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The sea does not take sides. You could have the best railguns and most stable ship in the world and all it'll take to sink you is bad weather on the wrong day.

If you get a bad engineer you get this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse 114 dead, 216 injured and I know exactly what went wrong. An idiot engineer approved some shop drawings which did not meet the specfications.

Maybe ...

$1,000 wouldn't be enough buy to a single hour of a good engineer's time.

A cascading chain of failures is how shit goes wrong. With the right "oopsie" no set of failsafes can prevent a disaster.

All it takes is a single mistake or breakdown for a powerplant to go from "everything's fine" to "did anyone survive that ka-boom?". That the latter doesn't happen on a regular basis is a testament to the skill of engineers worldwide.

The training version of the P-80 - the T-33 - remained in active military service until 2017. We did not screw up our second jet fighter. We got it right.

I can see that you've never actually been inside of a place where this is displayed at the entrance: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Radioactive.svg I have. It ain't fun. You seem to have the same kind of disregard for nuclear safety that the Soviets had when Chernobyl...

The Me262 is considered to be one of Germany's Wunderwaffe and the "you must fight this" nemesis of Hollywood "Ace Pilot" movies. In reality the Me262 was an unreliable fuel-hogging jet aircraft with bad 30mm cannons and fussy engines prone to catching fire at a moment's notice which needed to...

Most German Wunderwaffe were actually expensive wastes of resources which backfired on a bad day and barely worked right on a good day. They were made even less effective because the Allies were basically reading and reacting to German radiograms compliments of the Poles breaking Enigma and...

If you're thinking of the V-3: that was not a rail gun. Those were pump guns with a 430ft barrel and absolutely useless because they could not be retargeted. The WWI turret farm that was HMS Agincourt could send fourteen 850lb shells - each of which was more than twice as heavy as the V-3's...

Um, nuclear power is actually a horrible way to power a ship because the reactors need several feet of concrete shielding and about an inch of lead on top of that. If that breaks you're abandoning the ship.

The power needed to launch the projectiles has to come from somewhere. With a railgun that somewhere is the powerplant instead of the magazine. Reality is a very harsh mistress who will slap you hard when you make a mistake when you're pushing the limits of "this is possible".

You say that like it's easy, but it's not. Guns, and the cartridges they use, are not interchangeable. 9mm Parabellum and 9mm Glisinti are almost the exact same size. Using Parabellum with a firearm designed for Glisinti might cost you a limb.

Those old 5" guns aren't compatable with modern hypersonic shells. The 5"/38 fired shells which weigh about 54lbs and have a maximum range of about 9 miles.

I wouldn't be surprised if the railgun was just an expensive distraction meant to keep prying eyes focused away from whatever the USN was actually working on.