The announcement as reported by the Fars news agency and PressTV did not specifically say the weapon was going into mass production but implied it was ready for use.
A railgun is a weapon that fires shells with electromagnetism. It has no moving parts. There is no explosive charge to propel the shell. Instead, a charge of electricity generates magnetisim to propel the shell down a rail track and on its way.
The railgun was invented by a Frenchman in 1918. It has never been perfected, however, and has not been used in warfare to this day.
The US Navy is trying to perfect the technology and adapt the railgun for use on ships. Last December, the Navy test fired a railgun using 33 megajoules of electricity, the greatest known volume of energy ever used to operate a railgun. The Islamic Republic did not say how many megajoules it used in its test firing Sunday.
However, it said the shell was fired out of the railgun at 330 meters per second, a speed that sounds very impressive.
But, by comparison, the speed of a bullet emerging from an M-16 rifle, the standard infantry weapon in the US military is 930 meters per second, almost triple the claimed speed of Iran’s railgun.
Furthermore, the velocity of the shell fired in December by the US Navy railgun was 1,676 meters per second or more than five times the speed claimed for the Iranian railgun.
The US Navy goal is to use 64 megajoules to fire a shell at 3,500 meters per second over 200 miles in six minutes.
The announcement from the Islamic Republic said one utility of the gun was that it was soundless because electricity is silent. However, the Iranian gun was actually silent because the shell did not reach the speed of the sound. The US Navy railgun made a tremendous sound last December because the shell broke the sound barrier immediately after firing.
