> stronger alloys so that the rails don’t disintegrate in 10 shots
Or a way to rapidly swap rails out.
[Perhaps like here?](https://youtu.be/uqd88M62Wpk?feature=shared&t=53)
I mean, it might work. The US has used somewhat similar loading systems for their early naval missile systems. The main problem would probably be that such a system would negate two of the main advantages of gun-based systems, their density and cost effectiveness. In the space where you have 50 VLS cells, you can have 500 shells and charges. If you need to store gun barrels as well as shells, that advantage is greatly diminished. These barrels are also not likely to be cheap.
> If you need to store gun barrels as well as shells, that advantage is greatly diminished.
I guess that might depend on what kinda mileage can be squeezed out of barrel.
It's likely to only be an intermediate solution anyway, until alloys become good enough to withstand a lot of firings.
Ye. Though the effort to create such a system would probably not be seen as worth it. For missiles they were offering a completely new capability, so the cost was deemed acceptable. However, railguns really just provide a more cost-effective way to strike long-range targets. An intermediate system would likely not possess that advantage to the degree necessary to be worth it, and at most would see limited service on a single ship modified to take the system.
> and at most would see limited service on a single ship modified to take the system
That's what I was thinking - a "shakedown" ship to get some real-life railgun usage data, with successor hopefully not needing such rail reload system anymore.
More or less a glorified test vehicle
> Ah. I thought you were talking about something more like the AA missile systems on US warships pre- Arleigh Burke
I mean, that can still kinda sorta happen, IF
1. Railguns show enough performance that using them would provide far greater capability than staying with conventional systems
2. Material science fails to develop drastically more durable rails, but manages to majorly shave off the price for decently more durable ones, making it acceptable to have rail magazine and autoloader aboard the ship.
3. Some kinda threat appears that'd necessitate provision of at least one railgun ship per carrier strike group
But that'd, once again, require all those conditions to get fulfilled somehow. And it's not too likely.
You’d probably want to turn the inside of the tube into a reasonably high quality vaccum before the shot .. but then you’d need something that can open inside of a few microseconds and also form an airtight seal and have that cycle a few hundred times before needing a replacement
There’s a niche use as a “cheap” Martian orbital delivery system. No counterballast issues. Enough atmosphere to cool. Gun strong enough to shoot stuff into space. Could be a good way to refine asteroid ore, just crash it into Mars and send it back into space purified.
You can probably intercept them, especially if the target is carrying the AA.
It's just that intercepting the rounds is unlikely to have much, if any, effect.
Make it rotate through 6-8 rails on each side (think like two gattlings next to each other for visual reference). Optionally add active cooling for the rails not currently firing.
Cost-cutting, most likely.
Much like all the other things in Avatar.
Especially after Karl Falco managed to break ***MULTIPLE*** Dragon Assault Ships during his time in Hell's Gate
> Much like all the other things in Avatar.
We have to remember, that the whole purpose of human presence is commercial exploitation of resources. So doing shit as cheap as possible, fits the narrative.
Coat the rails in vapor deposition grown diamond. Diamond is pure carbon, a conductor itself, and the hardest material known to man.
Basically unlimited barrel life.
OK. Replace every 10 shots. Plenty of rails available (think railroads). Old technology.
Or: Recycle rails with movable small and cheap furnace from Hone Depot (uses electricity from same generator).
That's why coilguns are the real dark horse. Sure muzzle velocities are piddly right now, and will never reach the same potential as railguns, but they also don't need fantasy materials to work.
They could at least displace conventional firearms, while being almost completely silent, with simpler and lighter ammo (i.e. a lot more of it), and less moving parts (just ammo feeding, no bolt or ejection), no fouling or barrel wear.
Railguns are the Tiger tank, Coilguns are the Sherman. Less flashy, but far more practical in every way which counts.
Exactly. I have always thought of railguns as the go-to for main guns thanks to their higher power, while coil systems are great for secondaries and gauss-assisted cannon because of lower maintenance.
