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)."
I think the knife has a longer range than this thing.
They should use some of the technology for cold fusion to accelerate small metal plates into things... That would be hella fun!
-Bill
Did I get it?
Start a happiness pandemic
Sounds like we have our Quake 4 in real life before it is released...
"faster than the Earth travels through space". Always cracks me up.
...doesn't necessarily mean that we should do that thing.
While moving technology forward is always a good thing, are there any non-military uses for this?
libertarianswag.com
What does the "magnetic pulse gun" link have to do with a "magnetic pulse gun?"
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?
[
and to fire it your name has to be atlas..... its not a gun.... Move along nothing to see here...
SS
Plates don't liquify people. People liquify people.
34 kilometers per second, faster than the Earth travels through space.
Compared to what, relative to what ? The moon ? Saturn ? Space is quite big you know...
RedVortex
I, for one, welcome our new cybernetic, rail-gun bearing overlords.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
The military, that's who.
A new way to kill people.
They will probably start testing on selected soldiers with no family in a sheep pasture in west texas somewhere.
Yep, this is exactly what we need floating around the streets, the ability to turn organs into fluids. Giving the victim no chance of survival nor the ability to donate organs. Wonderful.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
I'm not a hippie, far from it. Grizzled veteran of several wars is more like it.
But I hate guns. I hate war. I hate all these things that are designed to kill and maim (contrary to international treaties, in fact).
How about concentrating on global cooperation instead of global conquest? There are only two ways of eliminating an enemy: Kill him or make him a friend.
Call me crazy, but I'd rather make a friend than kill an enemy.
Designing these weapons can only lead to more killing. I find that terribly sad.
LAQ (Live Action Quake)?
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
...how a magnetic pulse accelerates an aluminum plate? I don't remember aluminum being particularly responsive to (simple, speaker-type) magnets, perhaps the scale of energy involved changes things?
My mech has been waiting to get outfitted with one of these for a while!
I'll take two, please.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
"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
American: pwned Iraqi: stfu camper
To the blast with rayguns!
How long will we have to wait until they start to make lightsabers, which are civilized weapons of a civilized world?
Another incredibly powerful weapon for world's largest loose cannon to be playing with. Go America!
Call it a "rail launcher" and fire satellite payloads into orbit. Of course you'll have to slow down the velocity or the payload will ionize in the atmosphere upon launch. Rail launchers are more practical in a vacuum, as there is no atmosphere to interfere with hypervolocity launches. Perfect for chunking mined ore from the Moon to Earth?
I'll bet this railgun on fires a few millimeters because they have problems with longer magnetic "barrels" exploding from the shockwave produced by an object moving "at the speed the Earth moves through space".
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I refer you to the article:
One purpose of these very rapid flights is to help understand the extreme conditions found within the interiors of giant planets in our solar system. By creating states of matter extremely difficult to achieve on Earth, the flyer plates provide hard data to astrophysicists speculating on the structure and even the formation of planets like Jupiter and Saturn.
What's more, this is 3 times Earth escape velocity and so if one had a huge heat sheild it would be a good way to help launch things using less fuel - one could start the rocket launch using this rail gun and then fire up the conventional rockets once the rocket has a bunch of inertia and some significant initial altitude. If you're only trying to put it in Low Earth Orbit this should be a huge help since LEO is still pretty far in the Earth gravitational field (so that the velocity require to put something into LEO is well below this speed).
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.
#include using namespace std; int main() { int p1, p2, total, n1, total2, b1, total3; cout > p1; cout > p2; total = p1*p2; cout > n1; total2 = total*n1; cout > b1; total3 = total2/b1; cout "The grand total: " total3 endl; return 0; }
I have heard plasma?
this guys should talk with ITER (www.iter.org) to do not spend billions building their reactor and convince them to build a gun factory...
How about this: In Soviet Russia the Railgun ... ummmmm ...
No, I can't really see any easy beneficial (which is, I guess, to say "non-military") applications for this tech, unless you can tell me how this could aid in space exploration (a means of launching spacecraft, maybe?) ... or how it might help in the advancement of processing or data storage technology...
Wait! I've got it:
Railgun confirms: Tank crew is dying.
