Electromagnetic Railgun

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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I would have thought that long term it would be preferable as it should be cheaper eventually, not to mention that you could be storing inert rods rather than a few thousand tons of extremely high explosive warheads which if you were attacked would see you reach the bottom of the ocean quickly. :p
 
Tefal said:
You're going to need very sturdy hardware to survive that launch intact would probbaly cost more than launching it conventionally.
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Could you not have it starting off relatively slowly in the rail then speeding up as it gets further along the rail?

As tech gets better I'm sure it would be more resistant, solid drives etc?
 
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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Capability, cost etc.

Not only can it do far more, distance, power and so on.
The "ammo" takes up far less room, as you don't need explosives and are very cheap.
 
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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hit's targets with similar accurately and much faster than a $1,000,000 a shot missile with a <$100 shell.

Also means your ships aren't loaded with high explosives so your crew don't all die if the enemy hits their ammunition stores.

And you can carry more ammo.
 
sigma said:
[sillyidea] Could we use a huge one of these to launch stuff into space? [/sillyidea]
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Yep you could has been looked at a fair bit. Any resonable sized one wouldn't be able to launch humans. Due to g-force. But resources and building equipment doesn't really have a g-force limit. 1km barrel would still need around 1000G of acceleration.
http://research.lifeboat.com/ieee.em.pdf


Tiny Clanger said:
Robert Heinlein didn't thinks so - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress (excellent book by the way).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver

Mind you - this is a mass driver or electromagnetic catapult than a rail system...
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Yeah they aren't fast fast enough ~1km/s exit velocity. Where you need around ~7km/s for launch.
Rail guns however have reached the 7-9km/s range, but only for a couple of gram projectiles.
 
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Strife212 said:
So we'll have nuclear powered ships railgunning the enemy non stop for weeks, sounds good to me :p
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given their significant range advantages on normal guns you could do a MRSI (Multiple Rounds Simultaneous Impact) with much higher numbers of shell's than currently possible.


so one ship firing it's guns for some time then all the shells hitting at once (depending on the available angle)
 
Finally, was waiting for some news since one of the railguns was shipped to the US for testing over there.

If BAE can get in on this first or near enough, then the profit margin is quite large, a whole new generation of projectile weaponry.

I am giddy.
 
And that's why I stopped playing Eve online... all the cool stuff would have taken so long to train skills for it just seemed like forever :(
 
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