Much of the sound from a conventional firearm is from breaking the sound barrier, it's why you use subsonic rounds with suppressors if you want to be quiet. It won't be *as* loud, but "completely silent" is a myth.
Ammo is cheaper and easier for something like a shipboard application, where you've got room for capacitors and electrical generation capability. But a personal scale coilgun would need a shitton of battery power. You're just changing the form you store the energy in. You've got to get the projectile moving somehow, after all. And currently, gunpowder is like an order of magnitude more energy dense than batteries. You're going to end up with heavier ammo, not lighter.
>And currently, gunpowder is like an order of magnitude more energy dense than batteries.
So just detonate a small amount of gunpowder to charge a capacitor that powers the coilgun, duh.
Or improve the projectile so firing it at a huge maintenance cost doesn’t seem so silly.
What if we use the magnetic propulsion to eject a guided missile a great distance away, then before it completely slows down the rocket motor is ignited thus increasing the total range?
What if we made it similar to caseless ammunition. Rail and round integrated. I guess it would really be more of a “barrel” magazine…
Cycling them into the turret, integrating them with power once “chambered” and expending them when done. Likely get several uses out of each before needing to toss the whole thing.
I think, my noncredible friend, you have missed the point.
The rounds and the rails would be packaged together. Expendable.
Since the rails would likely hold up for a number of firings you could refit them with projectiles and then put them back into service.
I’ve absolutely no idea how much rail is needed for proper effect, but let’s just pretend it’s about ten feet. So a bunch of 10-foot long rail/inner barrel/projectile containers.
I'm interested in these helical railguns that combine a coil gun and Railgun. Apparently they significantly improve efficiency and reduce the current used at the rails, which should increase lifespan.
Real solution: [put some jet engines and an 80s theme song on it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW9SDuJHk94)
Only shit the 80 lacked was a tank, you got the chopper, [the car](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BsFnk83NMI) and [the bike](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c_-KvMTOOc)
The thing is the huge amount of energy you need to store and deliver extremely fast into the projectile.
Closest thing today is the electric catapult system of modern carriers, and that still delivers less energy and way slower than required.
You need a huge bank of capacitors and that has even less power density than the wheels used in the carrier.
Issue is the rails wear insanely fast. They also must be super precisely manufactured, which means super expensive. It’s a material science problem, not an electrical engineering one
Huh, never heard of that designation before.
Only XK (end of the world), XC (societal restructuring) and XZ (reality failure). With the X being constant and the second letter denoting the scope of things breaking.
There are actually a ton of K class scenarios. A lot of them only appear in one or two containment files or some random tale somewhere so most people only know the really popular ones: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/k-class-complete-list
[It’s usually the other way around.](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/k-class-complete-list) The K stays and the other letter signifies the kind of disaster.
You're missing one of the best parts of railguns: they don't need the previous projectile to leave the barrel before firing the next one. The only limit to the rate of fire is power and loading time.
No, you have to account for relativistic effects once your at orbital velocity, see GPS.
But it depends on what sort of effects and what magnitude you can ignore.
For ultimate precision, yes, but for this kind of application not so much.
1 / sqrt(1 - v^2) is the gamma factor, where v is the fraction of c. So at 0.1c, your factor is around 1.005, half a percent. That's a rounding error for most uses.
We aren't talking "but officer, the red light looked green to me" kinds of speed here.
I mean I assume the bullets aren't going to need to calculate earth time accurate to the microsecond or whatever the GPS needs to perform its black magic
Still doesn’t work. The projectile is only held together by atmospheric pressure differentials, which means that you need to have some kind of atmospheric pressure along the entire flight path.
Mach 9 is amateur numbers. I fully support the development of rail guns into the beasts they will eventually become. However, other weapons can do the same or close enough to the same for far less cost. Once railguns or MACs (magnetically accelerated cannons) start hitting 30km/s then things get really spicy. Another possibility is if we fine tune railguns energy requirements so a modern tank can provide enough power.
