Electromagnetic Railgun

Aeleys said:
haven't they been testing these for a while now?
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So far as I know original development started during the Second world War and has continued since then the issues being that in the past they couldn't viably mount the weapon on vehicles due to the power requirements and overall massiveness of the designs it's onl;y recently that they've been able to scale the technology down enough to even think about mounting rail guns on ships.
 
Capn' $qu!ff said:
So far as I know original development started during the Second world War and has continued since then the issues being that in the past they couldn't viably mount the weapon on vehicles due to the power requirements and overall massiveness of the designs it's onl;y recently that they've been able to scale the technology down enough to even think about mounting rail guns on ships.
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Ah yes, although i don't really see the point with all the tech/weapons we actually have already.
 
Aeleys said:
Ah yes, although i don't really see the point with all the tech/weapons we actually have already.
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Conventional weapons as we know them at the moment have their limits. The advantage of the rail gun is you have 3 large warships lined up in your sights better to waste one (for lack of better words) "rail slug" which has the potential to break through all 3 nicely lined up targets rather than use conventional weapons which may hurt one of those nicely lined up targets. To put it basically the rail gun is a more efficient weapon!
 
oxygene said:
o long to come about. Simple rails guns can be homemade with little difficulty so something on a much larger scale shouldnt be too hard in principle :p
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actually no, they are phenomenally hard in principle for high energy ones :p
 
PermaBanned said:
Not on it's own. But one with enough size and enough power could do a lot of the work.

Assuming you mean orbit?
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You're going to need very sturdy hardware to survive that launch intact would probbaly cost more than launching it conventionally.
 
Capn' $qu!ff said:
Conventional weapons as we know them at the moment have their limits. The advantage of the rail gun is you have 3 large warships lined up in your sights better to waste one (for lack of better words) "rail slug" which has the potential to break through all 3 nicely lined up targets rather than use conventional weapons which may hurt one of those nicely lined up targets. To put it basically the rail gun is a more efficient weapon!
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Yeah, what i meant was i find it stupid that the world sinks trillions into weapon tech R&D, and come up with something we already have but it does it a bit better. (killing people)

Don't get me wrong i love weapons, and military hardware but i just think it could be better spent on something more worthwhile. :p
 
Would super conductors improve the performance or require a lot less energy?

If we one day get room temperature superconductors i wonder if we might see hand held versions of these, though that's not something to look forward to if we ever get room temperature superconductors thats for sure.
 
oxygene said:
Tbh I'm suprised these kind of things have taken so long to come about. Simple rails guns can be homemade with little difficulty so something on a much larger scale shouldnt be too hard in principle :p
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You're talking Coil Guns and yes while the same sort of principles are used the speed at which the projectile is fired is significantly lower than that of a true rail gun.
 
Radiation said:
Would super conductors improve the performance or require a lot less energy?

If we one day get room temperature superconductors i wonder if we might see hand held versions of these, though that's not something to look forward to if we ever get room temperature superconductors thats for sure.
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would help in terms of stopping the cables from over heating when discharging other than that not really.

You'd need huge advances in power generation and capacitors to have a hope in hell of making one of these work on anything smaller than a destroyer.
 
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I will only care if they make it a killstreak in mw4. How do these actually work, is it just a very large current creating a magnetic field for a small period of time?
( I don't actually I dislike modern cod).
 
Aeleys said:
Yeah, what i meant was i find it stupid that the world sinks trillions into weapon tech R&D, and come up with something we already have but it does it a bit better. (killing people)

Don't get me wrong i love weapons, and military hardware but i just think it could be better spent on something more worthwhile. :p
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This particular line of R&D has other uses as stated earlier this could be potentially used as a mass driver for transportation/extraterrestrail exploration provided we could negate the sheer g-forces that you'd experience were you to be moving at that speed.
 
Capn' $qu!ff said:
This particular line of R&D has other uses as stated earlier this could be potentially used as a mass driver for transportation/extraterrestrail exploration provided we could negate the sheer g-forces that you'd experience were you to be moving at that speed.
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Yeah, it's just sad that we need "war" to advance our tech...

maybe i'm just being humbug about it but we seriously don't need more weapons.
 
opstrat said:
if its a rail gun then why is there muzzle flash?
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either intense heat caused by sparks, material being burnt off the barrel and the projectile or the intense heat caused by the projectile flying at such high velocity through the air, probbaly all three.
 
Tefal said:
would help in terms of stopping the cables from over heating when discharging other than that not really.

You'd need huge advances in power generation and capacitors to have a hope in hell of making one of these work on anything smaller than a destroyer.
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No doubt but what about just getting a projectile up to average bullet speeds?

I imagine it could make for a practically silent handgun/sniper rifle if the capacitors were available.
 
Radiation said:
No doubt but what about just getting a projectile up to average bullet speeds?

I imagine it could make for a practically silent handgun/sniper rifle if the capacitors were available.
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no, not even close to get normal bullet speeds you're still looking at a large very heavy bank of capacitors (too much to carry) and then a very long charging cycle requiring a generator.

and no it wouldn't be silent, go listen to a few vids of peoples home versions.
 
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