Railguns: the Useless Billion-Dollar Weapon

The railgun was supposed to be a revolution. A gun that didn’t need gunpowder. A slug fired at seven times the speed of sound. Range? Up to 200 miles. It was sleek, sexy, and straight out of science fiction — and the U.S. Navy wanted it bad.

For years, it was the crown jewel of Pentagon wish lists, promising pinpoint strikes with the raw power of physics alone. But by 2021, the dream was dead. No deployments. No mass production. Just a half-billion-dollar money pit and a pile of broken test rails.

So, what happened? How did the Navy manage to fumble what looked like a game-changing weapon? And why are China, Japan, and others still chasing a dream that Washington already buried?

This is the story of how the railgun went from battlefield miracle to a half billion-dollar mirage.

A Shocking Idea

The quest to hurl projectiles with electricity, not explosives, began, surprisingly, well over a century ago. Specifically, during WWI, when French inventor André Louis Octave Fauchon-Villeplee built a prototype “electric cannon” in 1918 – essentially the first railgun.

The concept was simple in theory: use electromagnetic forces to accelerate a metal – specifically a magnetic metal – projectile to extreme speeds.

In practice, however, it was like trying to bottle lightning. Early designs remained experimental; with even German scientists toying with an electric anti-aircraft gun during WWII that never left the drawing board.

For decades, that was the sum total of the railgun’s development. A bit of tinkering here, a bit of fettling there. Enough to reconfirm over and over again that electromagnets could indeed make metal slugs go fast… and that’s about it – nothing even remotely approaching a fully actualised and ready to go weapons system for the real world.

And so it was that railguns lived only in research papers and science fiction, a tantalising what if that promised to revolutionize firepower – if only the engineering could catch up. Little did those early pioneers know, however, that their ideas would spark one of the Pentagon’s most expensive wild goose chases a century later.

The Pentagon’s Big Bet

Fast forward to the 21st century, and in 2005, the United States Navy – ever in search of its next war winning toy – decided enough was enough, and placed a daring bet on electromagnetic railguns.

They really were dreaming big too, with the Office of Naval Research promising a weapon straight out of sci-fi: a gun that would use no gunpowder, yet could fire projectiles at Mach 7 to hit targets accurately 100+ nautical miles away. It wouldn’t even need any fancy kind of warhead either – sheer kinetic energy alone would be more than enough thanks to that absurd speed.

To be fair to them, the appeal was obvious. Name a single conventional cannon that could manage that sort of range at all – never mind reliably. You can’t, can you, because they don’t exist.

Take the mighty Paris Gun, Imperial Germany’s 282 monster designed to lob shells at its titular city from afar – even it could only manage 81 miles, on a good day. Then there’s the M1299 Howitzer, BAE Systems’ failed attempt at making an ultra-long range – but actually accurate – howitzer for the 21st century; it could do 68 miles at best. Consider finally the M65 Atomic Cannon, for which range, for obvious reasons, was rather important – 20 miles. You get the idea then, an accurate 100+ mile range out of a cannon – bit of a big deal.

And for a time, all appeared rosy for the Navy’s new toy, and by 2008, enthusiasm was sky-high. The Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations had witnessed a record-setting test of a prototype made by BAE Systems at Dahlgren, Virginia, in January of that year, and they liked what they saw so much – in addition to two other successful tests in October 2006 and January 2007 – that they revised their range estimates up even further, with 200 miles at Mach 7 now being promised.

To think of the railgun’s provisional figures in a specifically naval context too, rather than just an ‘oooh, other big cannons don’t go as far’ one, they were eyeing it up to supplement, and maybe even replace, their 5-inch Mark 45 gun, which has been their go-to ship gun since 1971 – and it can only push out to 20 miles on a good day.

Naturally, with promises like that, and the progress to achieving it seemingly coming along so nicely, the railgun became something of a military tech celebrity, a claim that is best evidenced not by the vast litany of articles that discussed it in excited terms back then, but from its appearance in 2009’s Transformers 2, in which one is shown giving one of the film’s baddies the business from atop a US Naval ship. As enthusiasm like this demonstrates, as far as anyone was concerned back then – the railgun was near future tech which was just around the corner.

