A weapon of yesteryear.

We have seen this technology in science fiction films, in television series, in video games, although I say that it is not such a futuristic technology, it really belongs to the past, we owe the idea to a French inventor Louis Octave Fauchon-Villeplee who in 1918 invented an electric cannon with a strong resemblance to a linear motor.

He filed the US patent application in 1922, his device consisted of two parallel bars that were connected to the projectile he was going to launch and the entire device was surrounded by a magnetic field, when the current passes through the bars a Magnetic force that propels the projectile along the bars.

The magnetic force is what drives this projectile and reaches enormous speeds, that is the base of a railgun or a magnetic cannon and this idea was taken up later during the Second World War by Nazi Germany who tried to manufacture railguns with air defense purposes.

The German design consisted of a cannon that would hit the target with projectiles. that those projectiles carried will carry a load of at least half a kilo of explosives, the weapons would be mounted in six-barrel batteries and would have to be able to fire twelve rounds per minute, the Nazi weapon was never built unless we know of, it simply stayed in a project but when the plans were discovered powders by the allies aroused great interest, in fact in 1947 the US Army wrote a report that concluded that although the cannon could build the amount of energy necessary to doing the function was unfeasible.

The US is not the only one that has experimented with this weapon, in July 2016 Russian scientists developed a railgun and there are also rumors that China not only would have developed a railgun but would have installed such a weapon in one of their ships and there are more nations that are experimenting with these types of weapons.

It is the very high energy consumption that has always limited the development of the railgun, in July 2021 the US Navy decided to stop the program and had invested since 2005 more than 500 million dollars in the project, But the budget for the year 2022 was cut and one of the victims of the cut was the railgun, now the priority of research in the US Navy is hypersonic missiles, lasers and electronic warfare systems.

Hypersonic missiles have emerged as a serious competitor to the railgun, the cannon shots can reach speeds of 7242 kilometers per hour, penetrating a concrete wall from 160 kilometers away, that is something amazing but it turns out that a hypersonic missile can do that same at a longer distance and also can change the trajectory or the objective during the flight something that a projectile launched by a railgun cannot do, it seems that this electric weapon can be forgotten as one of those futuristic inventions of the past that never They came to be developed but at the beginning of this year 2022 there has been news that brings a possibility of hope for the railgun.

One of the nations that is investigating this technology is Japan and in this image above you see the Japanese prototype weapons, smaller, more practical and in principle that consumes less energy, as it turns out that on January 4 a few days ago the medium Nikkei Asia published close information to the Japanese defense ministry, apparently Japan is interested in developing the railgun but to intercept hypersonic missiles it would be the old German dream of using the cannon as a surface-to-air weapon and in this way Japan would seek to anticipate and respond to hypothetical attacks with hypersonic weapons developed by China, Russia or North Korea, it seems that the railgun would offer the speed and agility necessary to neutralize possible hypersonic missiles, perhaps in the end we will have this futuristic technology made reality.

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