http://www.pskovinfo.ru/coilgun/
A battery powered coil pistol. For real, but no better than a pellet gun.
A battery powered coil pistol. For real, but no better than a pellet gun.
Real Gauss pistol
- Thread starter Uncle Bob
- Start date
trader jim
SOC-14 1K
Is this for real???...you MIGHT be able to knock cats off the back fence with it at close range!!! 
Liam Devlin
SOC-14 5K
Once more we step from SCi Fi into sci fact..Good stuff Uncle Bob! Thanks!!!
trader jim
SOC-14 1K
would this be more powerful if it was a rifle??
could you include more power???
could you include more power???
Yes and no. http://www.coilgun.com/ look through this site on the theory (and practice of building your own coil gun.Originally posted by trader jim:
would this be more powerful if it was a rifle??
could you include more power???
These guns use one set of coils to accelerate the bullet, so the limit on the energy provided would be limited to the power the wires making up the coil could carry. I suspect you could just about double the muzzle energy of this gun if you didn't mind the occasional fire from the coils igniting.
If the Traveller Gauss weapons are using coilgun type technology, they probably use a series of coils. But using a series of coils requires even more capaciters, and a very carefully balanced set of power switches.
There are ways to enhance the gun: Make the projectiles with (or with a core of) a rare-earth magnet, like the type used in speakers. And get the power supply to reverse the current just as the projectile reaches the center of the coil. But that would probably take a second set of capacitors.
The reason these type of weapons are not used, and may remain forever science fiction, is their power requirements. Getting a lot of power into a small space and still being able to get it back out very quickly is difficult.
Stupid thing has now been posted on Slashdot. So that's the last you'll see of the site for the next two days.
Railguns are the other way of doing gauss guns, using a pulse of electricity rather than a pulse of magnetisim to accelerate the projectile. Note the coilgun picture above has the same number of moving parts as the railgun: 1, the projectile.
Railguns _are_ simpler to construct than coilguns, however. They don't require the same level of switching gear, and at least as importantly, the position of the projectile in a coilgun is actively unstable, which means it has a high probability of tumbling inside the barrel (probably jamming or disabling the weapon), whereas the projectile in a railgun is held in place by rails and is not unstable.
The disadvantage of railguns is that there are rails present, which add drag and wear to the system. Also, both railguns and coilguns require exotic power sources.
For game mechanics effects, gauss weapons should be _very_ prone to jamming if the ammo is low quality or dirty, or if the weapon is mistreated.
The disadvantage of railguns is that there are rails present, which add drag and wear to the system. Also, both railguns and coilguns require exotic power sources.
For game mechanics effects, gauss weapons should be _very_ prone to jamming if the ammo is low quality or dirty, or if the weapon is mistreated.
Richard Saunders
SOC-12
Hello.
Sorry i must be missing something.
A Gauss gun is a magnetic accellerator weapon.
I thought that a rail gun (like the one they mounted on a warship for firing practice) was an explosive charge gun (didn't they vaporize aluminium by running an electric charge through it) this shot the projectal out the barrel like a normal shell just faster.
You cant get a faster shot out of a Gauss gun just by doubling the power in (the magnetic field will become saturated and more power just waists the power).
Aluminium works quit well (it setts up an opposing magnetic field inside itself and excellerats itself inside the mag field, you just need to get it going in the right direction).
BYE.
Sorry i must be missing something.
A Gauss gun is a magnetic accellerator weapon.
I thought that a rail gun (like the one they mounted on a warship for firing practice) was an explosive charge gun (didn't they vaporize aluminium by running an electric charge through it) this shot the projectal out the barrel like a normal shell just faster.
You cant get a faster shot out of a Gauss gun just by doubling the power in (the magnetic field will become saturated and more power just waists the power).
Aluminium works quit well (it setts up an opposing magnetic field inside itself and excellerats itself inside the mag field, you just need to get it going in the right direction).
BYE.
Not exactlly. The projectile accellerates though the action of the magnetic field on the current accross the base of the projectile.
http://home.insightbb.com/~jmengel4/rail/rail-intro.html
http://home.insightbb.com/~jmengel4/rail/rail-intro.html
Early (prototype) gauss weapons in Traveller might appear at lower TLs but using belt or backpack power units in the same fashion as laser weapons. Support versions might continue to use such supplies even once a disposable battery with enough energy density to fire off a 40 round clip has been developed...
