Russian Teenager Designs Noiseless Electric Rifle

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I believe that what you are referring to is a hugely exaggerated story of what is known as a COIL GUN or GAUSS RIFLE which uses coils of wire called Inductors which produce a magnetic field to accelerate a solid magnetic projectile. The concept has been proven and does work, it is silent, and electromagnetic.

However the current issue with these weapons is portability and practicality. In order for one of these "rifles" to fire with energies comparable to current firearms it takes a lot of power, and by a lot I mean you are looking at a tank sized vehicle to haul around the batteries and a device 6-8 feet long with as many coils. It is highly impractical.
 
while extremely cool in concept, with the size of the rifle the young man has there, it would take a power supply about the size of a nuclear power station to make it do what he says it does. the concept is pretty old and out own military has a few rail guns that they have tested and can achieve the same results but they're still 20 feet long or more and take huge batteries. if DARPA and some of the US's greatest minds can't do it in a shrunken down package such as this, i doubt a Russian 8th grader can. i think this story is 2 parts truth and congratulations to a very smart young man, and 8 parts propaganda to make Russia look advanced and to build fear in their enemies.

Bobby
 
the technology to do these small size weapons is available. have seen at least 40 websites since 1998 on how people between the ages of 18-30 have developed small coil and rail guns that are man portable.
however i remember that one country allows them to be built with a maximum power level equal to the muzzle energy of a .22 short. As such power requirements kinda drop down.
battery life is limited to how the weapon is designed to launch projectiles. i do remember one person who managed to get 20 shots from a 12volt tractor battery.

I also remember a "3 headed fish' type story from the late 90s on that us government had tried to make a coil gun for a warship, but the weight of the proposed weapon would have weight equal to the entire turret,gun, and ammunitiion hoist of a fletcher class destroyer main turret.
 
I haven't seen a portable system with more energy than an airgun...yet. I'm curious what the claimed Muzzle energy and velocity of this system offer.
 
I say the same thing about usa today, newsweek is one of those check out rags talking about alien abduction and babies sired by bigfoot.

I doubt this story BUT I want one. 6 kilos is heavy.
 
Until we come up with much more efficient power sources, man portable and effective rail guns and other energy weapons will be limited to sci fi films. Atomic/nuclear energy could probably do it, but than you have a rifle with a 5 block blast radius when it's damaged.

Once the projectile becomes supersonic it is no longer close to silent.
Click to expand...

That's the other problem. There's nothing you can do about the sonic crack. Splitting air makes noise, no two ways about it.
 
Nothing new here... As a child, over 60 years ago, one of my favorite books was "Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle." I suspect this account is equally plausible.
 
Once the projectile becomes supersonic it is no longer close to silent.
Click to expand...
While true, there are two things to consider:

1. The shot isn't silent, but it is much harder to localize the shooter, since you hear the crack after the bullet passes you, and you can't then listen for the THUMP of the gun going off. So, you end up hearing where the bullet was when the crack reached you, not where the shooter is. Also, many people would not recognize the sonic crack as a gunshot.

2. You can work around this issue by developing a gun that shoots a barely subsonic round and just making that round as massive as possible. See the various "Whisper" cartridges.

Mike
 
So he takes a broken airsoft gun, wraps it in duct tape, and works his magic, then claims that it shoots real bullets? I don't see a power supply.
 
winknplink has the right idea. The gun is going to be larger than a normal rifle. It is going to take a considerable amount of power to run that gun as well. There isn't going to be a way of adapting a regular rifle to being a rail gun without some huge changes in construction.
 
I spent an evening googling gauss guns/rail guns a while back. There are some very impressive videos out there. People rigging up capacitor banks with some serious power potential. Of course, recharging those capacitors would put some serious hurt on batteries, but the concept still really interests me.

Until batteries get *MUCH* better these are no competition for any firearm in terms of a man-portable weapon though. The rub with batteries is that as the get higher power densities, alot of the safety we associate with batteries goes away. Li-ion and Li-polymer batteries can easily enough reach a point of thermal runaway (read: start a fire) if not managed properly. People hear battery-powered and think safe kids toy, but if you pack enough energy into a small enough space, anything starts to behave more like gasoline or gunpowder - it wants to give that energy up.
 
Railguns are not practical until we improve the power source. They take a lot of power.

Pravda is a junk rag, like the national enquirer. I don't think they have ever printed anything thats true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y54aLcC3G74

Railguns are cool though, the Navy is very interested in them.
 
i can't get it better than this... but here's a bigger image...

12049191.jpg
 
Now is this electric rifle that needs bullets "magnitized in advance" (according to the article) expected in any way to be superior to an existing silenced rifle firing subsonic ammunition?

Yeah, technology is cool and all but... meh

Wake me up when someone invents wormhole technology (or if Kahr ever makes a "K10" 10mm).
 
Future Weapons did a show on them a while back. Had a small one that shot right around the speed of sound IIRC. But it required a whole room of conductors and the tech said they had enough energy in them when charged to incinerate you instantly if you touched them.
 
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