65 replies to this topic

[joemomma]

Coralld, on 01 February 2012 - 12:19 PM, said:

Probably the same as the Gauss Rifle as it to uses electromagnetisom to propel solid rounds. PPC, or Partical Projectile Cannon is different from a Gauss or Rail Gun. A PPC I guess would be kinda like a weaponized Hadron Colider as it takes a super charged partical and slams it into its target.

Somehow the phrase "Weaponized Hadron Collder" makes me happy and terrified all at once.

Anyone notice the bizarre array of weapons in BT? They all work on different scientific principles, and have different stats, but "gauss rifle", "plasma rifle", "Pulsed Particle Cannon" (or whatever the hell PPC stands for) all sound equally intimidating as far as I'm concerned.

[Coralld]

joemomma, on 01 February 2012 - 03:43 PM, said:

Somehow the phrase "Weaponized Hadron Collder" makes me happy and terrified all at once.

Anyone notice the bizarre array of weapons in BT? They all work on different scientific principles, and have different stats, but "gauss rifle", "plasma rifle", "Pulsed Particle Cannon" (or whatever the hell PPC stands for) all sound equally intimidating as far as I'm concerned.

I know... Isant it great?

Edited by Coralld, 01 February 2012 - 05:53 PM.

[Alaric Wolf Kerensky]

Liam, on 30 January 2012 - 03:07 PM, said:

A perfect weapon concept for experimental tech in MWO !!!!

You do realize a Gauss Rifle is an improved version of a railgun... right?

[Coralld]

Alaric Wolf Kerensky, on 01 February 2012 - 06:05 PM, said:

You do realize a Gauss Rifle is an improved version of a railgun... right?

You do realize that a Gauss is a more complicated version of the rail gun? You know, do to the whole timing of the magnitizing of the coils and a few other stuff.

Also, there is this.
Rail guns requires ridiculous amounts of power to work, though I imagine most of the research is either going into new capacitors to store the immense power required for the extreme burst needed to fire a rail gun, or even into the materials themselves, and trying to reach a superconductive material.

The main difference between the two is a matter of contact.

A rail gun is like a big U. the two sides are made up by the rail gun itself. The bar at the bottom is formed by the projectile itself. So in this case the projectile touches the rail gun. When you force an enormous current through this (around 10^6 Amps) - which is pretty high considering you only need 3 amps to weld metal - then a circuit is created which according to the right hand rule, causes motion in the forward direction. This motion is a force by a strong magnetic field that is made by the circuit. This means the motion is created by the flow of current through the projectile, and hence directly acts on the projectile.

A coil gun however is wrapped around a barrel, a core. When a current is passed through a coil, it creates a magnetic field which attracts the projectile. However, this is simply like pulling along a piece of metal with a magnet. It's not every strong, and you can only pull it so far. Hence you need multiple coils to provide adequate acceleration. Then each time you need a powerful energy source to charge each coil. In the end, you need so much power, and such a long barrel, to approach the same speed as can be achieved by the rail gun, that it becomes unfeasible.

So rail gun motion is caused by the current running through the projectile, hence very strong. Coil gun is insulated essentially by the barrel and the air in the gun, so loses power, and requires multiple stages, whereas a rail gun only requires 2 long bars.

To make this feasible, you want to use a projectile with no explosive in it, and fire it so very very fast ~ Mach 10, that it has enough kinetic energy to rival an explosive shell.

Edited by Coralld, 01 February 2012 - 08:02 PM.

[Felicitatem Parco]

Coralld, on 01 February 2012 - 06:39 PM, said:

You do realize that a Gauss is a more complicated version of the rail gun? You know, do to the whole timing of the magnitizing of the coils and a few other stuff.

Also, there is this....

Um... railguns and coilguns operate under different physical pinciples, so neither is a version of the other. Also, we (society) already have a functioning railgun with the power of a small tank cannon, and a capital version is in the works.

[Coralld]

Prosperity Park, on 01 February 2012 - 06:55 PM, said:

Um... railguns and coilguns operate under different physical pinciples, so neither is a version of the other. Also, we (society) already have a functioning railgun with the power of a small tank cannon, and a capital version is in the works.

I understand, but as you can see, I elaberated on the comment of "Coil being better then Rail" and proving him wrong. Also, Coil guns do work better on a smaller scale then Rails, but as things get bigger the Rails become better.

[Trogusaur]

Elektrik, on 01 February 2012 - 02:18 PM, said:

Funnier still is that you brought the point up in the first place when the only mention of fox was in the url....