This is a problem sometimes in conventional PWM (Pulse-Width Modulated) solenoids, where a loose fit between the armature and the core tube can lead to jamming problems. A solution that works well is to coat the moving part with PTFE (or something similar), which allows you to tighten up your tolerances a lot and still have a free-moving part.
Not too exotic. The newest artillery sized railguns use compulsators. The Army expects to field it's first electromagnetic gun in 2008. This will be at least an 8MJ gun.
And rail erosion has been pretty much dealt with through the design of new armature-sabots. We can probably expect the same kind of technology in railgun small arms.
Canonically, gauss weapons are quite obviously coil guns. But this was at a time when the railgun conceots was unknown outside of very limited circles. The latter has certainly proved to be far superior for weapons applications.
It should be noted that the canonical gauss rifle (coilogun) requires a ferromagnetic projectile. If we assume elemental iron, a 4 gram, 4mm projectile would be 40 mm in length, deliver 4500 J of energy and generate 5 J or recoil energy.
This would mean this very long projectile would have about 25% more energy than a modern 7.62x51mm rifle bullet with about the same recoil as an M-16.
The projectile is probably unnecessarily large and likely could be driven at an even higher velocity.
As you may be aware, the University of Tex at Austin's center for elctromechanics is the lead for railgun compulsator design.
There iused to be a bunch of stuff on their website about the Army's elctromagnetic gun project, and the FMBT (Future Main Battle Tank) which is supposed to field in 2015 with a railgun main gun.
Looks like most of it is no longer accessable without a password.
Here's a link.
http://www.utexas.edu/research/cem/programs/pulsed_ac.html
Also, try a search for Army electric gun project
There iused to be a bunch of stuff on their website about the Army's elctromagnetic gun project, and the FMBT (Future Main Battle Tank) which is supposed to field in 2015 with a railgun main gun.
Looks like most of it is no longer accessable without a password.
Here's a link.
http://www.utexas.edu/research/cem/programs/pulsed_ac.html
Also, try a search for Army electric gun project
Andrew Boulton
The Adminator
The end of the Cold War killed a lot of the funding for these kind of programmes. I doubt if there will be much significant progress in the forseeable future. Back when I was in the heavy armour business a decade ago, everyone was talking about upgrading to 140mm, or exotic tech like railguns or liquid propellant, but 120mm (even the inferior US smoothbore version
is still good enough.Before anyone gets upset, Andrew is correct. The US M256 is 1980s technology, the old Rheinmetal L44. The German Leopard 2A6 has a much longer smoothbore L55 gun which is more powerfull, the British rifled 120mm is a little more accurate, and the Russiams have been developing 135mm and 152mm guns.
They were hoping for railguns on the FCS, but they aren't ready yet so direct fire gun is now a 120mm.
The FMBT is mostly fantasy right now so it could be armed with anything by 2015. 140mm, railguns, plasma guns, hafnium mini-nukes... They are still hoping the railgun will give them 120mm performance in an air transportable package, which igmores the possibiity of facing Kontac-5 explosive armor or maybe LeClerc MBTs.
The new Army Chief of Staff just fired the Generals who have been futzing around with the Medium Brigade and the Objective Force, so no one knows where that is going now. (The view form the middle-ranks of the Army is that Schoomacher is clearing out the political generals who prospered under Clinton.)
They were hoping for railguns on the FCS, but they aren't ready yet so direct fire gun is now a 120mm.
The FMBT is mostly fantasy right now so it could be armed with anything by 2015. 140mm, railguns, plasma guns, hafnium mini-nukes... They are still hoping the railgun will give them 120mm performance in an air transportable package, which igmores the possibiity of facing Kontac-5 explosive armor or maybe LeClerc MBTs.
The new Army Chief of Staff just fired the Generals who have been futzing around with the Medium Brigade and the Objective Force, so no one knows where that is going now. (The view form the middle-ranks of the Army is that Schoomacher is clearing out the political generals who prospered under Clinton.)
Considering that the 22kV capacitor bank was installed at the Greenhill facility in late 1999, one could hardly argue that the end of the cold war has stopped all railgun funding. Ideed, the new facility served as a model for the later 52MJ facility at ARDEC and the 32 MJ facility at Kirkcudbright, Scotland.
Indeed, in late 2001, proposals vere being vetted for a new facility to replace both Greenhill and ARDEC. This would become the National Electric Gun Facility and support at least 84 MJ and a minumum 2 kilometer firing range.
