China Plans to Test a Railgun

The development of a new electromagnetic weapon called a “railgun,” announced in the early 2000s, caused many smirks from representatives of nuclear powers’ military agencies. Laboratory tests in the USA, UK, and Germany proved to the world the infeasibility of such weapons due to high electricity consumption.

China Plans to Test a Railgun

Surprisingly, the mobile electromagnetic cannon was first seen by viewers on an American military ship in 2009. In the film “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” a shot from the railgun destroyed the Devastator. In turn, it tried to destroy the Khafre Pyramid to gain access to the Star Destroyer.

Most likely, after watching the Transformers movie, Chinese military officials had a clever idea—to install a railgun on the landing ship “Haiyangshan” with a displacement of 7,000 tons. According to experts, such a vessel of the Type 072-III project can carry the necessary equipment to generate a powerful electromagnetic pulse.

A railgun is a weapon that uses electromagnetic impulses to accelerate a projectile. Compared to traditional guns that push the projectile out using expanding gunpowder gases, the projectile in a railgun is part of an electrical circuit that accelerates between two contact rails.

It is currently unknown what power source the Chinese plan to use in their tests. There are assumptions that the ship is equipped with a nuclear reactor capable of sufficiently compensating for the electricity costs of the electromagnetic gun.