Even better, you continue to press the fact I mentioned it when all others have dropped it. Everyone else has moved on, you can stop whining.

To Coralld: PPC an Ion cannon? I hadn't really thought of it that way. The only flaw I see here is that Ion completely disables the target, disengaging all of its functions. Still though, would the railgun still pass as a ballistic?

Edited by Lord Trogus, 01 February 2012 - 07:07 PM.

[Coralld]

Lord Trogus, on 01 February 2012 - 07:07 PM, said:

Even better, you continue to press the fact I mentioned it when all others have dropped it. Everyone else has moved on, you can stop whining.

To Coralld: PPC an Ion cannon? I hadn't really thought of it that way. The only flaw I see here is that Ion completely disables the target, disengaging all of its functions. Still though, would the railgun still pass as a ballistic?

Can every one drop the whole rage politics thing, its getting very annoying as this is not the place for it.

I said it was "Like a ION Cannon" do to the fact that it uses either charged IONs or Protons. And yes, a Rail gun is ballistic weapon.

[Elektrik]

Lord Trogus, on 01 February 2012 - 07:07 PM, said:

Even better, you continue to press the fact I mentioned it when all others have dropped it. Everyone else has moved on, you can stop whining.

To Coralld: PPC an Ion cannon? I hadn't really thought of it that way. The only flaw I see here is that Ion completely disables the target, disengaging all of its functions. Still though, would the railgun still pass as a ballistic?

To Trogus: Please do note that I started this thread on the Rail gun, and whilst I agree that the whole politics discussion is unneccessary, please feel free to move onto threads not posted by myself if you can't resist mentioning it in the future.

To Coralld: Now all we have to do is figure out a way to mount this sucker on this thing! LOL! http://themadadmin.c...mech_walker.jpg

[Coralld]

Elektrik, on 02 February 2012 - 08:03 AM, said:

To Coralld: Now all we have to do is figure out a way to mount this sucker on this thing! LOL! http://themadadmin.c...mech_walker.jpg

I remember that thing. To me it kind of looks like a retarded Jenner. Also, if there was a way to fit a Rail gun onto it that would be so full of win.

[Trogusaur]

Elektrik, on 02 February 2012 - 08:03 AM, said:

To Trogus: Please do note that I started this thread on the Rail gun, and whilst I agree that the whole politics discussion is unneccessary, please feel free to move onto threads not posted by myself if you can't resist mentioning it in the future.

I apologize, my first post was an attempt at a bad joke that apparently fell flat. I wasn't expecting flack for it, (with the intent of a jest) but equally heated responses from others tend to escalate things. I am equally excited about the railgun and its future uses, and can't wait to see what the military does with it. This weapon could very well replace conventional tank cannons if it proves to be cost effective to miniaturize the railgun to a tank-sized mount.

[Felicitatem Parco]

The problem with railguns are the recharge times and capacitors - a tank that just fired its railgun would have to recharge the capcitor banks by throwing the throttle wide-open to spin-up the engine and letting the engine's alternator pickup that energy and shuttle it over to the capacitor banks. If you want to replace, say, 1kg of gunpowder, you'd have to burn an equivalent amount of gas to replace the energy of that gunpowder, then you'd have to burn more fuel because engines have less than 100% effiiciency, then you'd burn more fuel because alternators have less than 100% efficiency, and all this time you're either not moving or moving under reduced speed because your engine is busy recharging the gun.

Also, capacitor banks have to be kept fully charged if you want them to be ready-to-fire, which means you're driving around with a bunch of extremely fast-discharging electrical components that are currently charged with the same amount of energy you get from shooting a tank cannon... let's hope your cpacitors are built very, very well... because if they fail, it's like having an enemy tank point its gun in through your window and firing.

[Felicitatem Parco]

Actually, I don't know why Railguns were left out of Mechwarrior, or at least shadowed by Coilguns.

Rainguns are better for mounting on Mechs in my opinion: the power of a railgun is based strictly on the rate at which you can dump current through it and the strength of the materials comprising the rails (because weak rails vaporize), so railguns can operate with very short barrels like the torso barrels in the Fafnir Mech; the strength of a Coilgun depends on the length of the barrel because the principle of Magnetic Saturation limits the rate of acceleration you can achieve using magnetic attraction, so they need a longer barrel to bring a projectile up to hyper-velocities. A Fafnir would actually have pretty mediocre torso-mounted Gauss Rifles because they're so short.