A big issue with railguns is over penetration. If a round is punching through the target, then a lot of force isn't being distributed to the target.
The biggest drawback of a railgun at 3km/s is that the earth is round. That slug is going to punch right through the target and make for a bad day for some random person half a hemisphere away. 3km/s may not reach escape velocity (~11.2 km/s) but it'll travel quite the distance punching a hole through everything before the target and beyond.
No, you need to account for shock heating. SR71 had all sorts of heating problems and it was only hitting \~1/3 that speed. Even with a pointy dart, once you hit something remotely solid your aerodynamics are less credible than NCD and your dealing more with a fluid than a solid mass.
One of the guys working with Survival Research Labs made a rail gun. It would charge up a bank of capacitors and then slam a copper rod across the rails. The rod would melt almost instantly but the molten copper would get blasted out the front in a glowing spray.
You can see it in operation in their [Carnival of Misplaced Devotion](https://youtu.be/ODSQpgMBR5I?t=190) show. The big white PVC bit at the bottom left of the frame is the "barrel" although it doesn't guide the projectiles at all and mostly just keeps bits from hitting the audience and keeps your fingers out of it.
You can also see it firing at 2:38 and 2:58 in that video although you can't see the projector itself. It's not much to look at though, looks like an old stick welder box with a wide but short PVC barrel on top.
I think that's the same guy who built an EM pulse generator as an installation art piece.
In the future we will have reactors small enough to put on planes, then we will have electric A-10s with railguns for CAS. Just imagine being a random rebel in a civil war, hiding on your fort, protected from dangers behind your reinforced concrete walls, to be jump scared by tungsten roads piercing through the walls and moving towards you at the speed of MACH fuck you.
Look, if I am arming a plane with an electromagnetic-powered minigun, I might well light it like an upper-middle-class suburban in the Christmas season to show the enemy what they will be killed in seconds later.
And the A-10 is not that bad tbh, it has a pretty good record against British armed vehicles, which are considered NATO level is in quality.
We should use rail guns for artillery. Conventional artillery is known to give operators long term brain damage due to the explosions. Railguns should mitigate that.
The size of the one you show firing the iron arrow is quite big and only for naval ships In theory i think and i would also question the effectiveness of the smaller handheld one but if there's a video of that firing and showing some results than that'd be awesome
Okay, folks while we’re talking railgun technology.
Whatever happened to Metal Storm - that company that developed the railgun technology and was listed on the stock exchange. It seems to have disappeared as well as the tech? I was convinced there was so much potential in that tech.
There were some problems with it. The first was that to reload meant you had to replace the entire barrel assembly, and I’m not sure that reloading spent barrels in the field was possible. This also meant that the guns were very heavy for their ammo capacity (the 40mm grenade launcher version was like the size of a 120mm mortar). Finally, each round would have a different amount of barrel length and therefore a different muzzle velocity, which was not good for accuracy. These aren’t necessarily unsolvable issues, but it would have taken a lot of development time that wasn’t considered worth it for how niche the weapon was.
You know if you had a portable generator capable of enough electric power for a rail gun with KE near a 120 x 570mm NATO round I feel like more than half of the world's reason for conflicts will be solved.
Why not just take the ULTRAKILL approach to things and make the guns shoot metal flakes at mach jesus that can be reflected from coins, and also industrial nailgun minigun
Shortcomings:
The amount of electrical power required to generate enough current for a decently sized projectile to achieve a speed like that is huge.
The rails wear out over time and need to be checked and replaced frequently in order to prevent catastrophe.
Still very cool and effective, it's just because of those two points that mass adoption is coming later.
you know hes spent the last few years looking at the data because his shirt looks like a repeating pattern of the compressible flow data and he thinks it is a flex on his colleges.
Plasma railguns are even funnier; there is no other way to kill fools and break stuff with a donut of air moving at three percent of the speed of light.
