Chinese Navy ship seen carrying a railgun capable of firing hypersonic projectiles

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-02/chinese-warship-with-electromagnetic-railguns-spotted-at-sea/10680108

The next generation of naval warfare appears to have come early, as a Chinese naval warship has been pictured out at sea carrying what appears to be an electromagnetic railgun.

Key points:

Railguns use enormous electric currents to shoot projectiles from tracks at great speed

China's first railgun was revealed in 2011, and has been since tested for more range

The US has been slow to develop the technology since initial research in 2005

A photo taken and posted by Weibo user (and prominent defence blogger) Haohan-Red Shark, purports to show the Type 072II Yuting-class tank landing ship Haiyangshan with a railgun mounted on its bow.

Compared to conventional artillery that uses gunpowder to fire projectiles — a practice that has been in wide use since the 1500s — a railgun uses a high-powered electric circuit to shoot a projectile along magnetic rails, firing at hypersonic speeds of Mach 5 or higher (five times the speed of sound).

While the US has been pursuing its railgun capability since 2005, China has taken the front foot, with anonymous sources confirming the existence of the weapon in 2011 to CNBC.

Since then, Chinese media has been incrementally filing news reports on the development on the technology, with the Global Times reporting in March that Zhang Xiao, an associate research fellow at the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) University of Engineering announced her research team was responsible for the "largest repeating power supply system in the world".

The sighting appears to pre-date US intelligence estimates that Chinese railguns would arrive by 2025.