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[Astramancer]

Modern personal firearms, sure.  The future of modern battleship artillery is railguns - they can mount the powerplant and capacitor bank necessary to fire it with higher muzzle velocities than anything gunpowder can do.  Railguns can shoot faster (velocity-wise) than anything explosives can do because there's a strict upper limit on how fast the gasses can expand. I've read gunpowder can do around 4,000 feet per second, whereas railguns can (theoretically) do closer to 52,500 feet per second as their upper limit.  Another advantage is that the projectile itself will be smaller and safer to handle than traditional artillery shells.

Current navy guns have a range of around 12 or 13 miles, a navy-scale railgun should be able to hit targets over a hundred miles away (I've seen figures of 250 miles... and six minutes for the round to travel that far).

[Ampersand]

The concept behind battleship railguns is primarily to make having a nuclear power plant on board worth while. Of course, I seriously wonder about the usefulness of firing a projectile that will shatter every glass object between it and the target, since it's going MACH 45

[mendonca]

That's a jolly good point, I never thought of that.

Now I want to see a boat-mounted railgun ...

[Virex]

If the problem of coil guns is that the object quickly saturates, wouldn't that mean that using a bigger bullet would increase the efficiency and as a result the punching power?

Modern personal firearms, sure.  The future of modern battleship artillery is railguns - they can mount the powerplant and capacitor bank necessary to fire it with higher muzzle velocities than anything gunpowder can do.  Railguns can shoot faster (velocity-wise) than anything explosives can do because there's a strict upper limit on how fast the gasses can expand. I've read gunpowder can do around 4,000 feet per second, whereas railguns can (theoretically) do closer to 52,500 feet per second as their upper limit.  Another advantage is that the projectile itself will be smaller and safer to handle than traditional artillery shells.

Current navy guns have a range of around 12 or 13 miles, a navy-scale railgun should be able to hit targets over a hundred miles away (I've seen figures of 250 miles... and six minutes for the round to travel that far).

It still has to compete with CLGG's or maybe someone will think of a hybrid between the two.

[Astramancer]

I wonder what the expansion rates of those explosions are.

In any case, one of the things that article mentioned was the difficulty of making sure the projectile survived the launch.  I wonder if rail guns are being pursued because the acceleration is more consistent across the length of the rails so you don't have nearly as much force acting on the projectile at any given moment, but you can still get insane muzzle velocities.

[Virex]

Well, a rail gun only needs something conductive, greatly simplifying the design of the shell and also permitting the use of larger charges, which should reduce the chance of the shell disintegrating at the wrong moment. Besides that, the military likes to keep many avenues open when doing early research and rail guns do have the added bonus that they scale easily with reactor power.

[Ampersand]

True. And when it comes to personal weaponry the speed of the projectile is not as important unless range and accuracy are the issues at hand. Rail guns may therefore have a place in very specialized situations demanding long range sniping, but certainly not for close combat situations.

For close combat situations, a weapon that fires a small high explosive charge with sufficient shrapnel, that can explode at a pre-determined distance away from the weapon which fired it would be ideal. Fortunately, that already exists, if not currently used.

[kuro_suna]

If the problem of coil guns is that the object quickly saturates, wouldn't that mean that using a bigger bullet would increase the efficiency and as a result the punching power?

But a more massive projectile would take more magnetic energy to accelerate, so you would still have the problem of poor efficiency at higher muzzle velocity.

[Trekkin]

Of course, as we all know, the future of projectile weaponry lies in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_beam_weapon anyway...

Railyguns are awesome.

[Virex]

Yes, because mounting a particle accelerator on a ship totally leaves plenty of room for the engines needed to power it...

[Astramancer]

Also, physical projectiles still have the advantage of indirect fire.  Rayguns are all and good, but you can't shoot someone over the horizon with a beam weapon.  Assuming that the aperture of the partial beam cannon is 100 ft off the surface of the water, then you can shoot something that's, what, 13 miles away (assuming it's sitting on the surface of the earth)?

It would probably be awesome for shooting down planes and missiles (and maybe other boats, but the whole "really well grounded" thing may cause problems), but it would be a terrible replacement for artillery.