Ahh, that's more like it. Now I can sleep. :-)
Let's hear it for reading comprehension! Between yahoo news and he submitter, we're somehow left with the impression that this is a rail gun. It's nothing of the kind. It's an implosion machine. As described in the LiveScience.com article linked: "The Z uses a short burst of intense electricity - only a few 10 billionths of a second long - that forces an ionized gas to implode." So we can stop the handwringing over the morality of this "weapon", as to use it as such would require luring the enemy into a chamber the size of a soup can and asking him to hold still while you blast him.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If tuned correctly, perhaps exterminators will have a new technology that will not only kill the bugs in the walls, but also vaporize them without destroying the surrounding building.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
A Bunch of Squirrels beneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Z Machine, -- and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness --
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
(Moderators: Yes, this is a bit redundant. But if Edward FitzGerald can get away with publishing five or six different translations of Khayyam's Rubáiyát, surely I should be allowed to post just two!)
Does this mean, if we shoot a slug into the path that the Earth is orbitting, it'll go RelativeOrbit+Xthousand miles per hour? Gee, why can't NASA think of these ahhem Great ideas?
Oh! Here comes another Great idea! Chang that, my Great(TM) idea. What if NASA just launches a space shuttle in the direction the Earth is orbitting away from? You know, shoot the shuttle aft-ward? I'm sure NASA wouldn't need as much rocket fuel -- you know.
Forget paintball me and my friends can now play Quake in real life.
Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity. -Nikola Telsa
Oh - you said RailGun. I guess my brain just saw the additional three letters.
On a serious note, this seems a useless device for most purposes. It MAY have implications for nuclear fusion, especially if used in any future space-based drives, as you can't exactly place the JET fusion laboratory in space - it's rather big.
It MAY also have implications for subway systems built along similar lines as the Japanese Bullet Train. What I am picturing here is a subway system that is kept in a partial vaccuum, with stations providing airlocks the train can connect to. Instead of having a moving magnetic field pulling the train, as with the Bullet Train, you'd have more of a fixed magnetic field to suspend the train, then a rail-gun to "fire" the train from station to station.
(You'd need the acceleration to be kept below 2g - if you want passengers to return. Or even be walking off, as opposed to scraped off, if you scaled the existing rail-gun systems to this kind of level. I'm thinking something that would be closer to a fairground ride or the catapult on an aircraft carrier, in terms of acceleration, only using magnetism and for long enough to get the train to a decent speed.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
These guys beat them to it
I believe this link better describes what the Z Machine has to do with rails guns.
... when a Love Gun can fire love at 34 kilometeres/second!
I mean, love is great and all but that's just cool.
I'm sure it has some practical non-war mongering use like ridding the world of used car salesmen.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and think of the children for once.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
that can accelerate small aluminum plates at 34 kilometers per second
34 km/s is not an accelration...
I work at Sandia, on this very topic. These are just flyer plate experiments, using the Z-machine's Marx Generators to isentropically accelerate small aluminum flyer plates up to high velocities, in order to better understand the behavior of metals at high pressures/densities/temperatures. This has been around for a while now. The only difference is they've recently attained these higher velocities by having the Marx Generators switch at slightly different times, rather than all at once.
Nothing to see here, move along. (and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain)
solids into liquids, liquids into gas, and even gas into plasma
Let me guess - it then turns plasmas into solids.
So the war of the future will be an evere more complex version of Liquid, Gas, Plasma, Solid - far more sophisticated than the three state method of old including Rock and Paper.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This put's the Flux Capacitor to shame. No where did I park that Delorean?
So this thing can fire stuff at many times the escape velocity of earths G pull. As soon as we can create a nuclear power plant that can launch its waste into space and have energy to spare we can switch all plants from fossil fuels to nuclear. Electricity might get a little more pricey but it'll solve that nasty C02 problem.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
However -- rail guns are on the cusp of military viability. The University of Texas at Austin's Institute of Advanced Technology got 10 million dollars to develop viable rail guns. Just a month ago Janes reported that a prototype of the military rail gun had been tested, and that it was nearing viability.
That article really made me wish I had a Jane's subscription. Apparently, the limiting factor is the size of the capacitor -- if they can get this down than naval applications within a few years are plausible.Incidentally, a fun game, if you're ever bored, is to imagine what would happen to the human body if one were to hold and fire a rail gun (even a wimpy one that shot at a mere 1,600m/s and not at "near the speed of light"), and the law of conservation of momentum actually worked. Really! Try at parties!
