Feb 232019
An illustration from 1984 showing the main features of an orbital railgun for the Strategic Defense Initiative program. While the design looks reasonable enough, almost certainly this is either missing a whole lot of important details or has changed them into unrecognizability. Scale is impossible to determine, but a practical space-based railgun capable of generating the projectile velocities needed (typically 10 km/sec) would have been an impressive structure indeed.
What do you think is missing?
Dimensions, for starters. A LOX tank. A big enough LH2 tank (what’s shown seems small for the mission). The “barrel” is just a simple small tube; *exactly* what it’d really be in not shown. The turboencabulator is not depicted.