Thread: Coilguns as Weapons

Hi guys.

Just starting to build a new coilgun, and I was wondering if we could ever use them as viable military weapons. If not, why? My guess would would be either reliability or finding a power source. Maybe they will be used, in a form such as this: http://www.thinkboti...om/military.htm

Any ideas, feel free to post.

Seems unlikely to me, the good thing about conventional guns are that they are generally reliable and simple (consisting of a hammer a bullet and a barrel...) They are less likely to break. The gun described there seems quite complex and could go wrong in a variety of ways. And yeh, the last thing you want on a battle field is for your juice to run out, definitly a disadvantage to the hammer approach

That's what I thought. So, with this railgun the navy is developing, how will it be made more reliable? I read they wanted to fit it to their destroyers.

There are some advantages if its to be placed on a battleship. For instance the ship isn't very likely to run out of batteries like a soldier on the battlefield, also the fact that the projectiles wouldn't carry any sort of explosives would make it safer against accidents/ if the ship was hit by another explosive.

According to wikipedia the projectiles are lighter than an equivelant shell and are more accurate

I'm building one after this coilgun

Originally Posted by P4raMagnet1c

That's what I thought. So, with this railgun the navy is developing, how will it be made more reliable? I read they wanted to fit it to their destroyers.

Rail guns and Coil (also called gauss) guns are different concepts. About Navy railguns though, it's budget for that research was just killed.

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We haven't had a battleship in more than 20 years.

I know they're different; I was just wondering how the navy's research was coming along. Shame its been cut, thast could've a great weapon. Cite a source for that info?

Cite a source for that info?

US Senate Cancels Navy?s Superlaser, Railgun Program| Danger Room | Wired.com | Propulsiontech's Blog

Rail gun's are very viable means of projectile acceleration, and are much much simpler than coil guns. You can situate a massive rail gun to fire massive objects at incredible speeds, without the need for much, if any, explosive propulsion. The shells in a rail gun are more efficiently accelerated if the first 200-500m/s of velocity is achieved through other means of acceleration than the rail gun's energy bank, but beyond that, they can achieve ridiculous speeds in very low small amounts of time over a relatively small distance. A fantastic application of a rail gun would be a military satellite set up that would run off of solar charging, where the solar energy would either charge MASSIVE capacitor banks or accelerate a massive wheel to store the energy in a kinetic form, to be used later.

Lynx, is the budget cut going to affect you at all?

Originally Posted by Arcane_Mathematician

Lynx, is the budget cut going to affect you at all?

No. I'm Army and will be retired in four months. I remembered the story about the cuts from the periodic news I get from having been part of the Joint Test Community a few years back.

The simplicity and efficiency of rail guns would be enough to make them viable weapons if only they could eventually be made to last more than one or two shots.