Fond wishes,
Moiche
You may have also seen aluminium egg rings fired off older rail-gun devices. The actual material doesn't have to be magnetic, it moves forward because of its own magnetic field induced by current flowing through it. Aluminim is a GREAT conductor of electricity and so makes a similarly great magnetic field. This field, when interacting with the rail gun's, makes it move, NOT the fact that the material itself has (unenergized) magnetic properties. Pretty simple really.
wow, really, wow -- No GNAA, no "First Post!"... I've seen everything.
This is the huge tidbit that I haven't really seen discussed: "That's 50 times faster than a rifle bullet, and three times the velocity needed to escape Earth's gravitational field." A rail gun, of sufficient capacity to catapult raw materials into orbit, would be a gigantic breakthrough for the whole planet.
The article's title is extremely misleading.
This does not bring rail guns any closer to reality, by which I mean it does not bring military rail guns any closer to reality.
The Z-machine is a hanger-sized experimental device akin to a particle accelerator. This was an experiment designed to study extremely high pressures, such as those thought to have been important in Jovian planetary formation.
Saying that this experiment brings rail guns closer to reality is like saying that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN brings PPCs closer to reality.
The purpose of the device is to determine the equations of state for various metals at very high densities/pressures/temperatures.
Faster than the speed at which the earth travels around the sun??? Cmon, give me real units! I need to know how much faster this is than libraries of congress shot out of cannons.
Don't forget about the laywers!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
On something that was being developed at White Sands Missle Range in the early 90's. A friend of mine was working on a device that accelerated a small plastic pellet (about 3mm) to hypersonic speed. They shot them at 6 inch square aluminium plates an inch thick. 3mm entrance and a 3.5 inch exit hole, I saw some targets. Very little splatter of molten metal, most seemed to be vaporized, as I was told, some did become plasma. This was part of the "star wars" space weapons. The shots were fired in a vacuum because air resistance would vaporize the pellets. I don't know what happened to that program. It was just after my father in law left the High Energy Laser Test Facillity. There is still much research and testing going on out there, which is why they are close to Sandia and Los Alamos (300 miles in New Mexico's vast expanse is an easy trip on todays roads). This is besides every missle system under development or improvement.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
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
It's a minor point, but you need to specify the speed relative to something - in this case, it's the speed of relative to the sun. It's good old relativity - and I'm not talking about general or even special - just good old Galilean relativity! (Which says you can't know whether you're moving, or the object you're watching is moving...)
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
There is something weird going on with the math.
First off 76,000 mph is about 38,000 m/s which agrees with the 34 km/s statement so I believe this number.
They say that the pellet achieves this speed in less than a second.
This implies an acceleration greater than or equal to 3400 g's.
Assuming a constant acceleration it also implies a track length of 17km.
Later the article states that the achieved acceleration is 1010 g! This implies an acceleration time of about 3.37 seconds and a track length of about 50km.
These two statements do not agree.
Well railguns are neat and all, but I'm still not joining the Army until they invent the respawn point.
"Derp de derp."
Fortunately there do appear to be some non-military applications. As the writeup says, it can turn some gases directly to plasma. This technology can be further applied to the cheaper production of plasma televisions, possibly very large ones.
Ask me about freelance Java consulting.
Am I glad that our atmosphere doesn't excape the earth at that speed or what!
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
It's a very small gun.
I was quite annoyed by Fortune and her freakin' rail at times. Dunno if it was real or even remotely realistic, but I wouldn't want to get my mass driven by that.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
These aren't the clichés you're looking for... it's:
"In Korea, only old people use railguns. Mostly to liquify noisy young people and their dag-nabbed rap music playin' machines."
You were way off...
Also it may be relevant that I could really go for a bag of potato chips right about now.
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
"The Constitution guarantees us the right to keep and bear rail guns!!!" Later followed by "Mommy... Johnny liquefied the cat again!"
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
The Z machine (and it's earlier configuration called PBFA 2) have been on Sandia for a long time.
As said above, it's not a rail gun. It's not really even particularly useful for rail gun research.
What it's for is to put small amounts of matter at tremendous temperatures and pressures.
There are a lot of reasons to want to do this. Some of it is just basic research. i.e. What happens to matter and the laws governing it at these extreme conditions?
Another application is fusion power research. You can compress deuturium and tritium to the point they will fuse in this machine. Though it's not made to generate power, you can learn about the details of the fusion reaction.
