Reply #6: I worked on the rail gun

[More_liberal_than_mo]

development during the mid 80's. It was a research project at a major engineering university funded by the Raygun "Star Wars" program. We were trying to build rail guns for use in low earth orbit to knock out ICBMs while they were venerable during their sub orbital phase of their trajectory. They work on the principal of expanding gases from the arc plasma generated by high voltage arcing between 2 conductive metal rails. They generate orders of magnitude more force pushing the projectile than gunpowder does. In our experiments the idea was to simply use a lead object as the projectile (not an explosive round) to knock down the missile while in flight fired from an orbiting satellite platform. I suspect something of this nature my be the payload of the recently launched super secret unmanned mini-space shuttle that was sent into low earth orbit last month, just guessing.

Looks like they have now found a more "practical" use for them on ground or naval based systems.