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Gamers May Get a Charge Out of the Gauss Rifle
Zothecula writes "Well, Patrick Priebe might have outdone himself with this one. In the past, the German cyberpunk weapons-maker has brought us such creations as a wrist-mounted mini-crossbow, a laser-sighted rotary-saw-blade-shooting crossbow, and a flame-throwing glove. His latest nasty futuristic device? A video game-inspired electromagnetic weapon, called the Gauss Rifle."
From the description is'nt it more of a railgun type of weapon ?
If you've ever played BattleTech, past the original set of Mechs, you've seen Gauss Rifles. IIRC they were introduced about the time of the Clan Invasion (possibly retconned to the Lost Tech)
The only real problem I can see with a Gauss Rifle is the recoil, which could be considerable.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Don't be silly; everyone knows you don't bring a railgun to a watermelon fight.
As with electric cars and aircraft, the power density of boring, smelly chemical fuels are just stubbornly competitive with electric tricks...
It's a pity, because they are much more entertaining; but it's persistently the case.
No. A coilgun and a railgun are different. The fact that a lot of sci-fi describes the physics of coilguns but calls them railguns causes a lot of misconceptions. But it's pretty simple, seeing as one uses coils and the other uses rails (who'da thunkit?).
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Well, the thing is that coilguns are built to shoot ferromagnetic projectiles and he's shooting aluminium pellets. And alluminium is not ferromagnetic (but paramagnetic). Anything I'm missing ?
TFA: Fortunately, he has no plans on developing it commercially, or on telling other people how to make one of their own.
Capacitors, em coils, pressure sensors... you pretty much already told us how to build it. Of course, anyone with an IQ above room temperature could have worked that out from the descriptions in the various games that employ similar weapons. I personally would have gone with something other than pressure sensors to trigger the next coil -- wear/tear, added drag, etc. -- but to each his own.
As far as producing it commercially? The US Navy is already working on that, thanks.
This guy has a history of making cool garage-project, working replicas, but it's nothing as innovative as all that. There's a reason soldiers are still carrying around powder-charged ammo instead of giant power packs and several pounds of coil.
You have your engineering constraints wrong.
The battery size reflects the "clip" size. You'll be lucky if your battery size/weight is much smaller than the ammo it flings for a bunch of basic chemistry reasons. A battery the size of a truck trailer would be able to fling a volume/weight of ammo about the size of a truck trailer, either all at once or more likely eventually. In other words the energy density of chemical batteries is never going to be a whole heck of a lot better (like orders of magnitude, not the smallest decimal point) than the energy density of smokeless powder. Hence the intense interest in hypersonic projectiles. I suppose if you had a nuclear aircraft carrier or nuclear powered submarine to power it, then ...
The velocity reflects the weight and number of the coils. Something that is pretty wimpy compared to a slingshot is about the most a human can handle. If you insist on hypersonic velocities its going to be immensely huge and probably quite inefficient as a tradeoff making the whole weapon system fairly useless.
Your budget reflects the total projectile energy via capacitor bank size. Something light enough you can pick up and an individual might be able to afford makes for the worlds wimpiest pellet gun, not much more than airsoft really. If you insist on blowing up a tank, you'll need a truck trailer full of capacitors costing about as much as a house. Capacitors are a really awful way to store energy, but the only way to release the energy quick enough for hypersonic power. If you get serious, internal resistance and crushing magnetic forces and strange resonant effects become a big problem (no longer able to treat the cap as the simple AC/DC electronics 101 simplification of a perfect device anymore)
Usually the limiter for the home builder is triggering followed by power supplies. Whats most likely to stop you is finding a big and bad enough set of SCRs or whatever to handle triggering or if you try mechanical like this guy you end up accidentally building a arc welder, second your average noob is mystified at how to generate more than a couple hundred volts without spending lots of money or getting killed or blowing up the trigger system. If they succeed at that, the next limiter is usually the spectacular cost of high voltage low resistance high capacity capacitors... any 1 or 2 of the 3 isn't going to do, and maxing out all 3 is going to be very expensive. Assuming you pull that off, coils are pretty simple, as are batteries.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Anything I'm missing ?
Yes.
Coilguns actually are good at shooting conductive pellets, since the induced current creates an opposing field and force. The best pellets are often iron cored with a thick copper sheath, giving the best of both worlds.
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Gauss rifles had been around since the star league, as with most things the Clan versions were just better than their IS equivalents.
Actually the main problem is that to achieve good efficiency the barrel must be very long.
Also you need a fast power supply, which is a major problem for any electromagnetic gun.
Ever see those people with their little RC dragsters? One turn of wire armatures with high current draw cells to power them? I think science has this covered by now, it's only a question of how big a projectile you want to lob. The US Navy has been experimenting with these for years and plan to equip ships with them, capable of lobbing shells well over one hundred miles, at mach 5 or better. Power supplies capable of high current draws and perhaps arrays of capacitors and you're well on your way.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You mean the article where he explicitly says his inspiration was a weapon from Crysis 2?
Gauss Rifle was the term used in Traveller, but not only in Traveller, it's mentioned in many other places including games, which is why I knew exactly what a Gauss Rifle was despite never having heard of Traveller.
So it doesn't actually tell you that Traveller was his inspiration at all.
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