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)."

Comments

Plates don't liquify people

[cheesebikini]

Plates don't liquify people. People liquify people.

Re:Just because we can do a thing...

[nrlightfoot]

This is a non-military use. They are using it to simulate conditions deep within giant planets. Also this isn't really a rail gun. For one it doesn't use rails, and the whole aim of this experiment is unrelated to rail guns.

Did you not do basic physics at school?

[Anonymous Coward]

"a magnetic pulse gun (rail gun) that can accelerate small aluminum plates at 34 kilometers per second"

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 /. were pedantic nerds with nothing better to do hang out, not CNN.

Re:Did you not do basic physics at school?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is /. were pedantic nerds with nothing better to do hang out, not CNN.

And as one such, I can't help pointing out that "were" should be "where".

Re:faster, how?

[OO7david]

This is unneed pendantry. If you are not only able to list off these places as frames of referrence but also think of them in the first place, odds are you already know the answer.

Most sensible people would take it as being the sun spinning around the sun, and leave it there.

Since there is no pleasing you therein, the earth is more or less 149,668,992 km from the sun, which gives a circumfrence of around 940,398,011 km which over 365 days gives 29.8 km/second.

So, there you go, it's around the sun.

Wrong

[brian0918]

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)

These are not the rail guns you are looking for

[Moiche]

True, the Z Machine is not a gun -- it's a giant magnetic field generator. I guess referring to a giant magnetic field generator as a "gun" works better from a journalistic prespective.

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.

UT-IAT has devised a common low-cost projectile concept for both naval surface-fire support and army non line-of-sight (NLOS) engagements using an EM gun launcher. It has a flight mass of 15 kg and contains either multiple kinetic-energy flechettes or a smaller number of sub penetrators made of tungsten. In its naval guise it has a muzzle energy of 64 MJ; a muzzle velocity of 2,500 m/s; a maximum range in excess of 500 km and an impact velocity of 1,600 m/s. From a more size-constrained land tactical platform it would be expected to have a muzzle energy of 20 MJ; a muzzle velocity of 1,400 m/s and an impact velocity of 700 m/s out to ranges in excess of 100 km.

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

Does not.

[Larthallor]

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.

Futurama, of course

[Olaserov]

Try the new Soylent Green Energy Drink!

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Re:Shitty weapon in Counterstrike

[Anonymous Coward]

Point them at a country and demand their oil for power generation? :o