Bonus: it's carbon negative. Use reactor to power the condensers, kill those dirty diesel vessels. We should arm the just stop oil protesters with it and let them loose in the Black sea
All we really need for this to become a reality is stronger alloys so that the rails don’t disintegrate in 10 shots
> stronger alloys so that the rails don’t disintegrate in 10 shots Or a way to rapidly swap rails out. [Perhaps like here?](https://youtu.be/uqd88M62Wpk?feature=shared&t=53)
I mean, it might work. The US has used somewhat similar loading systems for their early naval missile systems. The main problem would probably be that such a system would negate two of the main advantages of gun-based systems, their density and cost effectiveness. In the space where you have 50 VLS cells, you can have 500 shells and charges. If you need to store gun barrels as well as shells, that advantage is greatly diminished. These barrels are also not likely to be cheap.
> If you need to store gun barrels as well as shells, that advantage is greatly diminished. I guess that might depend on what kinda mileage can be squeezed out of barrel. It's likely to only be an intermediate solution anyway, until alloys become good enough to withstand a lot of firings.
Ye. Though the effort to create such a system would probably not be seen as worth it. For missiles they were offering a completely new capability, so the cost was deemed acceptable. However, railguns really just provide a more cost-effective way to strike long-range targets. An intermediate system would likely not possess that advantage to the degree necessary to be worth it, and at most would see limited service on a single ship modified to take the system.
> and at most would see limited service on a single ship modified to take the system That's what I was thinking - a "shakedown" ship to get some real-life railgun usage data, with successor hopefully not needing such rail reload system anymore. More or less a glorified test vehicle
Ah. I thought you were talking about something more like the AA missile systems on US warships pre- Arleigh Burke.
> Ah. I thought you were talking about something more like the AA missile systems on US warships pre- Arleigh Burke I mean, that can still kinda sorta happen, IF 1. Railguns show enough performance that using them would provide far greater capability than staying with conventional systems 2. Material science fails to develop drastically more durable rails, but manages to majorly shave off the price for decently more durable ones, making it acceptable to have rail magazine and autoloader aboard the ship. 3. Some kinda threat appears that'd necessitate provision of at least one railgun ship per carrier strike group But that'd, once again, require all those conditions to get fulfilled somehow. And it's not too likely.
We could also try levitating the rod inside the railgun not letting it touch the gun, but they probably do that already.
You’d probably want to turn the inside of the tube into a reasonably high quality vaccum before the shot .. but then you’d need something that can open inside of a few microseconds and also form an airtight seal and have that cycle a few hundred times before needing a replacement
There’s a niche use as a “cheap” Martian orbital delivery system. No counterballast issues. Enough atmosphere to cool. Gun strong enough to shoot stuff into space. Could be a good way to refine asteroid ore, just crash it into Mars and send it back into space purified.
You been watching the expanse or something? (I have been)
[удалено]
You can probably intercept them, especially if the target is carrying the AA. It's just that intercepting the rounds is unlikely to have much, if any, effect.
Ok easy solution, just replace the ships instead
3000 one-time-use railgun boats of the USN
Gattling Railgun when?
Make it rotate through 6-8 rails on each side (think like two gattlings next to each other for visual reference). Optionally add active cooling for the rails not currently firing.
If you’re using an explosive harpoon to kill whales, why not just have a guided torp then harpoon the carcass so this doesn’t happen?
Cost-cutting, most likely. Much like all the other things in Avatar. Especially after Karl Falco managed to break ***MULTIPLE*** Dragon Assault Ships during his time in Hell's Gate
> Much like all the other things in Avatar. We have to remember, that the whole purpose of human presence is commercial exploitation of resources. So doing shit as cheap as possible, fits the narrative.
Just fire the rails
The rails are essentially propellant at this point.
Rebrand it as a plasma cannon.
Coat the rails in vapor deposition grown diamond. Diamond is pure carbon, a conductor itself, and the hardest material known to man. Basically unlimited barrel life.