That said, the main reason why this machine was built was indeed for military research. But even that is in a grey area. The US hasn't conducted a nuclear test detonation in quite some time. The reason it was able to do this is that computer simulations and other methods got good enough that they were able to be used instead of actually setting off a thermonuclear or nuclear device. Indeed, many of the Department of Energy's most powerful computers were created specifically to do that sort simulation (ASCII White, IIRC, for example).
When running computer simulations, you have to have some way of calibrating the simulation and checking that it's getting the right answer.
In the case of a supercomputer run simulating a car crash, you can validate it by conducting crash tests, and seeing how closely it agrees with them. Wrecking a few of a given car model is acceptable in return for it.
But, when simulating nuclear weapons, you would often run into cases where to validate the code, you'd, at first glance, have to set one off. The conditions in a nuclear blast are so extreme, that it's difficult to put matter into that sort of state. If you're trying to maintain a test moratorium, that kinda undermines the whole idea.
That's a big reason PBFA 2 and the follow on Z machine were made. They let DOE check the computer simulations and do basic research that would otherwise require nuclear testing. One of the biggest areas of interest is what happens when the materials in a bomb age. A lot of those weapons are getting quite old.
They have many other basic research uses, but a big one is making it possible to keep the nuclear test moratorium.
So, it's grey area. On the one hand, it's used for weapon research. On the other, it helps keep the test moratorium. It also has a lot of basic research uses. So, just like a supercomputer, you have to make your own decision about whether it, on the whole is a good or bad thing.
Uh, was I the only one who got the wrong article on the "magnetic pulse gun" link? It should be here.
Tepid fusion.
Accelrates at 34 km/s?? I thought that was a velocity. If .5 (at^2) = .005 m
And at = 34000 m/s
...then that makes the time about 3e-7 s. That would be something like 11.8 billion g's.
Not bad. Even for such a small projectile, that's an impressive impulse.
-ex
Imagine a beowoulf cluster of those!!
122 400 km per hour or 76 055.8339 miles per hour thank u google calculator :)
the impact of such a weapon reminds me of those dragonBall episodes.. lol
landfills getting full? Let's start launching our trash in plasma form into space!
Try the new Soylent Green Energy Drink!
"How is it?"
"Well, it varies from person to person."
* Olaserov is in the process of thinking up a signature.
Using rail gun on a squirrel would result in too much meat damage. A .22 is almost too much. You're better off using a .17HM2 instead. However, using a railgun on prairie dog could provide a lot entertainment. Think about how flat the trajectory would be and how far out you could hit them. Perfect for the Lubbock area. For those that need help imagining it, try http://www.dogbegone.com/.
Government officials are wondering if this can be used to used to discourage street skating...
What he doesn't know is that I'm wearing a disintegration proof vest!
Does the second Amendment protect our right to turn matter into plasma?
You have to admit, if you got someone to do it, you'd feel pretty damn proud of yourself though. ;)
-Vendal Thornheart
... if you're running around being chased by someone with one of these, chanting, "I refuse to be railed! I refuse to be railed!" repeatedly at high speed will cause them to lose their nerve and not be able to hit the broad side of a barn.
At least, it worked that way in Quake II at LAN parties.
Though it sometimes caused the person with the gun to drop out of the game, reboot into Linux, and start denial-of-service attacking the guy who was chanting...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
RAIL GUN.
that can accelerate small aluminum plates at 34 kilometers per second
They never get their SI units right.
:wq
For every force there is an equal and opposite reaction. Making something go from 0 to 34 in the distance of a gun must produce one major recoil.
Now I foresee a human-carried model! Shoulder rocket launchers let the rocket go on its own - no recoil but don't stand behind the tube. Well, let's replace the burning rocket fuel with a rail gun. The rail shoots out the back in slow motion and the payload goes out the front much much faster. Right? But we're talking magnetic fields at work so....the rail can be curved!! What does that mean?
North and south. Poles that is - double barrel shotgun. As long as both barrels shoot at once one side balances the other as long as the force should cancel at the back end.
Just in case some entrepreneur wants to build one now, remember Equal and Opposite. The rail has to be flexed. In other words, think sawed off shotgun, and even think crossbow. The rail has to be horizontal for the most part until the ends where the ammo is turned by the electromagnetism to shoot forwards. Almost all the force should occur in the horizontal portion while the forward pointing portion doesn't give any more force than a normal gun.