Come 2010, the Navy had poured tens of millions into prototypes by both BAE Systems, as we’ve already mentioned, and also General Atomics. That same year too, the latter started to catch up with, and even surpass, the former, as General Atomics’ Blitzer test system set a new world record by firing a projectile at Mach 5, and generating 33 megajoules of muzzle energy while doing so – roughly the same kinetic punch as a small hatchback car travelling at 100mph.

From there, the Navy started talking openly and publicly – bragging even – about deploying railguns on warships. The Zumwalt-class destroyers were chalked up as the first that would receive them – as back then said ships were still shiny, new, and futuristic, with the realisation that they were actually big old piles of wank having yet to have set in. As for dates, they stated that they wanted to be testing prototypes at sea by 2016, with the proper roll out – subject to said testing going well – coming as soon as possible after that.

Except, that roll out date never came, did it? How did this happen? How did a technology that appeared so full of potential, just, well… fail?

A good question to be sure, and one that we shall indeed answer – after we’ve taken the time to get to grips with how railguns actually work.

How to Shoot a Bullet with Lightning

In simple terms, a railgun is essentially a giant electric circuit shaped like a gun barrel. It consists of two parallel conductive rails and a sliding armature – or a conductive projectile – between them.

When an enormous electric current – millions of amps worth – flows from one rail, through the armature, into the other rail, it creates a powerful electromagnetic force: the Lorentz force. This force launches the projectile down the rails at extreme speed. In essence, the railgun turns electricity into kinetic energy.

To grasp the insanity of the speeds involved: the Navy’s goal of Mach 7 is about 5,369 mph at sea level. That’s nearly three times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet, and about five times the muzzle velocity of the Iowa-class battleship’s 16-inch guns from WWII.

A projectile flying that fast carries staggering kinetic energy; even a 10kg slug could hit with the force of a Tomahawk cruise missile. Unlike a missile, though, the slug has no explosives – it relies purely on sheer kinetic energy to obliterate the target. This also means that because the ammo is basically ‘just’ the warhead, i.e. without a casing or powder charge behind it, a ship could theoretically carry many more rounds as a result – the space that used to be used to carry those things, instead just carrying more rounds instead.

There are other perks to this electromagnetic marvel too, with the US Navy noting that eliminating gunpowder and explosives would make warships much safer from accidental fires or enemy hits. Remember when HMS Hood went up in a oner during WWII? That’d be all but impossible with a powder-free ship. No powder also means less noise from the ship’s gun – aside from the sonic boom of the projectile breaking the sound barrier.

In theory then, a railgun-armed ship could sit offshore and bombard targets far inland with precision-guided hypervelocity projectiles, or swat down incoming aircraft and missiles at a fraction of the cost of firing interceptors. These physics look glorious, on paper, but theory and reality can often be two very different things, and as we already know – railguns were exactly one of those instances… so let’s now see what the problem was.

Hype Meets Hard Reality

To get us started, remember when we said that railguns, to be effective, needed millions of amps? Well, turns out, that’s actually quite a lot. Take the lightbulb you are probably sat under right now; if it’s the old school incandescent kind, odds are, it’s drawing a single amp, at most. For those of you reading this on your phone, the charger you yanked it out of this morning likely draws in the region of one to five amps, and if you’re reading this on a really, really meaty PC, it’s likely drawing five to ten as we speak. So, a million amps then, yeah, it’s a lot.

Then there’s the matter of actually storing and delivering that massive pulse of electricity to the railgun. Remember when we said the Blitzer set a record breaking 33 megajoules of energy delivered? Well, doing that required bulky banks of capacitors or advanced alternators, all of which took up a huge amount of space and weight.

Only a few ships in the US fleet – such as the Zumwalt – could even produce enough juice to even consider running the thing. The Navy’s most common combatants, like the Arleigh Burke class destroyers, would need a complete redesign to support a railgun – unless the Navy could figure out a several thousand mile long extension cord, anyway.

