Brads Electronic Projects Forum

Electromagnetic Railgun world record setting event

Don't try this at home.

Pretty cool. I guess the handheld unit is a couple weeks away still... lol

Any idea how fast that went?

The amount of energy involved here is staggering - the same amount of energy as 7.88 tons of TNT.. Impressive is an understatement .. unless you're the one their aiming at. Unlike TNT, the rail-gun's principle of destruction is kinetic energy - aim it at another boat or building and everything it picks up through its path of destruction turns it into one big steel snowball.

Speeds over 3000 m/s are normal with these massive scale rail-guns, and some are accurate enough to hit a 5 meter target over 300 km away. Not sure how effective the damage would be at 300 km though

I bet that the whole team consists of males! Only men would be interested in making something go that fast

They still have a big hurdle to overcome. How do you put a GPS on that thing? The G forces on electronics may be enough to break it. You have to shield it from all of that electrical energy, it has to turn on and pick up a signal really really fast from a satellite and it has to hit a target that could be moving. My car gps takes literally minutes to coordinate with several satellites which wouldn't be good enough for a rail gun. It is going to have to use really fast electronics to make it work because it is traveling really really fast and I would think they would have to be programmed where to move before it is shot because electronic jamming could interfere with the safety of whom it is supposed to protect.

brad wrote:Any idea how fast that went?

Mach 8. mach 8 = 2 722.32 m / s

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/navy-electr ... -9382.html

That's enough to launch its solid warhead up to 125 miles away, and deliver 32 megajoules on impact. That's the energy of 21 high-speed car collisions all concentrated on a very small target area.

They want to increase the range to 200 miles so unless it is going down on an object vertically, it would do more damage horizontally because there probably isn't a lot to stop it unless the object obliterates itself.