Kind of scary, espcially if the high speed projectile doesn't want to turn the corner at the end, not to mention the long lever arm will make the rails flap. Automatic fire will have to be timed.
The only problem left? electric power for something like this must be pretty big. Kinetic energy = 1/2 mv^2 so even a small m will require a lot of car batteries. I don't see 007 running around with this weapon protecting ski bunnies while his batteries freeze.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Couldn't help noticing that km/s is a unit of velocity, not of acceleration. Should be 34 kilometers per second per second.
Yours truly
Physics Nazi (acting)
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
It seems these guys have been evaluating this new technology.
Open Source Alternatives
a quick glance at all of the comments posted shows a clear contradiction to your insulting incrimination! are you suggesting that slashdot readers don't read the articles they comment on?!
I'm already beginning to think of yet more ways of getting dissimilar materials to bond with each other in such a manner they are gonna STAY that way until they are melted for recycle.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
So we can stop the handwringing over the morality of this "weapon", as to use it as such would require luring the enemy into a chamber the size of a soup can and asking him to hold still while you blast him.
HEAR HEAR! I quite agree with the parent. This should be a discussion about the morality of lureing your enemies into soup can sized implosion chambers and asking him to hold still.
(It doesn't sound cricket, if you ask me...)
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Didn't Arnold have one of these when he was fighting the Cyrix Corp that built em?
:P
I guess only now that he's in Gov. is it getting released
that can accelerate small aluminum plates at 34 kilometers per second
The phrase is just meaningless. Acceleration is measured in distance per time squared units. so it's either kilometer per second squared or accelerates small aluminum plates to speeds of 34 kilometers per second.
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
...if it leaves that cool spiralling trail in the air.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Yahoo News is reporting that scientists at Sandia National Labs have created a magnetic pulse gun (rail gun) that can accelerate small aluminum plates faster than the Earth travels through space. well Duh!! They're ON earth aren't they? Only if you fire them in the opposite direction of where the earth is moving they'd be going slower than earth!
This may sound extremely stupid, but what about the sun's spinning action around the galactic core. How do you factor this in?
ISO certified == THX certified
Whens the BFG coming?
I've checked out Powerlab's site, and it's great looking stuff. No sooner did I wonder how the DoD has been doing than a new engineer joined my lab. At her previous job, she was measuring muzzle velocities of 6km/s from a 1 meter long rail gun... about the same length as the Powerlabs device. I'm guessing the amateurs are a little short of power. ;-)
Luke, help me take this mask off
Rail guns are unlkely to be useful for driving implosions. It would be very hard to focus a symmetric implosion with a railgun. However, you could use the same pulsed power to drive an implosion like a plasma gun. Get a thin gold tube, fill it with DT, and whack in a pulse. The pulse goes up the outside of the tube. The gold outside goes directly to plasma, stops conducting, and so the current can move inward. If you can get the shockwave reaction from the expanding plasma to approximately match the speed of the current penetration, then a nice, cylindrically symmetrical implosion should be yours, and the small burst of annoying penetrative radiation and the hair loss that goes with it.
There is another effect - the Z-pinch - that is a bit railgun-ish. This gets a lot of mention in the Sandia webpage. People used to have great hopes for that - it was quite the thing in the seventies, when people could still use phrases like 'everlasting power from seawater' without laughing - but it is hard to get a symmetrical pinch before instabilities run riot.
Don't take my word for it. Maybe, I'm too old, and things have moved forward since I last was in this field. Sandia is a seriously cool place, even if the people who write their webpages are a bit too keen now and then.
There once was a time when Slashdot was a gathering point for people with a technical clue. The editors would put a technical slant on some event or announcement, which would lead the /. masses into making at least semi-intelligent nerdy commentary.
... the editors comment on highly technical news about a high-voltage instrument for physics experiments by misunderstanding it utterly and spouting total nonsense about progress on rail guns, which have absolutely no bearing on the subject matter.
Look what we've descended to now
Notch one up for the meme of Nerds Are Technically Clueless.
(The world already knows nerds can't code anyway, or they'd have put in dup detection long ago. Now they see we can't think either.)
Thank you Slashdot editors. You are a real credit to the technical community.
