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Originally Posted by Zachstar
To knock a bullet or shell out of the air is hard enough. These are going to be going MUCH faster.
And if you manage to knock that one down? Great! Now what about the 30-80 incoming behind it?
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Speed works against it too. At high speeds a smaller object traveling at lower velocities causes more damage. Put up clouds of smaller objects in a narrow corrador to insure a hit in this case a hit would just be a slight transfer of momentum between both objects nudging one off course. This is one of the tactics NASA is talking about to knock an Astroid off a collision course with Earth.
Side note: Could you imagin what this scattershot would do to an aircraft or a cruise missile? Kind of like a stick of butter hitting a brink wall. Or what a couple thousand 1in projectiles traveling at mach 7 would do to an platoon of APCs filled with troops? To quote Sev Trek cartoon: "He's dead Jim, someone get me a sponge!"
BTW A land based weapon genneraly has a much larger supply of ammo avilable while a ship would need to rearm from an AOR.
Of course if you had a rail gun for defense why not just turn it on whoever is attacking you with one or is about to. Since a land based one can be larger than one mounted on a ship the defender gets a range advantage in additon to an advantage in ammo.
Against 3rd world countries rail guns will work great but against someone with equivlent technolgy its a diffrent story. New tech can cut both ways.