New subsegment: Old News, (slightly) Odd coincidences
On 30 June 2021 the US Navy formally abandoned its electromagnetic railgun project. It was a story I'd been following since 2017, accordingly I had views and I remember it well.
The U.S. Navy has pulled the plug, for now, on a futuristic weapon that fires projectiles at up to seven times the speed of sound using elec
The decision was not unforeseen. Here's an article from 2017, somewhat breathlessly describing the US railgun prototype as the "world's most powerful gun" and warning that it could be condemned to "an inescapable limbo":
The Office of Naval Research’s much-hyped electromagnetic railgun prototype is finally capable of flexing its futuristic muscles.
Broadly speaking, the debate about the project—as it filtered through to social media—was whether the Defence Department would do well to invest in defensive weapons which could be deployed by ships at closer quarters than the missile minimum engagement range—if those weapons were also going to be very expensive and complex to build, arm and deploy. As I said, I had semi-illiterate views but what piqued my interest originally was not the news that the US railgun project was losing steam but the news that the Chinese navy had possibly made advances in the electromagnetic technology relevant to both railguns and catapults.
I digress. What struck me in retrospect as a somewhat startling coincidence—when my professional interest in finance and my personal interest in defense procurement collided over a 4-letter ticker (RAIL)—is that the US navy's decision finally to pull the plug on further development of a railgun IRL coincided exactly with the launch of Railgun Crypto.
Highly anticipated addition to the DeFi space Railgun set to release their token “RAIL” on June 30th. Railgun is a groundbreaking smart cont
And perhaps I wouldn't have remembered that today... except that the virtual Railgun is apparently becoming the ancillary weapon that its physical exemplar never managed to do.
The FBI said that Lazarus Group, aka APT38, a hacking group linked to North Korea, was responsible for the attack on the Horizon bridge last