Those issues might have been fixable, however; after all, this is the US military we are talking about – if any organisation on earth could convert a load of ships into floating power banks to support a tarty new bit of kit, it’d be them. When the matter of energy is compounded by yet further problems however, justifying doing so becomes all the more tricky.

For example, barrel life also proved to be quite the issue. You see, firing a projectile at Mach shitloads causes extreme friction along the rails, resulting in intense heat, metal vaporization, and gargantuan pressure. As a result, the rails – typically metal like copper – erode a little – or not so little – each time you pull the trigger. This led to test rails cracking or deforming after just a few dozen shots.

The materials science simply hadn’t caught up to the power of the weapon. Engineers tried stronger alloys and clever designs, but a field-ready railgun barrel that can fire hundreds of rounds without melting down proved elusive.

And what about rate of fire? The Navy initially wanted a railgun that could fire six to 10 rounds per minute to deal with swarming threats. That goal ran into the cold reality of capacitor recharge times and heat dissipation. In practice, testers found it might take at least a minute to recharge for the next shot without frying something.

This slow rate of fire also undermined one of the railgun’s touted roles: air and missile defence. To shoot down a manoeuvring missile, you might need multiple shots in quick succession, thanks to them being rather tricky things to hit, and a round a minute? Nah, that ain’t it chief.

Then came guidance and accuracy concerns. A 5-inch dart flying at hypersonic speed is great, but only if it actually hits the target.

The Navy did work on a so-called ‘Hyper Velocity Projectile’ that could be fired from the railgun, which had onboard guidance electronics. But cramming guidance chips and fins into a projectile that can withstand 40,000–60,000g’s of acceleration and searing plasma is a materials engineer’s nightmare.

By late 2010s, when these issues were starting to be fully appreciated, the Navy had already spent over 500 million dollars on railgun R&D. Getting it ship-ready would require hundreds of millions more for integration and prototypes, and even then there was still no guarantee of success.

The World Tries to Catch Up

It’s also worth noting that while they very much led the charge, the US Navy was far from the only one wrestling with the railgun.

China, in particular, took note and decided it wanted in on the action too. By 2018, photos emerged of a Chinese warship – the Haiyang Shan, a retrofitted tank landing ship – with a massive turret on its bow that looked suspiciously like a railgun.

They had turned it into a floating testbed, complete with shipping containers full of likely power equipment, and eventually, they sent it to sea for trials. As early as 2019, US intelligence reports were claiming that the Haiyang Shan was seemingly getting shots off well enough, and that, at full wacker, it may even be able to hit targets over 124 miles away at speeds of Mach 7+. A breathless CNBC report in 2018 even went so far as to predict China’s railgun would be operational by 2025, beating the US to the punch.

And given that – if you’re reading this early – it’s currently mid-2025, are CNBC going to be vindicated? Well, while we’d bet a kidney on the fact that they won’t be operational in 2025, they actually might be in the future, as China, for all of the technology’s many flaws and hurdles, really doesn’t seem ready to write it off just yet.

Back in February 2022, for example, the South China Morning Post quoted researcher Wang Xiaohe of the China Huayin Ordnance Test Centre, who revealed plans to “step up testing of railguns to an unprecedented level”, with Chinese scientists working to solve wear and erosion issues by refining rail coatings and pulse characteristics.

Then came a jaw-dropper: in late 2023, a team at the PLA Naval University of Engineering reportedly achieved 120 consecutive shots at Mach 6 without serious barrel damage – an endurance milestone that the US never came close to matching. If true, this would certainly mark a significant breakthrough.

And actually, they didn’t even attribute this success as being entirely down to ever more exotic and fancy materials used in their railgun’s construction, but in the software it was hooked up to, with China claiming to use a sophisticated AI-powered measurement and diagnostic system, one that collects data from more than 100,000 sensors simultaneously – more than 10 times the number on a modern aircraft – and then uses that data to figure out exactly how far the railgun can be pushed on the next shot before getting all blowy uppy.

