The US Navy has been testing its railguns, which fire shells at high velocity using electromagnets instead of explosive propellant, for years. Test footage emerged in 2012 showing off successful demonstration of the experimental weapon on land target...
For those unfamiliar with the concept of a railgun, it’s a dangerous weapon which uses a massive electrical pulse, instead of gunpowder or other chemical propellants to fire its ammo. The US Navy is showing off the latest iteration of its railgun, and it’s a beast. This thing can launch projectiles distances over 100 nautical miles – and at speeds that exceed Mach 6. So yeah, this is a serious gun.
You see that puff of smoke after it fires the projectile? It is not really smoke. Because the projectile is moving so fast, it vaporizes the air around it. Now let that sink in for a moment. It vaporizes the air! You do not want to be on the receiving end of that projectile.
The way it reloads and fires reminds me of a robot, which reminds me that robots should not get their hands on this when the eventually take over.
The US Navy's latest toy, a railgun that can fire projectiles at seven times the speed of sound, maybe be deployed sooner than thought. The original plan was to test it on joint high-speed vessels (JHSVs) in 2016, but the Navy is reportedly building...
See the guy in the image here, that sort of smirk on his face looks a bit to me like he isn’t sure if Homeland Security is going to show up on his doorstep any minute or not. Honestly, I’m not sure either. A guy going by the moniker Ziggy Zee has built a DIY railgun that is capable of firing a 22g aluminum projectile with 950 pounds of force.
That could certainly kill someone or destroy something. The gun uses CO2 to speed an aluminum projectile to 55 mph as it passes between a pair of copper rails. Around those rails are 56 480-joule capacitors that are driven by a 400V power source. The result is 27,000 joules of force, flinging that projectile down the barrel. The electrical discharge that accelerates the projectile is so powerful that part of the projectile melts.
The US Navy is the only other group I know of to be testing railguns, but its weapons are much more powerful, thanks to 32-megajoules of power.
Used to be that if you wanted to fire off a few high-velocity rounds with an electromagnetic railgun, you'd have to land a commission aboard the USS Ponce. That is, until YouTuber Ziggy Zee went ahead and built one from scratch -- no 3D printing re...
An ambitious maker has built a partly 3D-printed railgun that can fire aluminum or graphite projectiles at over 250 meters per second (560 mph). No, this isn't Quake, but it's no janky, all-plastic gun, either. The "handheld" weapon houses six capa...
The railgun is one of the most popular sci-fi weapons, perhaps eclipsed only by the lightsaber and anything with lasers on it. Part of its appeal is that it’s based on real physics. It could exist, and it does exist! Though naturally its fictional counterparts are absurdly efficient, compact and destructive. That being said, Redditor NSA_Listbot deserves a ton of karma for making a self-contained pneumatically-assisted railgun.
In very simple terms, a railgun has three main parts: a pair of parallel metal rails, a power supply that can deliver a high current and a highly conductive projectile. The rails on NSA_Listbot’s weapon are made of aluminum on the outside and copper on the inside.
Its power supply is a 12V battery rigged to a micro-inverter, a transformer, a rectifier and six 350V capacitors.
The image below shows some of NSA_Listbot’s projectiles, a pair of copper-plated tungsten pieces.
The projectile is passed along the surface of the rails as the power bank delivers the current. The current goes from the power supply to one rail, across the projectile and through the other rail. The resulting magnetic field violently pushes the projectile away from the power supply. Here’s NSA_Listbot’s railgun firing in slow motion:
As you’ll see in the gallery below, this isn’t actually a “pure” railgun. NSA_Listbot gives the projectiles a boost with a 900 psi pneumatic system that rockets pellets to a little over 220 mph just as they reach the rails. So it may not be as strong as the Quake railguns, but it’s no mere BB gun either.
We have talked about the awe-inspiring railgun that the US Navy has been working on before. The last time we mentioned it the gun was test fired at 32-megajoules and looked incredible doing it. The Navy wants to replace the giant deck guns on its ships and one day the railgun may do just that.
The most recent test firing of the railgun sees the hyper-velocity shell blasting through steel plates like they are nothing at a speed of around 5,600 mph. Another cool thing about these incredibly fast projectiles is that they are guided and can reach out and destroy a bad guy from over 100 miles away.
One big difference in this test firing is that instead of looking like a hammer, the projectile in this test is streamlined and much more precise. This is one of the coolest videos I have seen in a while, check it out.
BATH, Maine (AP) — Some of the Navy's futuristic weapons sound like something out of "Star Wars," with lasers designed to shoot down aerial drones and electric guns that fire projectiles at...
Just over 18 months after making its video debut, the Navy's electromagnetic railgun has a manufacturer. BAE Systems -- known for e-ink-powered tank camouflage, autonomous spiderbots and machine-gun-mounted lasers -- won the government contract and hopes to have phase-two prototypes ready "as early as next year." While the current design is capable of firing one shot, the Office of Navy Research hopes for six to ten shots per minute. If that doesn't scare you, consider this: The pulse-driven projectiles travel at Mach 6 and can hit targets over 100 nautical miles away. Don't worry, it's not too late to rethink that career of sailing the high seas as a pirate and get to work on that accounting degree instead.
The US Navy has been testing its railguns, which fire shells at high velocity using electromagnets instead of explosive propellant, for years. Test footage emerged in 2012 showing off successful demonstration of the experimental weapon on land target...
The US Navy's latest toy, a railgun that can fire projectiles at seven times the speed of sound, maybe be deployed sooner than thought. The original plan was to test it on joint high-speed vessels (JHSVs) in 2016, but the Navy is reportedly building...
Used to be that if you wanted to fire off a few high-velocity rounds with an electromagnetic railgun, you'd have to land a commission aboard the USS Ponce. That is, until YouTuber Ziggy Zee went ahead and built one from scratch -- no 3D printing re...
An ambitious maker has built a partly 3D-printed railgun that can fire aluminum or graphite projectiles at over 250 meters per second (560 mph). No, this isn't Quake, but it's no janky, all-plastic gun, either. The "handheld" weapon houses six capa...
