Speaker 0:  europe just fired a projectile beyond mach five without gunpowder or rocket fuel, but launching one hypersonic round is far easier than turning a railgun into a weapon capable of stopping a maneuvering missile. so europe takes rail guns into the open air. on june 29, the french german research institute of saint louis fired its domestically developed electromagnetic rail gun outdoors at its baldersheim proving ground. the test moved the launcher from controlled laboratory experiment into a measurable free flight. the isl's official announcement, you know, mentioned that the railguns could eventually fire extremely fast, comparatively inexpensive projectiles for long range artillery and missile defense without carrying explosive propellant inside every round. what do you think about this, john?

Speaker 1:  i love this. it it's been such a long i don't even know if we've covered rail guns on this, on this podcast before, but i love rail guns. ever since was it doom that had the rail gun? i think

Speaker 0:  they had it in, transformers. loom.

Speaker 1:  no. no. but in the video game. anyways alright. one of the video games, duke nukem or doom hide the railgun, and i always thought it was cool. but, anyways, this is cool. now this trial doesn't mean that europe has a combat ready railgun. okay? what this means is they're building a testing platform that allows them to gradually increase the weapon's energy, examine longer flight distances, measure accuracy, aerodynamic stability, and eventually experiment with specialized or guided projectiles. now for those of you that don't know, a real gun, it consists of two parallel conductive rails connected to a pulse electrical power source. so the conductive component is called an armature and bridges the rails and completes the electrical circuit. so when an extremely large current passes along one rail through the armature and back along the second rail, creates a magnetic field. and so the interaction between the electrical current and magnetic field produces what's called the lorentz force, which pushes the armature and the projectile attached to it or carried by it down the barrel. and so the underlying physics is conceptually straightforward, but the engineering of it is extremely difficult because the system may have to conduct currents approaching millions of amperes over only a few milliseconds. so essentially, you're using a magnet. yeah. you're there you go. to shoot a projectile. and this is really cool. like, there's a lot of engineering that goes into this. and so yeah. go ahead.

Speaker 0:  i was just gonna say we are showing the video for those people watching of some of this, the railgun in test trials.

Speaker 1:  yeah. and so, what's cool about what they're doing here like, there's open ranges, i think, in the us, for testing, but, this is gonna allow them to measure factors such as muzzle velocity and velocity loss down rate downrange, pitch, yaw, roll, and aerodynamic stability, projectile dispersion and accuracy, armature, structural integrity after launch. there's a whole bunch that they're gonna be able to, to test. and so the railgun itself, it uses a six meter launcher and a roughly 40 by 40 millimeter bore, which is kinda cool. so, yeah, this is obviously, like, if you if you're watching the videos, real guns, they obviously, they can't shoot right now as fast as, say, a machine gun or something like that. like, you know, one projectile. i don't even know what the reset time is because of all of the, currents and everything, that that, that are included here. but what are your thoughts on this? and what do you think about real ones?

Speaker 0:  well, i think the idea is cool. and, i'm not as big a fan as the doom games as you are. so i know they exist, and i liked them back in the day, but i haven't followed any of the more modern ones. however, they did show this in transformers where they were taking out that little big transform on top of the pyramid.

Speaker 1:  oh, yeah. i remember that.

