Oh that Zamora, always quick with a witty comebacks!
I've been exceptionally unproductive lately in large part due to the holiday weekend, so this will be the only update this week. Things should be back to normal next week, though.
How would you like to have your very own fully functional coilgun? Well, for a paltry $1,199.50, you can have one in the mail and at your doorstep within the next four to six months. Rejoice!
Okay, calm down now. The specs on these puppies are less than mind-blowing. They have a muzzle velocity of 45 meters per second, and a muzzle energy of 4.65 joules. To put that in perspective, an average muzzle velocity and muzzle energy for a full size 9mm handgun is something like 350 m/s and 455J respectively . A quality pellet gun can give you 35 joules of muzzle energy. So it's a toy. If you shoot a squirrel with this thing, the squirrel will get mad and throw acorns at you.
Despite being a common sight on semi hard-ish sci fi battlefields, there's nothing terribly new or sci fi about coilguns. Working models have been available since the 1900s, and any hobbyist with a Radio Shack gift card can cobble one together in his garage over a weekend (does Radio Shack still exist?). There are plenty of Youtube vids of guys plugging away at soda cans with their homemade “futuristic” coilguns.
Coilguns and railguns work on similar principles, but they're very different designs with different capabilities. A railgun is a much simpler device, and it can accelerate a projectile up to crazy high speeds in no time at all, just depending on how much current you can run through it. As I wrote about in an earlier blurb, railguns are being seriously researched for real-world military applications right now. Their two major drawbacks are that they require a TON of energy, and the rails tend to melt and vaporize after a few uses, so you need to constantly replace them.
A coilgun, on the other hand, accelerates a magnetic metal projectile through a series of coils, giving it a little extra boost as it passes through each. It's a more finnicky process that requires the coils fire perfectly in rhythm to keep the projectile accelerating fluidly, and there are materiological and physical limits to just how much acceleration you can get from each group of coils. So if you wanted to build a coilgun that could match the destructive power of a military railgun – or even a decent rifle for that matter – then you could do it, but it would require dozens of well-timed coil sections and the barrel would be crazy stupid long.
Coilguns are not a total joke, though. There is still some military interest in developing more sophisticated versions which get around the limitations you see in your typical garage build. Coilguns may also have useful non-military applications in the future, including potentially being a cheaper way to put spacecraft into orbit.
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