DIY Railgun Projects

Rhett writes: "Straight out of Quake it's a couple of EE projects for building railguns: Working railgun by Texas Tech students and a project by MIT Students." Now if only we can get enemy ICBMs to pass through Texas Tech on their way to dropping nuclear weapons on the U.S., we'll have a working missile defense system.

Comments

This could be interesting

[darkmayo]

Yes pranks taken to the next level with almighty rail guns.. I can see the headlines now.. "MIT rails Caltech" .."I OWNz J00" was the battlecry from MIT when the they opened fire from a mile away punching holes in Caltech. Caltech responded by saying "Oh yea just wait til we get our BFG10k working then we will have the last laugh." then caltech was railed again and responded once more.. HEY I WAS TYPING..

Railguns vs Orbital Platforms

[Alien54]

I once toyed with a story idea where some of the locals of a planet used rail guns against visitors from other systems. [Sort of like hillbilly geeks vs revenuers]

The bottom line on these is that for dumb payloads the first shot or two will likely hit depending proper leading of the target. but dodging the shots is relatively easy, since even with projectiles going at ten miles per second, shooting at target one hundred miles up means that the target is at least ten seconds away. This is plenty of time for alarms and manual menuvering. (Take evasive action Sulu!) This depends on detecting the characteristic magnetic flux from a rail gun shot at the time the shot is fired. a little dicey, but not that impractical.

Given atmospheric turbulence, etc. We should probably have something like a rapid fire rail gun to be really effective - something like machine gun speed.

I can see the black budget people working on this now.

What about COIL Guns?

[Raetsel]

I remember, years ago, during the (seeming) height of the US military's interest in rail guns (and Popular Science, etc., etc...) a small group of college students with a more efficient answer...

• it was a COIL Gun.

Really the same basic idea as a rail gun, but they 'wrapped' the rails around the payload to get more efficient use of the electromotive force -- more 'bang for your watt,' so to speak.

That, and it looked more like a gun barrel. It was so much cooler looking!

Google turns up some interesting things, from someone trying to sell handheld weapon plans, to science-museum, brick-destroying, 900 foot-per-second Coaxial Electromagnetic Mass Accelerators. The second one is rather small, too -- something like that should scale up without too much trouble...

God, that looks like fun. This brings back that feeling I had 10 years ago when I really wanted to build one of these things. Maybe now I'll pull my head out of the computer long enough...

Oh, wait. Jet boat first.

Limits of conventional weapons

[sterno]

There is a major advantage to using a rail gun. Ultimately destructive force is measured by the mass and the velocity of the projectile. Thanks to the joys of physics, the velocity has a whole lot more to do with the amount of kinetic energy you can inflict on a target.

Now, with conventional weapons, you have a serious design problem. To fire a projectile you create a small explosion in the barrel. The larger the explosion, the faster the projectile, but at some point, the explosion is so large that you cannot design a barrel strong enough to contain it (or at least not one that you can tote around on the average tank).

With a rail gun, you have a big advantage in that the force applied to the projectile is applied over the entire length of the barrel. This reduces the stress on the barrel because you can apply the necessary force over a longer period of time. This allows you to achieve higher velocities with lighter barrels which provides two big benefits:

1) more destructive force
2) guns that can be rotated and aimed faster and more accurately

Now of course there are limitations with this too, but it does get you beyond the problems inate in more conventional explosives based ammo.

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