#harmony bridge

On 30 June 2021 the US Navy formally abandoned its electromagnetic railgun project. It was a story I'd been following since 2017, accordingly I had views and I remember it well.

The decision was not unforeseen. Here's an article from 2017, somewhat breathlessly describing the US railgun prototype as the "world's most powerful gun" and warning that it could be condemned to "an inescapable limbo":

Broadly speaking, the debate about the project—as it filtered through to social media—was whether the Defence Department would do well to invest in defensive weapons which could be deployed by ships at closer quarters than the missile minimum engagement range—if those weapons were also going to be very expensive and complex to build, arm and deploy. As I said, I had semi-illiterate views but what piqued my interest originally was not the news that the US railgun project was losing steam but the news that the Chinese navy had possibly made advances in the electromagnetic technology relevant to both railguns and catapults.

I digress. What struck me in retrospect as a somewhat startling coincidence—when my professional interest in finance and my personal interest in defense procurement collided over a 4-letter ticker (RAIL)—is that the US navy's decision finally to pull the plug on further development of a railgun IRL coincided exactly with the launch of Railgun Crypto.

And perhaps I wouldn't have remembered that today... except that the virtual Railgun is apparently becoming the ancillary weapon that its physical exemplar never managed to do.