Go look up REAL world railguns before you argue when you dont know anything about them.
One of the primary advantages of railguns is the round suffers NO FRICTION except agasint air in atmosphere.
They have other problems but friction isnt it..at least when they work properly.
True and false. The round itself suffers no friction when fired, but the actual firing presents a large problem as you have titanic forces acting on both the sabot and rail. This is why the test-shots so far have a huge muzzleflash even though there is no powder. Some of the rail vaporizes and shoots out of the barrel along with the round.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ioLh7b ... re=related
This makes repeat firings impossible right now, and will continue to be a problem for quite some time. I assume it will be handled at some point, but who knows how drastic the measures will need to be to ensure a reusable barrel surface.
Incidently some plans for railguns suggest oscilating the magnetic fields rapidly to superheat the projectile untill it turns into plasma and then accelerating the plasma, creating a ball of charged ions.. incidently damn close to outsider blasters except the accelerated plasma is self containing like ball lightning.. so its a ball rather then a beam.
Kind of reminds me of the Bolo Hellbores, which take frozen hydrogen and accelerate it close to c. Needless to say they can shoot ships which are in orbit.
Metal storm arrays fire millions of rounds a second.. infact technicly they could fire billions if you want to make a big enough array but as far as im aware no one has.
They fire AT a rate of 1 million rounds per minute, but they don't actually fire that many because the barrels would melt and the gun would become useless. As with railguns, the barrel's ability to withstand the rounds would be the main hurdle to metalstorm tech if it is to be used to it's theoretical potential.
send up one ton blocks of manure.
Drop a 1 gigaton nuke directly behind it and detonate.
Have 100 of them... and you have yourself a expanding wall of deadly POOP.
Unfortunately nukes aren't that useful in space because there's no overpressure shockwave to blow things around. Your plan would accelerate the shit, but it is doubtful that the acceleration would be enough to threaten any Loroi/Umiak ship in the slightest. Most likely the entire fleet formation would become slightly browner as they fly through a fine mist of flying turds.
Why fight fair in real time, when your FTL tech can be turned into weaponry?
I'm a big sucker for FTL weaponry, but Outsiderverse FTL tech would make a very poor anti-ship weapon. Mostly because it wouldn't work.
From the Insider:
There are no "gates", just a point or vector you want to be on toward the next star, so that the destination star's gravity well will suck you back out of hyperspace.
Outsiderverse FTL depends on the gravity well of a star to exit hyperspace, which means that if you used it against a ship you would simply overshoot into interstellar space because the ship has insufficient gravity to draw you out. Perhaps you could create a very sensitive FTL module to function with small gravitational fields, but then you couldn't use it inside a planetary system as the sun's gravity would always be greater than that of any warship. You would enter and exit hyperspace in the same location.