Rail Gun, Part II

Railgun Update from General Atomics
Did he really say Mach 5? That's like 3,000 miles per hour. So this thing must be producing a heck of a sonic boom. I wonder how far away you can hear it, and I wonder if that distance depends on the size of the projectile.

Once again the camera technology used to capture the sabot in flight is probably more involved than the gun itself. According to Google's Calculator, Mach 5 equals 3,800 mph. I counted ten seconds of the thing in flight before it hit the plate. That works out to around 5,000 frames per second. I imagine it's all digital now, but that's still impressive.

 To record 10 seconds of real time flight you would record enough frames to make a full length feature movie. 3,800 mph is like one mile a second, and projectile only traveled seven miles, so the flight didn't even last ten seconds, so to make a feature length film we would have to pad it with some filler. I wonder how much of a crater it made when it finally hit the ground. 

Notice how the spokesman pronounces sabot "sabo", which is probably correct, because the word is probably French and the French are always forgetting to pronounce the ends of words. I probably mispronounce it because, well, I'm like that.

Part I 

From Tactical World.

Update February 2017 replaced video with one that works.