OK. Replace every 10 shots. Plenty of rails available (think railroads). Old technology. Or: Recycle rails with movable small and cheap furnace from Hone Depot (uses electricity from same generator).
I mean, if you check my thread with u/vegarig you will see why I think that even though it would probably work, it would probably not be used
That's why coilguns are the real dark horse. Sure muzzle velocities are piddly right now, and will never reach the same potential as railguns, but they also don't need fantasy materials to work. They could at least displace conventional firearms, while being almost completely silent, with simpler and lighter ammo (i.e. a lot more of it), and less moving parts (just ammo feeding, no bolt or ejection), no fouling or barrel wear. Railguns are the Tiger tank, Coilguns are the Sherman. Less flashy, but far more practical in every way which counts.
Exactly. I have always thought of railguns as the go-to for main guns thanks to their higher power, while coil systems are great for secondaries and gauss-assisted cannon because of lower maintenance.
Much of the sound from a conventional firearm is from breaking the sound barrier, it's why you use subsonic rounds with suppressors if you want to be quiet. It won't be *as* loud, but "completely silent" is a myth. Ammo is cheaper and easier for something like a shipboard application, where you've got room for capacitors and electrical generation capability. But a personal scale coilgun would need a shitton of battery power. You're just changing the form you store the energy in. You've got to get the projectile moving somehow, after all. And currently, gunpowder is like an order of magnitude more energy dense than batteries. You're going to end up with heavier ammo, not lighter.
>And currently, gunpowder is like an order of magnitude more energy dense than batteries. So just detonate a small amount of gunpowder to charge a capacitor that powers the coilgun, duh.
Or improve the projectile so firing it at a huge maintenance cost doesn’t seem so silly. What if we use the magnetic propulsion to eject a guided missile a great distance away, then before it completely slows down the rocket motor is ignited thus increasing the total range?
Or: just add another stage and/or more fuel. We can already build rockets that fly around the globe.
What if we made it similar to caseless ammunition. Rail and round integrated. I guess it would really be more of a “barrel” magazine… Cycling them into the turret, integrating them with power once “chambered” and expending them when done. Likely get several uses out of each before needing to toss the whole thing.
Well you’d also need a lot of extra rails, which takes up space. At that point you might as well just pack a bunch of missiles.
I think, my noncredible friend, you have missed the point. The rounds and the rails would be packaged together. Expendable. Since the rails would likely hold up for a number of firings you could refit them with projectiles and then put them back into service. I’ve absolutely no idea how much rail is needed for proper effect, but let’s just pretend it’s about ten feet. So a bunch of 10-foot long rail/inner barrel/projectile containers.
Costs a shitload less. On a ship size doesn't matter so much
magnetic containment so it is contactless. While I'm dreaming I'd like a pony (technical).
Xcom gaming
I'm interested in these helical railguns that combine a coil gun and Railgun. Apparently they significantly improve efficiency and reduce the current used at the rails, which should increase lifespan.
Or, hear me out, make a gatling gun style rail gun so that the barrels don't wear out quickly
Curious, what are your thoughts on [Helical Railguns](https://youtu.be/Xll9rIzZPeQ)?
Well make better alloys then! What are you people waiting for?
Or Japanese Teenagers >!This is a To aru reference!<
You jest but my wife is convinced (she did the math) she can jury rig a nuclear powered railgun on a cargo ship if needed (she probably can).
After reading *The Sum of All Fears,* of the great Tom Clancy, I assumed I could jury rig my own nuclear device, given the base mats
I really wanna see an Apache refuel from an ICBM
That's easy, just strap it to the missile before launch
Problem: attack helicopters are highly vulnerable to manpads during their slow approach Solution: intercontinental ballistic attack helicopters
Real solution: [put some jet engines and an 80s theme song on it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW9SDuJHk94) Only shit the 80 lacked was a tank, you got the chopper, [the car](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BsFnk83NMI) and [the bike](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c_-KvMTOOc)
Yeeeees
I’m just now realizing I meant to say SSBN as a reference to the scene from debt of honour but I’m not changing it bcuz it’s too noncredible
Get me the enriched plutonium and so can I (or anyone). A gun type nuke is as simple as it gets.