Speaking of "Quake in real life," how long before the US Military -- extremely desperate for recruiting -- uses FPS games as a promotion tool?
and I suspect that is why the M-1 Abrams is considered obsolete, and its replacement lacks heavy armor. Nickel sized holes were found in three M-1 tanks in Iraq --- on both sides of the tank.
The US is building naval destroyers with rail guns.
This is related to maintaining the nation's nuclear stockpile and studying the processes that go on inside giant planets in our solar system like Jupiter and Saturn. Rail guns have already been created by programs sponsored by the U.S. Navy and Army, but need further development to reach full operation. One of the major challenges is heat. The fact that the "rails" are not superconductors means that heat builds up over time, presenting an inherent problem in the whole idea. The challenge is to find a material that will either conduct better, or dissipate heat quicker. After the propulsion challenges are overcome, there will be the challenge of developing a projectile that is accurate over large distances. The dynamics of accuracy using an explosive start and an electromagnetic start are quite different. Once these challenges are overcome and testing is completed, the targeted applications will be for use in the Navy "Electric Ship", and an Army tank-style weapon system. Even though there has been work done on miniaturizing the power supply, there are no programs to turn this technology into a rifle-style personel weapon.
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
... for the coders who now have to write this into Duke Nukem Forever!
Yeah.. All this wolrd needs... Man that is one scary gun.
http://www.powerlabs.org/railgun2.htm sure, it's a bit expenseive, but hey, it works!
That's 50 times faster than a rifle bullet, and three times the velocity needed to escape Earth's gravitational field.
I can see the knock-on effect of this already: a group of Talibans fire their guns in the air celebrating, which accidentally kills 5000 aliens on a different planet, who then come and wipe out us nasty earthlings...
ok perhaps not - it could wreak havoc on our satellite systems though!
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
I think someone failed high school physics. People really need to learn how to write and interpret. Did anyone else notice this upon first reading?
Traditionally, war has been very personal (village to village, family group to family group). Also, the bad old days were very personal; you often saw the eyes of the people you kill.
Even clan societies are generally more laid back these days. (Compared to the continuous small warfare that existed a thousand years ago.)
You apply the personal morals of a modern society on the situation between countries.
In a modern society, with police, the state have a monopoly on violence and uphelds laws that you can trust.
In a clan society, without police, the only safety is that a victim's relatives will revenge wrongs. The relatives do the work of the police and revenge often results in blood feuds.
The situation between countries is more like a clan society -- because there is no world police force. Very big clans, lots of blood feuds...
Also note that you have to do revenge in a clan society. If no relatives would revenge misdeeds, it would be like living in a bad area without police protection; very dangerous. (To change it, work for a modern society -- and keep on with the old until the new works.)
Wow, one of most offtopic posts ever! :-)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Well ... our QA people have been asking questions for the last couple years now that turn my brain to liquid.
Anyway, nice to see new creative ways of killing people painlessly.
Gangsta: "You're dust ( make that plasma ), you fucker!"
I don't feel like it...
It's nothing new. It's the Z Machine (to lazy to post wikipedia link, if you complain your more lazy than I am) put to a new use.
Like this one
But if you don't have any spare bungee cord or a cooking pot, you can always make do with a Clay Pigeon launcher
on your mom's face!
Ok, so we have 1010g which is about 10000m/s^2. We accelerate for "less than" a second and reach 30000m/s? That is too high by at least a factor of 3. And remarkably, after having accelerated for "less than a second" (which implies being close to a second, and indeed we could not use less to get this speed at this acceleration) at an average velocity of either 5000m/s or 15000m/s (according to the calculation), we just moved, no, not 5000m or 15000m, but rather 5 millimeters, which is off by a factor of at least a million.
What nonsense. I suppose that what they want to be saying is that _after_ _exiting_ the contraption, the metal plate has to travel only 5 mm before hitting the target.
Pretty Big Fucking Accelerator?
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
How about we make small rail guns that fire smaller rail guns that fire smaller packages...
Now that would be fun!
Put a squirrel on a mission to pluto in a day!
plasma in to HOT MAG-MAH!
Darn. I had visions of massive mayhem games...
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
Kidney stone smasher supreme. Worlds Best Hammer.
http://members.cox.net/johnahamill/armorodd.html
I admit, "Rail Guns" have become common shorthand for all electromagnetic accelerator guns, but it's still taking an existing name in common usage and using it for something completely different. You can't just call a Building to Building weapon a B2Bomber, or an armored 18 wheeler a "battle-ship."