Coilguns would be better for throwing heavy slugs at ballistic velocities, but you can do that with an autocannon. Railguns are better at throwing small projectiles at hypervelocities which are unachievable using conventional chemical-reaction-based munitions (example = gunpowder) or Coilguns with short barrels.

Edited by Prosperity Park, 02 February 2012 - 10:00 AM.

[Coralld]

Its entirly possible to mount a Rail gun on tanks and be effective when used with carbin nanotubing as a power sorce which can hold a lot of power. Or am I thinking of a different type of nanotubing? Any way, I believe if you take a standard size AA Battery withy carbon nanotubing it can hold somewhere around 10 times the energy or even more, and they are easy to make. So instead of shells you have nanotube batteries you can keep the tanks Rail gun charged. And Railgun munitions are a lot smaller then standard munitions.

Edited by Coralld, 02 February 2012 - 10:30 AM.

[joemomma]

I remember someone talking about the "vaporizing rail" problem being a serious concern. Apparently even the hardest most electrically conductive substances they've got still have to be replaced a ton more often than a normal tank barrel (and cost a ton more as well). Not to say that by the time Battletech rolls around we won't have some amazing new alloy, but the maintenance costs on one of those are going to be very large for the time being.

[Felicitatem Parco]

Yup. Railgun rails are subjected to plasma scoring for each shot because the extreme amount of current flowing from anode rail->projectile-> the cathode rail causes serious electrical arcing between the projectile and the rails. When you make the rails you have to choose a material that's very electrically conductive, yet very resiliant in the face of extreme high-temperature operation and serious oxidation.

People who make their own Railguns at home typically use brass rails because brass, being a copper alloy, is very conductive so you lose little energy to heat, it's readily available on the market, fairly inexpensive compared to exotic alloys, and relatively durable for what it's worth.

You might think "Why not use Tungsten rails?" Tungsten is THE MOST heat-proof metal and it's very very very tough - tough enough to be the primary component of many armor-piercing munitions and many tank armor systems, themselves. There are 2 problems with Tungsten rails, though. 1.) Tungetsn is expensive. 2.) Tungsten has a fraction of the electrical conductivity of Copper and Silver which means Tungsten rails lose huge amounts of energy due to electrical resistance [in the form of heat, which further damages the system].

The best materials to build weaponized Railgun rails with, assuming that either money is not an issue or materials will be cheaper in the future, would be Tungsten-Silver alloys. Silver is the most conductive metal on the periodic table and Tungsten is the thermally- and oxidatively-toughest metal. These are currently available on the market, but too expensive to build weapons with. The next best bet would be CuproTungsten (Tungsten/Copper alloy) which is also available and slightly cheaper. Third best bet would be the kinds of high-temperature superalloys used to build turbine blades such as the ones marketed by Haynes International (their most "popular" product being named Hastelloy).

Edited by Prosperity Park, 02 February 2012 - 09:20 PM.

[Elektrik]

Coralld, on 02 February 2012 - 08:42 AM, said:

I remember that thing. To me it kind of looks like a retarded Jenner. Also, if there was a way to fit a Rail gun onto it that would be so full of win.

I know, right?!!! LOL! What I can't believe is that the guy mounted a tennis ball shooter...I suppose he did that to make it seem less 'scary' but still..I woulda mounted at least a comical weapon, like a potato launcher....

[Elektrik]

Lord Trogus, on 02 February 2012 - 09:27 AM, said:

I apologize, my first post was an attempt at a bad joke that apparently fell flat. I wasn't expecting flack for it, (with the intent of a jest) but equally heated responses from others tend to escalate things. I am equally excited about the railgun and its future uses, and can't wait to see what the military does with it. This weapon could very well replace conventional tank cannons if it proves to be cost effective to miniaturize the railgun to a tank-sized mount.

In re: bad jokes, perhaps you should do what Sheldon from "The Big Bang Theory" does-preface it with something like "Bazinga"....lol!

[Coralld]

Lets ask Sheldon to solve our Railgun problem, he is never wrong after all... Other then that one time he lost to Howared on the cricket bet.

[Elektrik]

Coralld, on 03 February 2012 - 09:30 AM, said:

Lets ask Sheldon to solve our Railgun problem, he is never wrong after all... Other then that one time he lost to Howared on the cricket bet.

Hmm....tempting as that may be, I'm not sure I could deal with his obvious megalomaniac personality.... hehe