Re: Weapon Naming Madness!!

Sorry if this comes across as harsh, but... well. Daulton, it seems to
me that you really don't have a clue of what you're talking about here:

>     The reason Railguns aren't in common use is twofold, One charging
> the capacitor takes a long time or a major power source. 

Yep. According to a symposium paper published a year ago (not
classified; I can give you ISBN number and page if you like), Edward M.
Schmidt (researcher at the US Army Research Lab in Maryland, Aberdeen
something - forgot its name :-( ) writes: 

"On balance, present technology railguns are more than twice the weight
of comparable powder guns." 

The powder guns he is referring to are the main guns of today's MBTs,
ie 120mm cannon and similar. He then goes on to note that advances in
electrical engineering is very likely to reduce or even close this gap.

> Two the 
> weapon is intensely inefficient. a one foot weapon has the range of
> six inches, and punches very tiny holes through paper. 

This statement is ridiculous. I can build a working railgun with these
specs from office materials, using paper clips for ammunition. 

I can also build a toy cannon from a cardboard tube, load it with a
small gun powder charge and firing ping-pong balls with it. Such a
"weapon" would be even less dangerous than the toy railgun you describe
- but in spite of this, powder-powered guns have been used very
successfully to kill and destroy for the past five hundred years or so.
Most MBT main guns are bigger than my cardboard toy cannon, too :-/

> Any effective research on the subject is probably classified, but I
> wouldn't doubt that someone is trying to make it effective.

Yep. Two of the "someones" are the US and British armies.

In the same collection of symposium proceedings I mentioned above, DERA
staff (Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, IIRC the British Army
research organisation) claim that their test railgun consistently hit
targets at a range of 2 km with APFSDS projectiles. I didn't write down
the Mass of the projectiles, but they seem to be similar in size to
those fired by today's MBTs. Muzzle velocities were between 1300 and
2000 m/s, but it should be possible to reach much higher velocities
provided we manage to build projectiles that don't melt in flight. I've
seen theoretical figures of 6-8000 m/s in other papers.

I suspect such projectiles would do more than merely "punch very tiny
holes through paper" :-/ Small holes through MBT armour is more likely.

> The confusion is understandable as the term Railgun was first used in
> fiction in the "Pulp" Sci-Fi novels and perpetuated through the 50's
> and 60's Sci-Fi movies which used any PSB they could get to explain
> anything.

This may be where the term originally comes from, but today's weapon
research community calls them "railguns" rather than "Gauss guns"
nonetheless. (Or "coilguns" - I have found one mention of coilguns in
one of the papers... but it only said that they are possible; after
saying this it ignored them. I suspect this is because they are less
effective or harder to build than railgun <shrug>)

> Another point is the fact that both weapons are magnetic
> accelerators. Just the Gauss weapons are typicaly nickel/iron 
> slugthrowers, and Railguns are plasma weapons.

This is pure fantasy. Railguns - what you call "Gauss" guns - exist and
work, but the technology is not yet well enough developed to allow us
to fit them into combat vehicles... and the only plasma launched from
them is the metal plasma which ablates from the rod penetrators during
flight :-/

Regards,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry