ArcFlash Labs' GR-1 Anvil Portable Gauss Rifle

Sci-fi guns are coming along. This thing is bulky, kind of heavy (20 pounds) and has the impact of a 22 rifle which isn't much by firearms standards, but it's still enough to kill you. I thought I had put up a post about earlier attempts to build one of these, but I couldn't find it. Whatever, this is the first one that looks like it actually works. I imagine this is going to inspire a several more people to build better ones. It's going to take some work to make one that is powerful enough to match a conventional firearm. I suspect room temperature superconductors would help.

Rail Gun, Part II

Railgun Update from General Atomics
Did he really say Mach 5? That's like 3,000 miles per hour. So this thing must be producing a heck of a sonic boom. I wonder how far away you can hear it, and I wonder if that distance depends on the size of the projectile.

Once again the camera technology used to capture the sabot in flight is probably more involved than the gun itself. According to Google's Calculator, Mach 5 equals 3,800 mph. I counted ten seconds of the thing in flight before it hit the plate. That works out to around 5,000 frames per second. I imagine it's all digital now, but that's still impressive.

 To record 10 seconds of real time flight you would record enough frames to make a full length feature movie. 3,800 mph is like one mile a second, and projectile only traveled seven miles, so the flight didn't even last ten seconds, so to make a feature length film we would have to pad it with some filler. I wonder how much of a crater it made when it finally hit the ground. 

Notice how the spokesman pronounces sabot "sabo", which is probably correct, because the word is probably French and the French are always forgetting to pronounce the ends of words. I probably mispronounce it because, well, I'm like that.

Part I 

From Tactical World.

Update February 2017 replaced video with one that works.

Electromagnetic Railgun world record setting event

This happened this month.



Note the time shown along the bottom edge of the video. Looks to me like it is counting ten-thousandths of a second, i.e. the camera is taking 10,000 frames a second. In part of the video they are tracking the projectile as it is flying along. I wonder how they did that. Was the camera actual tracking the projectile, or did they just use a wide angle view and crop it down so it looks they were tracking it? Our military must have some of the fastest cameras in the world. For another example check out the picture of the howitzer firing.

I am impressed. I am not quite sure just how fast they got the bullet going, but Mach 5 is one of the numbers I read. The Navy's goal is to make a real gun like this that they can install on ships. They are hoping for a range of 200 miles, compare to the 13 mile range they have with their current five inch conventional gun.

The railgun projectile would follow a sub-orbital trajectory. The high velocity at impact would negate any need for an explosive warhead.

Update February 2017 replaced missing image.

Update February 2022 replaced missing video. The top link seems to be dead, but it might just be a temporary problem.