because it apparently didn't go up as high as it was supposed to, the test was ultimately declared unsuccessful.
Poor Chinese. They have yet to learn so much from Elon (hint: declare everything a success. NO. MATTER. WHAT.)
this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
137 points (96.6% liked)
Technology
57435 readers
3274 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
One of my favorite Star Trek quotes of all time: “If the invasion had been considered a defeat Gowron would’ve been assassinated by now. He simply declared victory, and went home.”
A new space race with railguns would be the fucking coolest thing ever
Spinlaunch has been trying to make a catapult-to-orbit out of a miniature hyperloop. Actually not as dumb as I made it sound (but it does have its own issues)
until they use the tech to drop bombs more effectively
Unless your upper half happened to be on the upper path of one of those things. Then it would probably be amazing for like a nanosecond. In the most macabre way I suppose. But just a nanosecond. After that when you fully realize what happened there probably wouldn't be much you left to keep realizing anything past that.
It goes without saying that we should work out any safety issues before that
You can launch payloads into orbit with less pollution and for cheaper. You can build habitations with the material and bring humans up the traditional way.
Of course though, the powers that be are going to be more interested in killing each other.
I wonder how much more energy it took to accomplish that compared to just shooting a rocket. Last I had heard railguns weren't really feasible because of the absurd amount of energy they would require even with perfect efficiency.
It's not the absurd amount of energy that's the problem. It's the absurd amount of energy that has to be STORED AND RELEASED within a fraction of a second in a controlled fashion.
If you wanna go electric, you would need a stupendous amount of capacitors and a gun that won't get destroyed due to the immense energy release.
If u wanna go chemical (like an actual gun), u r faced with the same problem of the gun exploding.
The only approach that MIGHT work is the Spinlaunch thing, where u essentially store this energy as angular momentum in a THICCC carbon fibre rod. Spinlaunch is still yet to demonstrate anything remarkable, so there's that.
I'm no expert, but I could imagine rail-guns would be a huge advantage on nuclear powered vessels. For one the ammo doesn't explode if hit by enemy fire, and I'm guessing the ammo would be super cheap. In theory you could shoot bars of iron.
They might also have a much smaller launch signature, meaning harder response to a first-strike launch. But I’m not a physicist or nuclear deterrence expert or anything.
When it's not an experiment:
- Do we know where it is?
- Is it mobile?
This is the military we're talking about.
They'll turn a metal ring into a million dollar thing making sure it has 0 flaws on the surface that might cause 1 in a million shots to go off course.
If you have the opportunity to involve a giant rail gun in something, you do it.
They're not feasible because of the erosion of the barrel with our current level of materials science.
...a weapon to surpass Metal Gear
That's horrifying... but TBH it also sounds kinda sick
And when I said that their “electric launch system” for “scientific space exploration” was just a public testbed for a missile launch system, a small army of tankies descended upon me.
If it’s so smart, why can’t it launch itself? 🤓
Its so smart it gets something else to do all the work for it.
It might be a mistake to allow AI’s control of weapon systems.