Slashdot Mirror
Rail Guns Closer to Reality
emtboy9 writes "Yahoo News is reporting that scientists at Sandia National Labs have created a magnetic pulse gun (rail gun) that can accelerate small aluminum plates at 34 kilometers per second, faster than the Earth travels through space.
The accelerated plates strike a target after traveling only five millimeters, or less than a quarter-inch. The impact generates a shock wave -- in some cases, reaching 15 million times atmospheric pressure -- that passes through the target material turning matter into various states almost instantly (solids into liquids, liquids into gas, and even gas into plasma)."
Faster, measured against what frame of reference? A marker on the equator versus the center of mass? As seen from the moon? Sol? Alpha Proxima? Vega? The center of Andromeda's galactic core?
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LAQ (Live Action Quake)?
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Second paragraph:
Housed at Sandia National Laboratories, the Z machine attracted a lot of attention eight years ago when its energy output more than quadrupled - raising hopes that the reactions in the Z could provide a new source of clean, abundant power. To help further progress towards this end, the machine is getting a $61.7 million upgrade, officials announced recently.
"a magnetic pulse gun (rail gun) that can accelerate small aluminum plates at 34 kilometers per second"
/. were pedantic nerds with nothing better to do hang out, not CNN.
We were taught this at the age of 14 - what were you doing?
Acceleration is measured in distance per second per second. 34 km/s is a velocity. So did you mean it accelerates it to 34 km/s? Or did you actually mean it accelerates at 34 km/s/s? This is
Your a freakin hippie, don't lie
If you were a veteran you'd know there are some people who will **never** become your friend.
The current batch think all Americans are SATAN.
fergetaboutit! make glowing sand!
Just because it's called a "railgun" doesn't mean it has military uses. The power supplies and support equipment necessary to power the Z-machine take up several rooms. It's far easier to kill with existing weapons design that it is to reduce the requirements for imparting vast amounts of energy to low mass objects. The chance to study high energy transformations in other-than-nuclear reactions open several potential basic science appliations. The article clearly cites some potential applications that aren't military.
Call me crazy, but I'd rather make a friend than kill an enemy.
Unfortunately, not every enemy feels the same way.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
This is nothing to do with rail guns. It's just a silly inflamatory headline (or maybe railguns are cool 'cause they're in Quake).
This is all about generating massive shockwaves to examine the properties of matter in extreme conditions (without having to heat it up to enormous temperatures).
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
The "small aluminum plates" are not just small... they're TINY. Others have already noted that "rail gun" is a big misstatement; the discs they're talking about here are merely 850 MICRONS thick. Let's get this thing in perspective, shall we? I know that "rail gun" makes many geeks twitch uncontrollably, but come on now, that's just karma whoring.
Oh, and to link to a two-year-old image... with a caption of "have created" that implies it's brand new... PLEASE.
Once again, the question must be asked: where's the moderation system for STORIES?
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Or you could rig up a I.R. tracker, clock/timer and noise detector and if the that f**king dog next door went nuts at 5am in the morning again, it would be the last time he did it! Yippy Kay Ay, motherf**ker!
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
So many people here are saying things like this because of the stupid, erroneous "rail gun" description Slashdot gave it.
This is not some projectile launcher. It's a massively expensive device that creates immense magnetic fields in a tiny region for fusion and shock wave experiments, of which one thing that you can do is propel miniscule items over short distances. It doesn't "scale" to rail gun applications, and it's not designed to - it's already a monstrously large device. Besides - when it operates, it produces the greatest source of X-rays on Earth. You want to scale that *up*? Next, the G forces in this thing are just plain ridiculous. Last, Earth's escape velocity is not the only thing you have to achieve - did you forget about Earth's atmosphere?
Far, far, far more realistic is Gerald Bull's monstrous barbados gun, which actually would have been launching things to orbit given a few more months. However, using a crazy-expensive device designed for fusion and shock research with crazy levels of X-ray generation to propel projectiles to space an is a ludicrous idea. Why not just propose converting your average nuclear waste storage pool into a rocket because the radiation it emits is very high ISP?
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
I'm still not joining the Army until they invent the respawn point.
Well...it's not so much the _point_ that's the hard part, but more the respawning mechanism itself.
It is not being designed as a weapon. more sort of a particle accelerator (the 'bullet' is only a few hundred microns thick) It's being used to provide data about nuclear reactions. From the site it was a bit unclear though whether they are actually aiming to create sustainable fusion or not.