Slashdot Mirror
Guy Creates Handheld Railgun With a 3D-Printer (engadget.com)
turkeydance writes: Using a combination of 3D printing and widely available components, David Wirth built a functioning handheld railgun that houses six capacitors and delivers more than 1,800 joules of energy per shot. So far he has tested the gun using metal rods made of graphite, aluminum and copper-coated tungsten. David has shot projectiles at over 250 meters per second in tests.
For proof and pudding, look to the US Navy's Railgun program. They have successfully shot test projectiles at Mach 8, the end-game is a reliable system to fire 10KG round at Mach 7.
Keep in mind the speed drops dramatically after exiting the barrel/rail assembly.
If only criminals have guns it will be damn easy to identify them and lock them up.
True-ish, but the devil is in the details... you'd probably need a lot more law enforcers to be able to do that. AKA a "police state".
I, for one, prefer a society were it is generally acceptable that individual members take some responsibility for their own well-being. I always thought the liberal mindset is all about the individual and his liberties.
The rest of the developed world with its massively lower murder rates disagrees as well as Sweden.
Sweden actually has a pretty high gun rate per capita due to our big hunting community.
However, with gang shootings becoming an every day occurance in our ghettos and our tiny police force strained from uncontrolled immigration things are about to get ugly.
Posting anon since I work with the Dahlgren EMLF (Electro-Magnetic Launch Facility)
I'm not going to comment on specs, but the current test launchers (to my knowledge) does not require rebuilding every shot (even with higher MJ launches). They did about 6 years ago. The navy's final launcher also is going to fire at rates over 9 / min, which puts a lot more load on the rails and power supply system (and other things). This is part of why it's taking awhile to develop. Compressing a building's worth of equipment down to fit in a ship is also non-trivial.
It's not particularly expensive to shoot. I have been told there are some times we do shots as opposed to using modeling because it's quicker, cheaper, and is better data. The missile development people would kill for something like that.
There are some issues with rail wear, but a round only ever gets fired once, so the electrical destruction of the round that occurs only has to not affect the aerodynamics of the round for that shot.