Re: railguns

On 16-Sep-99 at 11:44, bbrush@rev.state.ne.us (bbrush@rev.state.ne.us)
wrote:
> Ok, with all the other info I've gotten, and by perusing the digests,
> here's kind of what you're looking at:
> 
> Max engagement range is 36".	Equals 36 million meters.
> Turn length is 7.5 minutes which gives you a turn of 450 seconds.
> A kton of TNT is equal to 6.31*10^8 joules
> A nuke (a small one), if my source is correct, produces around 1*10^10
> joules C=2.99*10^8 m/s
> 
> Now, with these numbers you can figure that the absolute minimum speed
of a
> projectile has to be around 80,000 m/s.  Anything lower and it
literally
> will not be able to make it from max firing range to the target in one
> turn.  Since 7.5 minutes is way to long for a time-to-impact for a
ballistic
> weapon we need to bump it up significantly.  So lets take it up to oh
around
> 1 minute (600,000 m/s).  That's still a long lag, but not too bad. 
Ok, now
> assume a projectile of 1 gram (itty bitty).  So we have
> 
> Energy=.5*.001*600,000^2=1.8*10^8 joules, or about 1/3 of a kton of
TNT
> 
> A 10 gram projectile will be 1.8*10^9 or about 3 kton of TNT

.01 Kg forward@600Km/s = 100,000Kg backwards@190m/s and that's for
one pellet.  :)

Roger