How about a 10 megajoule railgun?

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Whatever the future holds in small arms development, one thing is for sure.
You will not be allowed to own "modern" weaponry.
 
Need to refer to it as an electromagnetic mass-driver. Railgun just sounds too hostile.

When those are man portable I am buying one. Will I need a lathe to machine my own ferrous handloads?
 
Let me be the first...

I'm calling for microstamping of rail gun projectiles. After all you guys buy them, we need this measure to solve the associated crime wave that is sure to follow.
 
I just wonder if someone can get the blueprint for the one from the state fair, and just build it... submit a letter from your attorney saying it does not meet any of the "objective standards" stated in the law, as it has been around for decades, it must be permissible as there have been no ATF regulations mentioning it in any form, and if he is mistaken, please respond with the paragraph illustrating his misunderstanding of the law.

:D:D:D

Should get them a bit riled up, huh? :evil:
 
why use a $2m, easy to shoot down tomahawk, when you can use a $100 chunk of steel?
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I thought Tomahawks were well under $1M now, and out of the 288 actually launched during Desert Storm (back when they were more expensive) only 6 failed, all of those failures happening within the first 30 seconds due to failure to transition to cruise. So really, they aren't that easy to shoot down.
 
The arching between the electrode and the armature will obliterate the stamps.

Railguns of this power level (generally) vaporize large portions of the rail and the projectile during launch... the rails don't last very long (few dozen shots, I believe).

Besides, given typical railgun efficiencies, these people have a capacitor-bank that:
1) costs around 10 million dollars
2) might not fit in two boxcars
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And I don't expect to see railguns make an entry into the consumer small-arms field:

1) Unless the railguns use something more advanced than a chemical power source (think nuclear), powder-arms will have more shots for the weight of the ammo
2) So the advantage of a railgun is the ability to put large amounts of energy into a projectile or generate very high muzzle velocities.
Very energetic launches would harm the shooter, and high muzzle velocities are useful primarily to generate flat trajectories - a trait that is useless if your projectile isn't accurate (which it probably won't be by varmint-rifle standards).
 
Didn't the Germans attempt to field a railgun as an anti-aircraft weapon during WW2? It fired a small round, like a 40-50mm-ish size, but at a very high velocity. It was supposed to be individually more effective than a battalion of 88s, due to higher accuracy. In the end, they realized that each gun of the battalion would require it's own personal dedicated power plant, something on the order of the same size as the one for a largish city. Obviously, that would introduce some logistical complications......
 
Whatever the future holds in small arms development, one thing is for sure.
You will not be allowed to own "modern" weaponry.
Click to expand...

+1000!


As it stands today, we have been disarmed. It's only a matter of time before our firearms have been rendered ineffective by new technology. This is why we must insist on "advancement" of 2nd amendment rights not protection of our current status.
 
The railguns Germans had in WWII were railway-mounted artillery. Railguns in the article are electromagnetic projectile launchers utilizing a Lorentz force for acceleration. They have not become feasible until the advent of high energy density, high current, high voltage, low inductance energy storage capacitors. If you happen to know anyone with an IEEE membership, there are plenty of papers available under IEEE Transactions on Magnetics. Lots of target impact results too!

These full-scale devices operate on mega-ampere ranges (millions of amps). Depending on armature topology, arcing can be minimized (ie the French-developed brush armature PEGASUS) but it still takes incredible power. 9MJ isn't that much spread over time. An average home consuming 1kW-h is consuming 3.6MJ of energy an hour. This equates to 2.5 hours of average energy consumption by a home. 9MJ can keep a 100W lightbulb going for 25 hours. However if you release that energy over an incredibly short time period...

Assuming a 1ms pulse on a pulse shaped network, the peak power (power and energy are different) is on the order of 90 gigawatts. Smaller scale railguns have recorded velocities over 7km/s (23,000fps) due to much smaller payloads.

Isn't science fun? :D
 
I saw that today too.VERY cool! GO NAVY!!!


AT3
USN 2001-2006
USS Enterprise (CVN-65)
USS Nimitz (CVN-68)
USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71)
 
was reading a bit on hypervelocity projectiles a while back... any time such solid metals get up above 5500mph or so, they start to become almost molten... upon impact with dirt and other objects, the raw energy would vaporize most materials in a small area and turn them into balls of superheated gas that expanded at supersonic speeds... imagine a blast wave of superheated dirt moving toward you at 3000mph?
 
Modern railguns are moving away from capacitor banks and to compulsators. Recharge time is very fast, but you lose rotational velocity in the compulsator quickly. They also tend to have short life spans.

IIRC, the latest gun, just delivered to the Navy is rated at up to 32 MegaJoule. Railguns have achieved velocities of up to 10 Kilometers/second. That 32,800 fps for you metric atheists.
 
Last I checked, UT:CEM was big into compulsator development.

If you want to look into more readily available information on hypervelocity impacts, look up stuff on "light gas guns". They're way more commonplace and do about 6-7km/s as well, or about 20,000fps+. Not as much wow factor though and impacts are done under hard vacuum.
 
Yeah i seem to recall a model that fired a 7 lb projectile at 17000 fps. They said the energy would be the equivalent of a Ford Taurus smashing into something at 450 mph.
 
If you want to look into more readily available information on hypervelocity impacts, look up stuff on "light gas guns". They're way more commonplace and do about 6-7km/s as well, or about 20,000fps+. Not as much wow factor though and impacts are done under hard vacuum.
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A light gas gun is also a little more accessible to the tinkerer. IIRC, most of them are built on modified 40mm cannons.

If one was so inclined, a light gas gun firing a *very* long and thin drag stabilized projectile would be a fearsome varmint gun.

Err... that is, once you figured out how to keep it from venting hydrogen into the atmosphere. That could be a bit of a liability.
 
Chaboki calculates that firing the 64-megajoule weapon six times per minute would require 16 MW of power, which would be supplied by either onboard capacitors or pulsed alternators. The more daunting challenge is the force of the rail gun itself: A few shots can dislodge the conducting rails—or even damage the barrel of the gun.

While the 32-MJ LRG should start firing soon, it could take another 13 years for a 64-megajoule system to be built and deployed on a ship. The Marines, in particular, are interested in the potential for rail guns to deliver supporting fire from up to 220 miles away—around 10 times further than standard ship-mounted cannons—with rounds landing more quickly and with less advance warning than a volley of Tomahawk cruise missiles.
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