yes, but in the current state, railguns will produce a lot of heat and heat is very obvious in space unless you are near a planet or happens to be in front of a star.Seto Kaiba wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 1:03 pm True, though there are ways to suppress muzzle flashes... and railguns in a vacuum are going to be naturally less inclined to produce once since the system has no flammable/explosive propellant driving the shell.
Of course, "great distances" is relative and ability to change direction is going to be dependent on things like the ship's inertial mass, speed, and other considerations like orbital mechanics.
thus I'm talking about hitting more manoeuvrable things like MS, space fighters.
Leaving aside coilguns, which are often incorrectly conflated with railguns despite working on different principles, there are approaches to railguns in the real world that do not suffer from that particular friction problem. Plasma armature railguns do not have the projectile in physical contact with its rails, using instead a vaporizing metallic foil to establish an electrical arc across the projectile and keep it suspended in the middle of the barrel. The helical railgun also offers some promise in that area, though it is not yet practical with real world technology, being a synthesis of railgun and coilgun technology.
(The problem of heating the projectile itself can be mitigated with a discarding sabot.)
but I still doubt railguns can be accurately hitting things more than a thousand km away in space.
you still have higher recoil and depends more on the rail's integrity to be accurate, but at the same time you are putting a lot of heat and stress on that very rail by rubbing the projectile or at least the sabot against it every time you fire.
probably at least need to be firing things like missiles for self correction.
back in the 70's the anime creators were probably still thinking about liquid nitrogen cooled infrared or red lasers.
All told, that suggests that the laser technology in the Universal Century's probably little more advanced than what we had when the series was first made. (This also has some rather unpleasant safety implications for shipboard laser systems, since the most efficient gain mediums available in a conventional weapons-grade laser system are unpleasantly toxic substances like fluoridated deuterium.)
Mind you, it's not that they didn't need that range anymore... it's that Minovsky particles made it impossible to shoot accurately at distances of more than a few tens of kilometers and conveniently degraded laser and guided missile systems to the point of uselessness. Minovsky particles conveniently made it so that Minovsky particles were the only viable weapon for "long" ranged space combat.
