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"I hope we both are still around FreeRepublic when you have to eat those words."

Yeah, me too. Might see Flash Gordon's Death Ray first, though as we live well into the 23rd Century. It seems that you haven't heard of projects that go nowhere, engineering nightmares that cost huge amounts of the public's money and dead end, in all your extensive experience. I've seen a bunch, worse I've seen some go to production and to the field and end up as worthless.

Here's what they have to solve to make the railgun worthwhile:

1. As a ground, fieldable, deployable system - enormously powerful power sources. I wasn't kidding about nuclear power.

2. Rails that can last longer than a few shots. The plasma formed by the launches eats rails.

3. Projectiles that can withstand the heating loads when fired at Mach who-knows-what through the atmosphere at sea level. You know, the stuff that makes meteors into itty-bitty meteorites.

4. A useful load for projectiles launched from railguns. You know, fuzing and detonating and explosive payloads that will not go off during launch but when they get there. Not to mention some kind of guidance system to keep the projectile on course after all of the initial velocity bleeds off. Right now the acceleration, heat and electromagnetic loads are too monstrous for anything that exists to survive. Still, who am I to argue with Popular Mechanix?

5. Now for the fun one: in a battlefield where stealth, cover and concealment mean life, we have to make the railgun launch system NOT reveal itself to the entire world everytime it fires. As it is, it will make a giant electronic RF "yelp" that will be detected immediately and your firing position known instantly. Great stuff for counterfire systems, lousy for survival.

Other than that, a fantastic idea, almost as wonderful as the German's Paris Gun circa 1918. Shot 93 miles but required millions of Marks and took hundreds of men to emplace it, man it, hide it, and then displace it again. In the end, it was tactically and strategically useless because it had a CEP barely the size of Paris and resulted in killing 257 civilians. Hardly worth the effort but that's one of the reasons the Germans lost.