Of course, Beijing has been characteristically secretive, so confirmed beyond all doubt details are few and far between, but we also know that their program is being led by Rear Admiral Ma Weiming, a sort of rockstar engineer who also drove China’s development of electromagnetic catapults for aircraft carriers… so it ain’t like they’re lacking in brains suitably wrinkled to just maybe pull it off.

Beyond China, however, India has been pursuing railgun tech. In 2017, for example, India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation, DRDO, successfully test-fired a modest 12 mm electromagnetic railgun, accelerating a tiny projectile to about Mach 6.

Buoyed by that experiment, India then announced plans for a larger 30 mm prototype and ultimately a 1 kg projectile going around Mach 6. In 2025, DRDO even inaugurated a dedicated Centre for Electromagnetic Launch Technology to develop futuristic railgun systems. Indian defence officials tout that such guns could give the Indian Army and Navy a strategic edge – blasting targets in high-altitude border regions or arming warships with ultra-fast shot against aerial threats.

Japan, meanwhile, has also quietly become a leader in electromagnetic guns – perhaps not shocking given the nation’s high-tech pedigree.

Their efforts began in 2016, when the Japanese Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency started a railgun development program that aimed for a muzzle velocity of a little over 6,500 feet per second, and a barrel life of 120 shots.

Impressively, Japan met those goals: by experimenting with different rail materials (switching from copper to other alloys), their engineers achieved 120 continuous firings without significant rail damage, and in October 2023, Japan conducted its first ship-board test of a railgun, firing from a test ship – marking the world’s first at-sea railgun firing since the Chinese tests.

Japan’s motivation is particularly pointed too: they are developing railguns as a potential defence against the new threat of hypersonic missiles – which their neighbour China, who they aren’t exactly bezzies with, has been really stockpiling of late.

The European scene is also noteworthy. The European Defence Agency ran Project PILUM – Projectiles for Increased Long-range effects Using electroMagnetic railgun – from 2020 to 2023, assembling scientists and industry from France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Poland to study a naval/land railgun with 200 km range capability.

By 2023, they reported that “results exceed expectations” in key areas – from durable barrel coatings that mitigate wear, to a conceptual hypervelocity projectile that can survive Mach 6 acceleration.

And following PILUM’s wrapping up, a follow-on effort named THEMA – TecHnology for ElectroMagnetic Artillery – now aims to test a full-scale demonstrator by 2028, and possibly have a roadmap for a deployable system by 2035. In plain English: they’re not rushing a railgun to the battlefield next year, but they’re quietly trying to solve pieces of the puzzle (and no doubt observing the Americans’ expensive lesson with a knowing smile).

The global interest in railguns shows that the concept isn’t dead – yet. It’s become something of an engineering Holy Grail: nations are drawn to it, despite the US experience, thinking they are going to be the ones to crack it.

As for the matter of whether or not any of these upstarts to the railgun throne will succeed where the US failed… frankly, who knows. We aren’t prophets, and neither are we triple PhD’d material slash electrical engineers.

But what we do know is that a split in the path is coming along. Down one end, lies sweet sweet vindication for the US, as all these other countries will piss God only knows how much money away, only to find out that old Uncle Sam was right all along – and they should have followed in his example. And down the other end, lies an Uncle Sam who looks like a bit of a tit, and a right nobhead, because for once, he would have actually bothered to cancel a program whose costs were spiralling up into the heavens… only for it to end up being one that actually could have been completed with a bit more time, a bit more cash, and a bit more belief.

And speaking of Uncle Sam, we never actually told you how he came to throw in the towel, did we? So let’s do that now.

End of the Line

For the US Navy, their railgun dream officially hit the end of the line in July 2021. In a curt, bureaucratically worded announcement (with just a whiff of disappointment), the Navy stated it was pausing railgun R&D at the end of 2021 due to “fiscal constraints, combat system integration challenges, and the prospective technology maturation of other weapon concepts.” In plain speak: we’re out of money and patience, and by the way, missiles and lasers have gotten really good. Then, the final nail in the coffin came with the quiet euthanizing of the Hyper Velocity Projectile program in the 2022 budget. The American railgun, officially, was now dead.

