…“Capabilities in development would enable larger caliber guns to launch HVPs at air and missile threats over medium ranges (10–30 nautical miles),” read a May report on air and missiles from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA).
The use of the powder guns as the first HVP platform changes the order of how the Pentagon originally thought of how the HVP and railgun programs would evolve.
“The railgun was initially a surface-to-surface weapon and we in the Navy realized that it was more useful for air defense. Then the realization came that you can use that same projectile in a powered gun and achieve a lot of the same effects that you were trying to achieve with the railgun,” Bryan Clark co-author of the CSBA report told USNI News last week. “It gives you the speed – though not as fast – it gives you enough speed to use it in an air defense type of application.”..