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Homemade Gauss Gun
bonzoesc writes: "I'm sure we all remember getting owned by some railgun-wielding kid in Quake2. Ever wanted a way to get back? Enter the Homemade Gauss Rifle. Requires wooden ruler with groove down the middle to serve as the rail, steel balls that can roll down the groove to use as projectiles, and magnets to store and redirect energy. Physics is fun!"
400km of thin copper wire is an awful lot. Try, "the width of northern Missouri".
Wall sockets are either 110V or 220V (sometimes listed as 120V/240V). Nowhere near five thousand. Not even in Europe, where they use much higher voltages, is a wall socket five thousand volts.
With a muzzle velocity of 2000m/s and a muzzle of only 3m, you can be damn sure that the payload would shatter and deform under the hundreds of thousands of G-forces.
You're also neglecting the fact that at 2000m/s, air has the consistency of concrete. The payload wouldn't even get out of the muzzle. It would explode in the muzzle, you'd get a burst barrel, and you'd have 400km of fragmented copper wire bouncing around and killing anyone who was standing too close.
At 2km/s, the concrete wall wouldn't just be breached. It would explode. Everyone around would be dead. There would also be liquified metal (from the payload) spraying everywhere, setting fires.
The sheer amount of energy required to launch a payload at 2km/s from such a short barrel would require a current far in excess of anything THIN copper wire could bear. Not only would the barrel burst and copper go flying everywhere, the copper would be molten.
The next time you decide to spin a totally BS yarn, please at least check to make sure the physics works.
On my last ship we had degaussing equipment inside the skin of the ship. Unfortunately there was a cable run in my "office" I couldn't count the number of times I would be playing something (SOF, QIII, UT, Deus Ex, System Shock2,etc) and have the equipment really screw up my monitor. (Mind you this was my personal PC as I had a couple of friends in the IT department) I never left the 'puter running if I was out of the office (which was a lot.. as many of nights getting off of watch and spending a couple of hours chasing mutant monkeys with a wrench...) as there would be a nice color display pattern waiting for me when I got back. I think I used the degaussing button more often than the power button....