Last I read, the railguns work fine, the barrels are just more or less destroyed after a single shot. Of course, I'm not entirely sure what they're thinking to fight with them, given that they'd still be grossly inferior to missiles in just about every way, and there aren't really any other navies with the scale that would make railguns make a damn lick of sense...
I'd guess that one of the advantages is over missiles is that it's much harder to shoot down a railgun projectile with point-defense weapons, e.g. other missiles or CIWS.
Yes, that's the only one I can think of, since the cost of the slug versus a missile isn't all that good given the one-or-two-shot nature of current railguns.
I think it would be awesome if railguns replaced ordinary hydrogen-burning launch techniques. Get large enough capacitators, a fucktonne of power, and a satellite with no living things on it, and you can launch more efficiently: current launches have a huge amount of fuel. Have you seen the Space Shuttle's launching rocket? Yeah, that. Imagine if you only had the weight of the Shuttle to deal with.
It's a magnetic cannon. It would fry any electronics onboard (unless you're just hurling, say, raw materials into an orbital net of some kind, which could theoretically work...), not to mention the heat stress on the projectile, given that you're running a massive electrical current through it...
You fail physics forever. To propel a slug with a given force means taking an equivalent amount in the opposite direction.
I could have sworn I read that, because the rail gun uses magnetic forces to propel the slug, there is no recoil.
EDIT: Nevermind, Wikipedia indcates that there is indeed massive recoil to a railgun. Although, it also says that problems with the railgun surviving being shot stem from the seat of said recoil not being known.
The railguns, IIRC, simply have a distributed recoil along the barrel, perpendicular to the rails because of some f'd up magnetics. Though there is some in parallel to the rails
There would be a lot of perpendicular force on the rails, wouldn't there... Thinking about the way magnetic fields... move, for lack of a better word, that makes sense. I can see that causing problems, but I believe the main problem is the heat from/chemical effects of running a powerful electrical current through the rails/projectile/air around projectile causing excessive wear and tear.