One of the neat things about keeping tabs on American military technology is that it allows for a little more insight into a government's defense priorities and how far their senior military leadership's head is up the ass of their Commander-in-Chief:
The U.S. Navy has conducted at least one new round of live-fire tests of its prototype electromagnetic railgun at the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico. The service had shelved its railgun effort in the early 2020s, at least publicly, after work that had shown promise ran into technical hurdles. A railgun is now set to be a key feature on the future Trump class "battleships."
Rekindling the United States Navy's railgun research at this point in time is, in a word, fucking stupid. It paints a portrait of a Commander-in-Chief so far out of touch with his nation's procurement and R&D priorities that he couldn't play grab-ass with them if he put a glove on the end of a bargepole.
The Navy has tried to sort out railgun tech since 2005. For those unfamiliar with it, a railgun, in simple terms, uses a magnet field instead of chemical propellant to fire a projectile with incredible speed at its target. Magnets are chained down the length of the railgun's barrel and fired in sequence to accelerate a salvo to the dangerous speeds—around six times the speed of sound—needed to say, punch a hole in an aircraft carrier and, the boat behind it. In 2021, the Navy kinda gave up on the idea. They didn't bother asking for more funding to keep the project going. The research and hardware the Navy had pulled together were mothballed for future use—you know, at a time when the science caught up with their desires for the tech. Some of the insights gleaned from the project were spun off into another initiative to create Hyper-Velocity Projectiles: far more versatile munitions that can be fired from a variety of platforms, including land-based systems and existing naval deck guns, at speeds of up to Mach 3. So, something came of all the time and resources spent on developing America's shelved railgun tech.
But when it comes to Trump, too much is typically just the right amount.
It's enough that a battleship—a behemoth vessel classification made obsolete by the advent of aircraft carriers and sea-launched missile technology—being planned and named after President Trump. Typically, new classes of vessels are named for presidents and military personnel after their tenure. But I guess when you've turned your nation around the corner into autocracy, you can name ships whatever you want, when you want. But looking to arm it with an exotic naval weapon system that a nation that loses its shit if you look at its ships sideways? It makes me feel like they're letting him have it as a consolation prize for not being able to gold-plate the first of the new Trump boats sent into the water. According to the National Security Journal, the Navy wasn't able to solve the problem of barrel material degradation after firing its prototypes just a few times. The forces created by the magnetic field needed to launch a projectile were so great that they literally ripped the rail gun apart. This, along with the weapon's massive energy needs, made it unreasonable to send it to sea.
Given all of the other unreasonable shit that the government has done to make Dear Orange Leader happy, I can't say that I'm surprised to see that they're letting their R&D folks take another stab at it. Right now, China is said to have 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. They're using it to build the largest navy the world has ever seen. But yeah, let's dick around with tech that we already know to be a problem instead of using battle-tested tech to put more ships in the drink.
