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China’s rail gun milestone: guided projectile prototype passes real firing test

Breakthrough as a delicate silicon shell fitted with a guidance chip is shot from an electromagnetic rail gun, survives and records the ride

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A prototype of a chip-protecting component for China’s guided rail gun shell used in a live firing test. Photo: North University of China
Stephen Chenin Beijing

Inside a metal shell being hurled from a standstill to a speed many times faster than sound, the pressure could be as high as an elephant standing on every square inch of a human body. To make matters worse, an invisible, violent magnetic storm is raging through its path.

This is the world inside an electromagnetic rail gun. For decades, this has been the nightmare that kept weapons engineers awake.
Their dream was to place a guidance chip inside a rail gun shell so it could steer itself to a faraway target. But how could the delicate silicon brain survive a force 20,000 times that of gravity combined with a magnetic pulse 140,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field inside a large, powerful rail gun?
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A breakthrough, published in the Journal of North University of China (NUC) in May, has just told the world that the nightmare is now over.

In a real-life firing test, a Chinese smart projectile prototype not only survived this journey but also recorded the entire ride.

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“The electromagnetic rail gun experiment verified that it can survive an extreme environment of an 8 ms pulse width, 20,000g-force overload, and a 7 T magnetic flux density,” wrote the team led by associate professor Ge Shuangchao with NUC.

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