Gizmodo: rail guns

DIY Rail Gun is Terrifying, Comes with Building Instructions

Rosa Golijan — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:00:00 EDT

How have I not seen this project before? It may not be quite as powerful as the Navy's, but this DIY rail gun packs 5.6kJ. That's five point six kilo Joules of Oh-my-dear-sweet-Geezuss-I'll-never-piss-off-a-DIYer.

The rail gun seen in the video below is only the first revision Ravi Gaddipati's project. The next one will be capable of "forty caps each rated at 400v and 3900µf." Holy crap! I'm not even going to question why he's building one of these. I'm just excited that there are plenty of pictures to walk you through the process on his site. [Vimeo via RP181 via Make]

Navy Rail Gun Test DESTROYS Everything It Touches at 5,640 mph

Kit Eaton — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:30:23 EST

The US Navy has just completed a 10-megajoule test fire of their huge rail gun. For the first time ever, they fired a projectile with a velocity of 8,270 feet per second. That's an amazing 5,640 mph, and the gun is only firing at a third of its potential power. The other video shows you what the projectile looks like when loaded.

The Navy is researching rail guns because they would weigh less than conventional ones, and since they rely on electromagnetics to fire rounds, you wouldn't need a big, dangerous pile of explosives stored in a magazine. All of that means a lighter ship, and a much more deadly ship: a combat-ready rail gun would be able to fire Mach 5 projectiles over 200 miles with pinpoint accuracy, hitting 5 meter targets.

Yesterday's test firing at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division used just some of the potential 32-megajoules the laboratory test gun is capable of, and that's only half the 64-megajoules the Navy is aiming at for the final weapon. Expect even more dramatic videos, sometime soon. [Navy Times and Danger Room]

BAE Delivers World's First 32-Megajoule Rail Gun (To the Good Guys)

Wilson Rothman — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:37:39 EST

Like every other red-blooded American boy, I enjoy the notion of propelling a piece of lead at up to Mach 8 and at "extreme" ranges. That's why I was glad to hear that BAE Systems has delivered a rail gun capable of such feats, and that the US Navy signed for the package.

A rail gun, to refresh your memory, is one that relies on precise and extremely juiced electromagnets to thrust the projectile, rather than ever increasing amounts of packed and wadded gunpowder or other fuel. Explosives are, after all, dangerous. On a ship, they either blow up or get wet, and either way that's just bad.

The device BAE Systems shipped to the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va. is the 32-megajoule Electro-Magnetic Laboratory Rail Gun (32-MJ LRG for short, but we'll call her "Julie"). It is about four times as strong as the last generation of rail guns, but demands 3 million amps of power per shot—enough to drain your Metal Gear's battery in a heartbeat. You'll notice the word "laboratory" stuck in there. Real-life rail guns have kinks that still need to be worked out:

Effective rail guns will require a major breakthrough in capacitor technology between now and 2020, as well as a way to keep the barrels from being shredded by each high-velocity shot.

Mind you, the Navy isn't like pissing its pants for joy that it gets to play with a 32-megajoule rail gun. This is America, after all. What the Navy really wants is a 64-megajoule rail gun. But since that might take 13 years and would require, yep, 6 million amps per shot, the Navy's gonna have to quit bitching and enjoy the toys it has, at least for now. [Popular Mechanics]

Rail Guns Over Pyongyang

johnb — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:25:11 EDT

The Navy is working on a 5,000 projectile-per-minute railgun designed to shoot explosive hell on a target up to 300 nautical miles away. While this definitely doesn't make for good vacation video footage, it does put 100% of North Korea at risk, provided we ever decided to send them a bit o' honey from the old U S of A. God, we're horrible, violent monkeys, aren't we?

Look Out, Pyongyang? Rail Gun in the Works [DefenseTech]