Navy ditches futuristic railgun, eyes hypersonic missiles

[marble falls]

1. I remember reading about the rail gun in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics ...

This Brilliant Maniac Built His Own Homemade Railgun

It's huge, dangerous, and completely awesome.
By Eric Limer
Oct 17, 2015

Dabbling amateur armsmakers mess around with potato guns. Serious amateur armsmakers 3D print their own portable railguns. This man is clearly one of the latter. (I admit it. I built several spud guns. I used to be the uncle that brought and set up the fireworks. I used to.)

Known as NSA_Listbot on Reddit, this guy clearly takes his projects seriously, and gets into all the nitty-gritty details of his inadvisable but super awesome weapon in a long post on Imgur. Unlike a coilgun or gauss rifle which use a series of electromagnets to pull a magnetic projectile down a tube at great speeds, a railgun operates on more complicated physics, but doesn't require its projectiles to be magnetic. What NSA_Listbot's got here is the same thing the Navy is building, but on a much smaller scale.

When all wired up, the railgun's 20 lbs of capacitors—3 pairs of 300J, 350V, 5500uF units—can electrify the gun's rails to fire tiny aluminum rounds like this:

It may not look like much, but according to the video, that pellet was doing over 250m/s out of the barrel. For context, a standard velocity round coming out of a .22 does around 350m/s. This thing is serious.





"Don't try this at home." Well, of course not. Wink, wink, nudge, budge.