We want to focus in on that “maturation of other weapon concepts” point in particular now though, because we’re well enough acquainted with their railgun’s issues by now, and we don’t want to retread old water.

Basically, while they were tinkering away with railguns, guided missiles kept getting better, smarter, and in some cases, even cheaper.

The Navy, as far as it was concerned, had simply realised that a 2-million-dollar hypersonic missile that could deliver a precise blow from 1,000 miles away now might be a better investment than a 500 million dollar and counting gun that on its best day might only manage to reach out to 100 or 200 miles or so.

Then there’s the matter of shipborne lasers – because as of recently, they’re not just the preserve of science fiction anymore. The technology has matured well beyond the lab bench and one-off prototypes, with operational systems now quietly entering service at sea.

Leading the charge is the U.S. Navy’s HELIOS system – short for High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance – which was installed aboard the USS Preble in 2019. Mounted where a traditional Close-In Weapons System would go, HELIOS is a 60-kilowatt solid-state fibre laser integrated directly into the Aegis combat system.

Unlike past bolt-on tests, this is a full combat-ready suite that can not only burn drones out of the sky, but also blind hostile sensors and provide real-time target tracking. It’s already demonstrated the ability to shoot down UAVs in real-world tests, and its only real limitation is the amount of electrical power the ship can feed it—because in theory, it can fire as long as the lights stay on.

And it’s not just the Americans. In January 2024, the UK announced successful test firings of its DragonFire system from a static site in Scotland, hitting aerial targets with remarkable precision. Developed through a £115 million joint effort by MBDA Missile Systems, Leonardo, and the UK Ministry of Defence, DragonFire is expected to be installed aboard Royal Navy warships as soon as 2027, with installation contracts already signed for an initial four vessels. British officials have been blunt in their goals: this isn’t about lab curiosity – it’s about burning drones and missiles out of the sky for pennies per shot.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, China has quietly joined the naval laser race too. In 2024, satellite and social media images revealed a People’s Liberation Army Navy Type 071 amphibious transport dock – likely Siming Shan or Yimeng Shan – outfitted with a dome-covered laser turret mounted just behind its 76 mm bow gun. The system appears designed to counter drones, small vessels, and possibly to serve as a dazzler sensor disruptor.

Beijing has even reportedly escalated laser use in active scenarios – coast guard vessels have been accused of shining military-grade lasers at Philippine ships in the South China Sea, temporarily blinding crew members during confrontations at Second Thomas Shoal.

In all these cases, the appeal is obvious. Lasers engage at the speed of light. They cost next to nothing to fire – mere dollars in electricity versus hundreds of thousands for interceptor missiles. They never run out of ammunition so long as the ship has power, and they bring incredible precision, from dazzling enemy optics to searing holes through UAV fuselages.

Unlike the railgun, which promised big but burned through barrels and budgets, naval lasers are here, now, and scaling up – quietly turning the once-impossible into another tool in the arsenal.

In short, the railgun lost the race – not just against the laws of physics, but against its own competition. Analyst Matthew Caris summed it up neatly when he suggested that hypersonic missiles and lasers alike had simply leapfrogged the railgun, offering more range, better reliability, and fewer headaches. Why keep pouring cash into a troublesome prototype when other, shinier toys were already delivering?

Key Takeaways

• The U.S. Navy invested $500 million in railgun technology, aiming for a revolutionary weapon.
• Railguns faced significant technical challenges, including high power requirements and barrel erosion.
• The Navy abandoned the railgun project in 2021 due to fiscal constraints and advancements in missiles and lasers.
• Other countries, like China, India, and Japan, continue to pursue railgun technology despite U.S. setbacks.
• Naval lasers and hypersonic missiles have emerged as more practical and effective alternatives to railguns.

Sources

• Original MegaProjects video: Railguns: the Useless Billion-Dollar Weapon
• Hero image source by Mr.choppers / openverse, by-sa.

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