Gauss Rifle?

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JCooperfan1911

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It seems they’ve cooked up a Buck Rogers style wunderwaffen that looks straight out of a star war:

60-FF7631-550-E-492-F-8-ACF-A3-FA02-FCBCC0.png

Supposedly uses the forces of electro-magnetisism to launch a steel pin at a couple hundred feet a second. Stopping power at this point seems inferior to the venerable Colt’s .45 automatic, but some eggheads are predicting the output levels will increase in coming years.

Thoughts?
 
As Mr. McCollum said in his overview of the GR1 Anvil recently, it’s important to remember that the Wright flyer only went 200 feet on it’s first flight. A 200 foot flight is about as useful as a 230 FPS mass driver (not quite a gauss rifle since it doesn’t spin the projectiles yet) which is to say not very useful for much of anything. It’s just the first step to something that will be a real and useful technology within our lifetimes. It’s very exciting.
 
What it needs, aside from the velocity, is a different projectile.
Something like rifled slugs for a shotgun (the rifling on the slugs doesn't really do much, but the distribution of weight does) or a finned projectile.
Even arranging it to shoot ball bearings, rather than pins, would help. A ball can be made accurate enough for the range that thing's getting--just look at paintball--and it's certainly more accurate than a tumbling cylinder.
 
Biggest issue was that in the video he said that it weighed around 20 pounds. All of the capacitors are on bottom and look nice in that arrangement but more could be added radially which could easily pull the weapon up into the 70 pound range but would significant increase the power (and expense) but make the gun absolutely worthless for anything other than bench use. Smaller and lighter capacitors that maintain the ability to dump energy instantly are what will move this technology forward. Also, staggering banks of capacitor powered coils could allow for automatic fire. The tech exists for very powerful weapons, but it’s not portable yet. It will be soon.
 
Amazing that even after 10 centuries, and the high tech time of history that we are in, that the principle of using gunpowder to propel a projectile, is still the most efficient, when it comes to warfare, hunting or protection, especially in the form of small arms. Have seen/read of several attempts during the 7 decades of my life as to find a better solution, but as of yet none have been found. Similar to the better mousetrap.
 
Technically, Matt, above, does not have a "rail gun." It's a linear accelerator. The discs used are some erratic.

There's two principles at work, one (Gauss) uses a magnetic field to levitate and advance a ferrous projectile at some velocity with a series of electromagnets in a row.

A linear accelerator (rail gun) uses a pair of conductors and a current is created through the projectile and the current passes up the conductors carrying the projectile. A limitation in LineAcs is that they often create an erosive plasma in the "barrel" at their highest velocities (this has been a fundamental limitation in the Naval Rail Gun project).

A Rail gun needs less "stuff" along the barrel (just the rails) than a Gauss rifle.

Ian point out, in his interview with the president of the company developing the Gauss rifle that the issue is not voltage, it is in how quickly you can "dump" the voltage. Which then delivered to each coil in its turn. This is another area where a rail gun has advantages. The field propagates down the rails at its inherent electromagnetic rate.
The president of the company said they were looking into using electrically adjusted fields to spin the projectile when they get to something more resembling Beta testing.
 
700 grain projectile at 230 fps is 82 Ft/lbs of energy. Double that velocity to 460 fps, and energy shoots up to 329Ft/lbs. Triple it to 690 fps, and energy is at 740 Ft/lbs.

The main issue is size and EM coil quantity. They can only have each magnet on for so long before it starts trying to pull back on the projectile. More coils in a linear fashion would equal more velocity, but then it gets more unweildy. I dont know about the physics behind it but the best way will likely be many more EM coils, that are smaller, closer together, and more powerful. Say 30 coils where each coil is accelerating the projectile.

I cant fathom a method of using the magnets to induce spin. The one method i can maybe think of is similar to how bowling balls are made. They have an off-center weight distribution. Put a piece of steel off center in an aluminum projectile and run the coils in a spiral around the barrel. But then what does that offset mass distribution do to the flight path?

Another potential material that may find its way into Gauss Gun technology is bismuth. For those not familiar with its properties, bismuth is dense, heavy, and ANTI-magnetic. Meaning it is repelled by magnets. A fun party trick is to put a magnet between two sheets of bismuth in a rigid mount. The magnet will levitate between them. I do not know whether its repellant force is stronger than the attraction force of steel, or for that matter the different attraction forces between different ferrous alloys.

As pointed out, this is an alpha type prototype. Its put together well enough and safe enough to get out for testing in the public. The public that will try their darnedest to push it to its limits and abuse it. Just think of the TVs 50 years ago, vs 20 years ago, vs today. Technology has to start somewhere.
 
I would expect that rotational stabilization will best be done with a right hand twist. I also suspect the use of such weapons might play havoc with battlefield communications.
 
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I wonder whether electromagnetic arms might first reach real practicality in the form of artillery rather than smallarms? In "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Robert Heinlein postulated using a concealed mass driver on the Moon to hurl rocks at Earth that impacted with kiloton kinetic energies.

On the small scale, when we consider energy and cost efficiencies, complexity, reliability and sheer overall weight, smallarms using chemical energy have a lot of plusses in their favor over electrical. Still cool though.
 
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Something I've realized over the course of my education is that people don't seem to understand how "new" electrical engineering really is. Mechanical engineering has been around millennia, electrical engineering has been around since (depending on your criteria) since the 17 century. It only really began to pick up in the late 19th, early 20th century, with most advancements happening in the last century.

That being said, electricity is still in it's early stages. This ,like many other inventions in history, is being limited by the technology of it's time.
 
In this case, I think that the flicker in the video is a by-product of the frame rate of the video rather than an magnetic field effect. The barrel shroud also may act as a Faraday cage.

In any case, the magnetic field strength tends to fall off with the 6th power of the distance from the source, unlike radiated RF which falls off with the 2nd power (square) of the distance from the source.
 
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