Still pretty complicated, but a fizzle is still plenty big enough to do a funny.
In Sum of All Fears they did an implosion device, with local lens grinders providing the precision machining.
That is truly one of the books of all time.
Israeli nuclear weapons only right. Cuz it's infused with evil magic.
Worst comes to worst you create a spectacular dirty bomb.
Your wife sounds powerful congrats on the score
Need perun PP of this
She’s a keeper.
Using cargo containers as ammunition would be peak credibility. Pretty sure Amazon would like to know more.
Delivery in 30 minutes to anywhere in the world!
Like FedEx breaching pod in Expanse?
The thing is the huge amount of energy you need to store and deliver extremely fast into the projectile. Closest thing today is the electric catapult system of modern carriers, and that still delivers less energy and way slower than required. You need a huge bank of capacitors and that has even less power density than the wheels used in the carrier.
Metal Gear?
Issue is the rails wear insanely fast. They also must be super precisely manufactured, which means super expensive. It’s a material science problem, not an electrical engineering one
where's she gonna find the reactor?
Shoulder mounted Rail guns for anti-armour? Personally, ive always been a fan of the Spartan laser
The giant fuck off fire hazard battery on the soldier's back:
That's a funny way to spell "nuclear reactor".
Nah trebuchets are better, you don’t even need electricity
Warwolf my beloved
Okay but what if you used a rail gun to accelerate the trebuchet's counterweight downwards?
QK-class end of world scenario. I'm still down to try it though.
For those people that aren't well versed in SCP stuff, QK-Class means a End of the World scenario with some sort of physics shenanigans going on.
Huh, never heard of that designation before. Only XK (end of the world), XC (societal restructuring) and XZ (reality failure). With the X being constant and the second letter denoting the scope of things breaking.
There are actually a ton of K class scenarios. A lot of them only appear in one or two containment files or some random tale somewhere so most people only know the really popular ones: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/k-class-complete-list
[It’s usually the other way around.](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/k-class-complete-list) The K stays and the other letter signifies the kind of disaster.
I just came up with an amazing idea, launch a railgun with a trebuchet and time it so the railgun acts as a top attack weapon
We need to contact Raytheon immediately
Operation Angry Birds
Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics, We talk cool guns.
But if sound moves faster than tomahawks, can’t we just try asking people not to be mean?
You mean.. don't blow stuff up? I'm afraid that's not an option around these parts.
Consider the following: Coilguns.
Arma 3 had a variant of the erstaz black eagle armed with one. I think they finally released that tank.
Actually too credible, get out of here with your far more practical suggestion.
You're missing one of the best parts of railguns: they don't need the previous projectile to leave the barrel before firing the next one. The only limit to the rate of fire is power and loading time.
And barrels and heat dissipation.
Don't you dare bring things like "physics" and "material science" into my NCD.
OMG I'm so sorry
We'll shoot them from a really cold place. Like the Arctic or my ex's heart. Problem solved!
That’s just a long range flamethrower with extra steps.
Well actually Effects of relativistic speeds start to occur at ~11% of c. Railguns go at 0.00001% c. No relativistic effects for you
No, you have to account for relativistic effects once your at orbital velocity, see GPS. But it depends on what sort of effects and what magnitude you can ignore.
For ultimate precision, yes, but for this kind of application not so much. 1 / sqrt(1 - v^2) is the gamma factor, where v is the fraction of c. So at 0.1c, your factor is around 1.005, half a percent. That's a rounding error for most uses. We aren't talking "but officer, the red light looked green to me" kinds of speed here.
I mean I assume the bullets aren't going to need to calculate earth time accurate to the microsecond or whatever the GPS needs to perform its black magic
"Mom they're making fucking Metal Gear agai-"
Get them to declassify MARAUDER, then we'll talk.
