is in flight. I don't imagine it would be easy to have any kind of active stabilization or guidance and the gun itself is probably quite heavy, so hitting drones is probably a no go, but hitting ships...
Yeah, now that I think about it, Mach 6 is not quite fast enough to intercept anything and lasers are probably more suited than this, despite their range and energy problems.
Of course, it being a railgun, not really expecting any sort of guidance in it. It's probably just a projectile.
Had it been around Mach 9 (~ 3km/s), I would consider it useful with a remote-release flak or sensor-assisted release flak for interception, as even tiny pebbles would be expected to disrupt nuclear armaments at those speeds.
Didn’t I recently read a post about the practical limitations of railguns, which concluded that lasers are better?
For hitting drones and artillery shells? Almost certainly lasers win.
For hitting ships? Railguns, if the problems with the rails getting festroyed after a few shots can be fixed. The Japanese claim 200 shots per barrel. Whether that means just the rails or whole barrel is unclear.
Only you can answer that.
I can answer it but it has a 50% chance of being wrong.
No, that was a dream we shared.
Okay, it all makes sense now