
thumb|285px|Test firing at the United States Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division in January 2008. The fireball is a result of pieces of the projectile shearing off during launch and igniting mid-air.
thumb|285px|Test firing at the United States Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division in January 2008. The fireball is a result of pieces of the projectile shearing off during launch and igniting mid-air.
A railgun or rail gun, sometimes referred to as a rail cannon, is a linear motor device, typically designed as a ranged weapon, that uses electromagnetic force to launch high-velocity projectiles. The projectile normally does not contain explosives, instead relying on the projectile's high kinetic energy to inflict damage. The railgun uses a pair of parallel rail-shaped conductors (simply called rails), along which a sliding projectile called an armature is accelerated by the electromagnetic effects of a current that flows down one rail, into the armature and then back along the other rail. It is based on principles similar to those of the homopolar motor.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).