Speaker 0:  yep. that whether, you know, the again, that is probably the future thing that we want, which is launching a nonexplosive device. right? so this, think of this update like replacing a cannon's explosion with a magnetic launch system on a roller coaster, except the track accelerates a metal projectile to more than two kilometers per second in just a few milliseconds. so, the test happened, but there's no deployable weapon has been announced. europe's team development program is targeting further firing ranges, testing in 2028, with research mapped to twenty thirties. little bit of search and found similar testing going on in the united states where they were reaching over mach seven. so the reported projectile diameter was 25 millimeters. the reported muzzle velocity were 2,000 mile, meters per second, equivalent speed 7,200 kilometers per hour, reported acceleration over a 100,000 g's. so it's a planned facility free flight distance of approximately one kilometer. isl confirms the outdoor shot, but does not publish the velocity, caliber, or acceleration in the announcement, so we had to kinda go through it. the us navy previously tested rail guns at muzzle energies reaching 32 megajoules. but the durability, power integration, and, competing weapon priorities kept the technology from becoming operational. so yeah. a projectile experiencing a 100,000 g's cannot, use ordinary artillery electronics, batteries, circuit board sensors, and guidance components, must all survive forces that can tear conventional hardware apart. so, basically, they're just sending a piece of metal down the pipe. pillow began with relatively modest budget of $1,500,000 euro dollar euro. sorry. and united, seven partners across four countries. its results became the foundation for the largest cema program, which is, part of the european defense agency. and the railgun may not use gunpowder, but it neither silent nor flashless. the projectile creates a sonic boom while electrical arcing and superheated plasma can produce an extremely bright muzzle flash. so it's interesting. the concept is cool. i'm just not sure how fast we're gonna get there and how excited we should be about this because we've been kind of here before, and people just change their mind about how much money it was gonna take to get them to a practical weapon.

Speaker 1:  yeah. sorry. it was quake two that had the railgun. sorry.

Speaker 0:  there you go.

Speaker 1:  that wasn't due. it was quake two. but yeah. so, there hasn't been much advancement in railgun technology, which is probably why we haven't covered it. but i think we did cover now that i'm looking back, we did cover, railgun being tested onboard a ship, maybe? because that sounds familiar to me or at least i've ran an article on it. so, there's a bunch of different experiments and testing going on and things like that. so, i'm, i'm excited for this. and the thing is the breakthrough here, it's not that europe has suddenly produced a deployable electromagnetic super weapon. it's that they can observe the entire transition from electrical acceleration to atmospheric free flight. so, as you said, mach five, railguns have proven they can generate extraordinary speed. the question that still remains unanswered is that whether engineers can turn that speed into an accurate, durable durable and rapidly, that's key, firing, power efficient and affordable military system. i guess my question here too is, are there other technologies that are that are up and coming? because back back in 2010 and when rail guns were first or back when i don't wanna say 2010. back when rail guns were first, started to be experimented and tested, we didn't have technologies that like, the laser technology that we have now. so i don't know if railgun technology is still viable. may i think it is. but we also have laser technology, which is a lot more predominant and could potentially, be cheaper.

Speaker 0:  yeah. i think the difference is right now, the test is demonstrated projectile can leave the launcher and fly outdoors. it did not demonstrate repeated firing or operational accuracy, 200 kilometer shot or the interception of a maneuvering hypersonic missile. but if they can get a accurate 200 kilometer shot, that's something that is completely different than what lasers can do. and the damage something like this can do is extremely devastating if they can do it. so the promise is there. it's also if we are going to space, this kind of thing feels like a, a great thing for space.

Speaker 1:  oh, yeah. good point. yeah.

Speaker 0:  but, the power storage, rail erosion, heat removal, projectile guidance, and targeting, tracking all remain major obstacles. so, watch the shot count, not just the speed. the real breakthrough will be accurate and pre repeated firings without destroying the rails, not one spectacular launch. so europe has moved its railgun research from laboratory hardware to real world ballistics, but the operational weapon is still on the other side of several brutal engineering problems. would you rather fund railguns that might deliver cheaper defensive shots or spend that money improving interceptive missiles or john's thoughts of lasers? or even now, we're coming into the world of, quantum entanglement. i can see a feature of quantum weapons. how exactly that would be deployed, i don't know. but, you start thinking outside the box when you can have, these things that are quite, that are entangled quite a distance apart and replicate each other. all of a sudden, if you can have quantum batteries, why can't you have quantum bumps? so, let us know what your thoughts are in the comments below. we'd love to hear, what you think.