DescentBB

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/02/railgu ... yment.html

OH MY GOD ARE YOU EXCITED OR WUT
I CAN MAKE TEX EVAR BIGGA

I HEARD AN INTERNAL POP IN MY SKULL NOW I CAN'T EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW AWESOME THIS PICTURE IS AND THERE'S BLOOD COMMING OUTOF MY EARS IT'S TIME TO CEREAL POPTARTS THIS FRENCH SUPERTANKER DOMINOES BUTTS GUMMANCOMMINGPENCILEATDESKS
(HELP)

umok

I want one:

\"Initial tests showed that targets can be obliterated by the kinetic force of the impact\"

That's freaking awesome. When will they sell backyard versions?

Wow. Pinpoint accuracy, less collateral damage. Sounds good to me.

Wow...


More info


That's nuts.

Selling point is ..safety????? o_0 .. I'm sure it will be fine once the ozone clears. lol!

I saw this (or possibly a slightly smaller version) on futureweapons. What an insanely powerful weapon!

Interesting ... Especially the part about how this technology can/will be used to aid getting objects (including ships) into space much more economically.

TechPro wrote:Interesting ... Especially the part about how this technology can/will be used to aid getting objects (including ships) into space much more economically.

Actually I heard about a railgun being proposed to shoot H3 (i think it was H3) from the moon to earth.

But how would you get rid of shrapnel? Wouldn't the shock of impact create an explosion and its own shrapnel?

its safer for the people firing it, not the ones on the business end.

tho, who'd said it would produce less shrapnel?

You know what's killer? These weapons will work just as well in space.

It could also be used as propulsion in space. As the 2500m/s exhaust velocity is the same efficiency as a solid rocket booster - but can use metal scrap as "fuel", and i bet it's a lot more powerful.
Abiet compare to ion drive engines with an exhaust velocity of over 11x that.
(rocket efficiency is all about exhaust speed, the higher the better)

and check this out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet
the railgun is fast enough to be able to launch a Scramjet engine.
The railgun could fire a scramjet powered cruise missile to strike anywhere in the world (from anywhere else) within 1hour 40mins. Assuming it could be sufficiently G force hardened to survive launch.

The way to go is to use this to launch satelites, the railgun's purpose is just to reach scramjet ignition speed - then you scramjet all the way upto the edge of space, release your satelites, then glide back down to refuel and reload into the railgun, and do it all over again.

Sedwick wrote:But how would you get rid of shrapnel? Wouldn't the shock of impact create an explosion and its own shrapnel?

It'll produce less shrapnel simply because of the lack of high explosives in the warhead - assumably it's the high explosive warhead that produces most shrapnel as even with shaped charges the explosive force can't be entirely directed. Some of the explosive force inevitably escapes backwards.

I guess these slugs are not for carpet bombing. From the way the article is talking about the technology, they seem to be solely armour penetrators. But who can trust the military Public Relations machine, oh I mean "Mass Communication Specialists", hehe funny job descriptions.

Sedwick wrote:But how would you get rid of shrapnel? Wouldn't the shock of impact create an explosion and its own shrapnel?

yup. There is also plenty of shrapnel down range from the carrier package as it disintegrates at exit from the barrel, but with that much energy being expelled.. you deserve what you get if you are in front of it (inadvertently) when it's fired. Shrapnel will be the LEAST of your worries.

Here's a slow motion video that the OP's pic came from

another slightly different (different firing perhaps?)


Older video here, this media tough-guy introduces a person who explains how they can release a rain of \"shot\" as they are comming down to spray large target areas.



Does anyone know why the supposedly fuel-less slug is trailed by a fireball? Is that just plasma created by the high air friction?

At that speed, it's entirely possible Roid. It could also depend on what the round was made of. That's why i made the comment about the ozone.

Wishmaster wrote:That's freaking awesome. When will they sell backyard versions?

Backyard version??? What about my right to bear arms? I want one that I can holster on my hip.

In other weapons tech news, electronic triggers look like they'll be really cool. Imagine a gun with no moving parts except for the trigger itself... you pull the trigger, it sends an electric signal that ignites the powder in the shell.

Futureweapons had a handgun like that. They also had an array of something like 20 x 20 barrels, each of which had a row of bullets in them that could be fired one by one, a couple milliseconds after each other. They put something like a thousand rounds on target in a tenth of a second.

How interesting, we're back to cannons.

Plasma cannons!

I'm sure the flames are caused by friction of the sabot material against the air. Pic of the shock wave is wicked.

Any material in contact with another material will transfer to each other. Be cool to use different sabot materials like ceramic alloys to see if it does cool tricks.

Electricity is taken for granted. It is amongst the most powerful of primal forces we know of.

Duper wrote:At that speed, it's entirely possible Roid. It could also depend on what the round was made of. That's why i made the comment about the ozone.

Canuck wrote:Plasma cannons!

I'm sure the flames are caused by friction of the sabot material against the air. Pic of the shock wave is wicked.

Any material in contact with another material will transfer to each other. Be cool to use different sabot materials like ceramic alloys to see if it does cool tricks.

Electricity is taken for granted. It is amongst the most powerful of primal forces we know of.

it must be like the plasma created around spacecraft during re-entry. They're not ablative are they?
a while back i was reading about a 3D display that worked by focusing a laser at a point in 3D space - superheating the air and creating a tiny ball of plasma wherever it was focues at, then painting 3D pictures dot by dot outof superheated air plasma. I was trying to figure out exactly how much energy was needed to create a visible air-plasma, but hit a brick wall . Perhaps studying the speed of re-entry needed to create plasma would be easier.

I think the amount of energy needed would depend on what altitude you were at. Air density/mass being a factor. Also, to a degree, composition.

I'm not a physicist, but I don't think you can focus a single laser beam at a certain point in space. There might be a way of doing it, but I don't think it would result in the charging air molecules. And really, the plasma for the most part won't contain any more energy than the laser itself.

Bigass gauss cannons are MUCH more fun!

well it was a rather powerful pulse laser. Pulse lasers can be pretty powerful.

here's some lasers ionising air (ie: making plasma) in continuous channels.


actually - this one appears to be the actual display device itself in action

this one seems a less polished proof of concept


think of it like light and paper. shine a light at a paper and it doesn't burn, but focus that light on it and you can start a fire. Air itself will do the same, ANYTHING will do the same (plasma is the 4th state of matter - any matter) but you just need a lot more power. These lasers are pulsed - the plasma only exists for a fraction of a second at a time, but each pulse IS quite powerful

same principle is used to accelerate these orbiters

<- vid on my account :3

ahh ok,, i was just going to say that I just tried it with my mouse and nothing happened.