Get a new name. The one you want was taken in WW2.
The ______ Agenda
they have my BFG-9000. Railgun. Bah.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
http://www.ga.com/atg/railgun.php I'm not sure if the Z machine can really be termed a "railgun" but these things are in preliminary stages and can shoot projectiles.
Get it from the source!0 05/nuclear-power/z-saturn.html
http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/news-releases/2
look closely at the location of Sandia Labs...
Albuquerque New Mexico...
Thats Black Mesa in disguise to me...
Whats next? resonance cascade?
creepy...
Heck, I can throw a rock faster than the Earth travels through space - as long as I'm at the equator, the local time is near midnight, and I'm throwing the same direction as the Earth is traveling. And don't go trying to get relativistic on me.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Methinks the ideal combo for powering a railgun or laser would be a diesel/omnifuel-electric hybrid.
Or, how about some nucular Bolos? W00TT!
Yeah, it said small alluminum plates, but what about lets say, nukes later on? Just a thought.
A rail gun weapon does not need to be near this fast(35km\sec) to ruin your whole daye rtech_RailGuns,,00.html
A projected naval rail gun with a 2.5km/sec muzzle velocity could deliver a guided projectile with an impact velocity of Mach 5 to targets at ranges of 250 miles, at a rate greater than 6 rounds per minute.
A test demonstrated that a rail gun projectile's kinetic energy could create a 10-foot diameter crater, 10 feet deep in solid ground, and achieve projectile penetration to 40 feet - 3 to 5 times more effective than current guns.
Rail gun projectiles are smaller and easier to store: a standard AGS magazine holds 1,500 rounds; a rail gun magazine could hold 10,000 rounds in the same amount of space.
http://www.military.com/soldiertech/0,14632,Soldi
This all reminds me of Neal Stephenson's The Big U... still one of the funniest books I've ever read.
The famous Sandia Z-machine is more of a quarter shrinker than a rail gun.
Sadly, the evolution of the English language nowadays seems to be directed by bad science fiction and gory video games. Real rail guns were projectile weapons so large they must be transported by rail - they can't be towed or moved with a truck without being disassembled because they are too heavy for roadbeds - and they have names like "Gustav", "Big Bertha" and "Schlanke Emma".
If the Z-machine was a gun (which it's not) it oughta be called a capacitive discharge cannon, not a rail gun. But I guess that's too hard to spell for kids today?
Those who ignore history are apparently in charge of revising the english language. Wikipedia and dictionary.com both use the "new" definition of railgun (although at least wiki has the grace to mention real railguns in passing).
Future historians are going to hate us for this one.
yah, maybe all those loosers were afriad they would get vaporized by a rail gun!
The US Army has working prototypes of actual rail guns... or Guass Rifles if you are familiar with BattleTech. The Army guns are cranking out tungston penetrators at 22KPS, which is twice as fast as the Rhinmetal 120MM smooth bore used in our M1 Abrams MBTs. Unfortunately there are a great many problems with the guns... such as they tend to destroy themselves after a shot is fired and of course the power situation to charge a second shot. So really it's nothing more than a really really spendy zip gun.
MadOgre.com
But can it do the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs?
Well, that's nice. Except that "34 kilometers per second" is not a measure of acceleration. Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, according to Wikipedia. Velocity, of course, is the measurement of the rate and direction of motion.
I'm just glad that I'm fast enough to keep up.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
since the days of Zork.
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
Why are all the Google ads for this page releated to Anger Management?
Driving a projectile with a magnetic field (energy but no mass, hooray) seems to offer limitless muzzle velocities. However, they have a history of throwing their breech into the ground at mach 2, rather than putting a bullet in the air when anyone over the rank of major is watching
I keep hearing things like this -- that, being so much more powerful than regular guns, railguns present all sorts of new engineering challenges, like the sabot being either vaporized or spot-welded to the rails the instant the current starts, or the device flying apart from various internal forces, etc.
So... anyone think to try making it a bit less powerful, at least at first? I know the physics only vaguely -- is there a minimum power level at which the effect will work? Or could you make one that was "only", say, 3x-10x more powerful than a conventional Howitzer, and work up from there?
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
I used them as sniper rifles. Long distance Headshot were fun.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
--J
J