Railguns (as seen in The Last Starfighter)
Railguns have been a video-game mainstay for first-person shooters since Quake in 1996, but those handheld death cannons are unrealistic; they shoot large masses of rock that can reach a zillion-mile target. You’ll have to look to The Last Starfighter’s meteor gun or Battlestar Galactica’s super-sized railgun for a peek at what the military is in the process of perfecting. Forgoing chemical propulsion for electromagnetic energy, the Navy’s electromagnetic railguns can fire projectiles more than 200 miles at a velocity seven times the speed of sound. Instead of destroying targets with explosions, the railgun obliterates them with kinetic force. The U.S. Navy made its first major breakthrough in 2008 when they successfully test fired the weapon in the video below; the plan is to have a working prototype by 2018.