This guy over here making a big deal about .001% of lightspeed, meanwhile MARAUDER hit 3% before it was classified 30 years ago.
Classified? No no no my friend, it was simply discontinued :) definitely non-viable :) please stop asking questions :):):)
I will continue to spread the good word of plasma railguns until the day I die. Literally their only flaw is that they don’t work in a vacuum.
Blow a few kilos of gas over the thing just before the shot?
Still doesn’t work. The projectile is only held together by atmospheric pressure differentials, which means that you need to have some kind of atmospheric pressure along the entire flight path.
Sounds like we need to make a fighter or ship from Ace Combat now.
SALVATION!
#3000 Stonehenge railguns of the (US)ean Armed Forces
Give a french woman enough time and she will put one on a fighter jet
Coils are the solution. Rail is just LCD eqivalent, we should skip it
Absolutely. A bit more complex than rail, but coil is more reliable, actually works and you can easily dial a speed.
Railgun the Kerch Bridge for the ultimate funni
Somehow I read that as 'convert the Bridge to act as a railgun'. Got any suggestions for ammo for that?
Too unknown for Russia. Them seeing a railgun would be the equivalent to humans discovering fire
Mach 9 is amateur numbers. I fully support the development of rail guns into the beasts they will eventually become. However, other weapons can do the same or close enough to the same for far less cost. Once railguns or MACs (magnetically accelerated cannons) start hitting 30km/s then things get really spicy. Another possibility is if we fine tune railguns energy requirements so a modern tank can provide enough power. A big issue with railguns is over penetration. If a round is punching through the target, then a lot of force isn't being distributed to the target. The biggest drawback of a railgun at 3km/s is that the earth is round. That slug is going to punch right through the target and make for a bad day for some random person half a hemisphere away. 3km/s may not reach escape velocity (~11.2 km/s) but it'll travel quite the distance punching a hole through everything before the target and beyond.
No, you need to account for shock heating. SR71 had all sorts of heating problems and it was only hitting \~1/3 that speed. Even with a pointy dart, once you hit something remotely solid your aerodynamics are less credible than NCD and your dealing more with a fluid than a solid mass.
Nonono. I saw the Spacedock video. What you need is that 3 propulsion system rail-coil gun with gas expansikn boost.
One of the guys working with Survival Research Labs made a rail gun. It would charge up a bank of capacitors and then slam a copper rod across the rails. The rod would melt almost instantly but the molten copper would get blasted out the front in a glowing spray. You can see it in operation in their [Carnival of Misplaced Devotion](https://youtu.be/ODSQpgMBR5I?t=190) show. The big white PVC bit at the bottom left of the frame is the "barrel" although it doesn't guide the projectiles at all and mostly just keeps bits from hitting the audience and keeps your fingers out of it. You can also see it firing at 2:38 and 2:58 in that video although you can't see the projector itself. It's not much to look at though, looks like an old stick welder box with a wide but short PVC barrel on top. I think that's the same guy who built an EM pulse generator as an installation art piece.
In the future we will have reactors small enough to put on planes, then we will have electric A-10s with railguns for CAS. Just imagine being a random rebel in a civil war, hiding on your fort, protected from dangers behind your reinforced concrete walls, to be jump scared by tungsten roads piercing through the walls and moving towards you at the speed of MACH fuck you.
>future A-10s NCD is dead
Look, if I am arming a plane with an electromagnetic-powered minigun, I might well light it like an upper-middle-class suburban in the Christmas season to show the enemy what they will be killed in seconds later. And the A-10 is not that bad tbh, it has a pretty good record against British armed vehicles, which are considered NATO level is in quality.
We should use rail guns for artillery. Conventional artillery is known to give operators long term brain damage due to the explosions. Railguns should mitigate that.
You can avoid brain damage by using a brainless firing crew. Like robots or Russian conscripts.
