Mmm, what applications could this be relevant to?

I see a mini rail gun replacing main guns of tanks, where high velocity is critical. Other than that, warships?

Ships would be a good choice. No more need to carry shells that include their own propulsion, and big ships already have a nuclear reactor, so the only thing they'd have to add is capacitors to build up the power large enough to fire.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/NASA-Railgu ... -9468.html

Yea the railgun tech is our "Mass Effect." Apparently it can be used to launch junk into space as well. Will this be our Gate system in vastness of space, who knows.

Isn't space postively riddled with debris as it is? Like, up to the point that it actually endangers/impedes human expansion? :O Or maybe it's capable of firing stuff outside the earth's orbit, I dunno.

most of space is pretty damned empty, but yea, much of earth orbit (especially low earth orbit) is full of junk. Still, with a cheap enough launch system like a railgun, we could presumably nail space junk with junk and destroy it. Personally, I'd rather have tons of crap floating around in the solar system than in the ocean. Not that that's a fix, or anything, but at least it would reduce pollution for the time being. Ultimately, recycling is the way to go, but there's just some stuff that can't be recycled. Yet.

Yeah, I agree. Not sure if a railgun powerful and accurate enough to fire stuff out of earth's orbit is viable (for now) though.

Yea, that's a lot of power. Still, the navy rail gun fired at mach 7.5 (if I'm reading that right). That's about 2500m/s. Escape velocity is about 11,000m/s. So we're not there by quite a bit, since we'd need to scale up to handle some really heavy loads to make it worthwhile, not just toss a fairly small chunk of metal like the railgun in these tests does. Still, if we were to triple the power of the current gun, we could actually shoot the current ammo out of earth orbit. That's pretty freaking crazy.

True, but it's no different from naval guns. A battleships guns are ridiculously destructive, have a decent range (~40km), and you don't hear about a lot of oops with those. I wonder how accurate a rail gun would really be at a range of 290 miles. With a 6 minute flight time, I don't see how they could hit much unless it's like a non-moving bunker (and a big one). I'll bet if it ever gets fielded, the effective engagement range will be way less.

Not to mention the natural curve of Earth. Probably a total bitch to calculate.

true... at those speeds, things get complicated. Still, Earth escape velocity is 11.2km/sec, which is still way higher than the 2.4km/sec they're currently hitting, so it should be possible to shoot things beyond the horizon. Tough stuff, though... that's a lot of air with a lot of possibility for turbulence knocking the projectile off course.

I have done a little bit of research in the past for school since we're making kind of a rail gun with magnets.
From the movies i've seen you could use the gun to destroy big targets (like your bunker) but from what i remember, it was also possible to have projectiles that will explode or something. Don't know it that accurate anymore, but they could have like a rain/hail of small fragments, which would then be used against troops for instance. I'll see if i can find the fragment again, my memory could be blurred.

edit: found it, somewhere after 2 minutes (or just watch the whole thing, it doesn't take that long)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OqlTXwLG40