Why railgun power storage matters more than barrel wear

Were railguns cancelled mainly because of rail heating and wear?

Wear could potentially be addressed, but generating and storing enough electrical power for the firing pulse was the more difficult problem.

The answer accepts that rail heating and wear are serious, but treats them as engineering problems with imaginable metallurgical remedies. The tougher obstacle is the rapid power draw: a gas-turbine ship would need substantial extra generating capacity and still require capacitive storage to discharge energy at the needed rate. Engineers could describe a route toward solving the wear problem even when the necessary materials were not yet ready. Nuclear power is raised as an immediate way to ease generation, while compact and reliable pulse-energy storage remains the central uncertainty.