DON'T TALK TO ME ABOUT "CLASSIFIED"!
Pfff…Outdated 😎 Portable fusion reactor + directed energy weapon = Unlimited ammo & Speed of Light Velocity
And, in a pinch, you can cannibalize scrap metal for more ammo.
*They're charging at us !!! Load the grapeshot !!!* Some ~~Napoleonian~~ sci-fi soldiers.
Or the cutlery. Imagine charging a position with 20,000 of your closest friends and getting taken out by a butter knife going Mach 9.
VLS about to become HLS
The size of the one you show firing the iron arrow is quite big and only for naval ships In theory i think and i would also question the effectiveness of the smaller handheld one but if there's a video of that firing and showing some results than that'd be awesome
"Operation: Only my RAILGUN can shoot it. imasugu" commences under General Biri-Biri
can we put a magnetic launch weapon on a Gustov?
i will never get over the fact that the current flows in the opposite direction to the electrons
Sure but then they get a power cycling failure at a critical moment and boom there goes argentina to a martian nuke.
Bring back big-gun battleships but with scramjet-assisted, nuclear-tipped, guided railgun shells
Coincidentally 400 km is roughly the distance it takes to go past being frighteningly powerful and wrap back around to funni
Can the projectile be fitted with some sort of DU tip?
Railguns? is the question. And the answer is 'Yes'
Okay, folks while we’re talking railgun technology. Whatever happened to Metal Storm - that company that developed the railgun technology and was listed on the stock exchange. It seems to have disappeared as well as the tech? I was convinced there was so much potential in that tech.
There were some problems with it. The first was that to reload meant you had to replace the entire barrel assembly, and I’m not sure that reloading spent barrels in the field was possible. This also meant that the guns were very heavy for their ammo capacity (the 40mm grenade launcher version was like the size of a 120mm mortar). Finally, each round would have a different amount of barrel length and therefore a different muzzle velocity, which was not good for accuracy. These aren’t necessarily unsolvable issues, but it would have taken a lot of development time that wasn’t considered worth it for how niche the weapon was.
The problem was the current literally melted the structure. Figure that out. Nerd. (I am just being sarcastic, I know OP is being like us)
I want it like halo where instead of installing railguns on ships we build ships around railguns
The problem with the railgun is that it’s so powerful it guts its own barrel when fired. Source: trust me bro.
I should probably finish my prototype and get it patented…
If someone is shot by one do they just disintegrate?
Japan is still working on theirs
Curios droid providing dazzle camo for the ground troops.
I keep ripping my nipple rings out when I use the shoulder-fired variant... anybody have a fix for that?
based curious droid enjoyer
Forgot to say it can run on solar power, so remote bases are not a logistical nightmare
You know if you had a portable generator capable of enough electric power for a rail gun with KE near a 120 x 570mm NATO round I feel like more than half of the world's reason for conflicts will be solved.
Why not just take the ULTRAKILL approach to things and make the guns shoot metal flakes at mach jesus that can be reflected from coins, and also industrial nailgun minigun
Shortcomings: The amount of electrical power required to generate enough current for a decently sized projectile to achieve a speed like that is huge. The rails wear out over time and need to be checked and replaced frequently in order to prevent catastrophe. Still very cool and effective, it's just because of those two points that mass adoption is coming later.
you know hes spent the last few years looking at the data because his shirt looks like a repeating pattern of the compressible flow data and he thinks it is a flex on his colleges.
This would kind of take "know what's behind your target" to a whole new level.
Do these actually do much damage with a 10lbs dart or do they just leave a small hole all the way through a ship?
Plasma railguns are even funnier; there is no other way to kill fools and break stuff with a donut of air moving at three percent of the speed of light.
Bonus: it's carbon negative. Use reactor to power the condensers, kill those dirty diesel vessels. We should arm the just stop oil protesters with it and let them loose in the Black sea
Rods from god?
Not even remotely, unless your criteria is just thing go fast