Let's assume that one day, we'll have handheld rail guns. Is there any reason to use them over traditional firearms?
Depends on the form factor of them, but in principle yes. Currently in the endless arms race between armor and ammunition, armor is winning since even boutique superhot AP 5.56 and .308 struggle with Lvl 4 plates, hence why the current retarded forced meme is 6.8. Railguns could send projectiles 4000+ fps faster than either of them, which would defeat any infantry armor for the foreseeable future. On top of that, it would allow infantry to reasonably endanger light armor and tanks with just their rifles, which really puts the power back in the hands of the infantry. But that's all hypothetical, a real railgun would probably be much lower velocity to prevent the same extreme wear and high maintenance that got the ship-mounted ones all canned.
>>63102469>Rail guns will bring back infantry centered combat>Stealth fighters will bring back within visual range dog fightingWar is healing
>>63102469>>63102473Let's do what Dune did and make personal shields so amazing that only slow moving knives can defeat them.
>>63102412You carry 65% less bullet per bullet, assuming the power supply is small and light enough to offer a weight saving or minimal weight gain for more power they could see use.In reality I don't think we are going to see a 100x energy density increase from batteries and rail guns will be vehicle mounted if they ever see deployment.
>>63102412Velocity, mass, something something. If you propel a grain of sand to a quarter of the speed of light, it's like punching someone in the face with an atomic bomb. So, yes, in theory, rail guns would be considerably better than gunpowder weapons.
>>63102412>Is there any reason to use them over traditional firearmsdirt cheap ammunitionno more primer shortages or complex manufacturing, just cut up some rod blanks and stamp them into shape
>>63102494At the cost of this ridiculously complicated machine in the hands of a grunt who almost certainly cannot perform standard maintenance on it.
>>63102502In theory it'll be much simpler than a rifle, the only moving part needs to the the feed system with no chambering, no extraction, no charging handle ect.There is no reason you couldn't make one with the magazine follower being the only moving part.
>>63102492If we ever get to the technological singularity that allows for this weapon to be a man-portable rifle, we won't need soldiers anymore.
>>63102412railgun's impact would cause collateral damages situations like hostage crisis or assassination
>>63102494>dirt cheap ammunitionWhat makes you think this is a thing? Current railgun projectiles are very precisely machined and are extremely expensive. The idea that you could just load nails in them is your headcanon. Or maybe you got the idea from role-playing games?
>>63102412Wouldn't a handheld railgun be noisy as all fuck compared to a regular gun?
>>63102469Bulky diving suit/plate mail Whipple shields with woven protective brigandine layers beneath. Matchlock railguns. Corporate Neofeudalism.
>>63103214How many rpg's have railguns?
>>63103237DnD has a famous railgun but it operates on following the rules to an illogical extreme (considering the apparent velocity of an object passed between X number of characters to be the distance it has "travelled" over the span of a six second period) instead of electromagnetism. I'm sure shit like Starfinder, Eclipse Phase, etc. have railguns in them too. Plenty of fantasy games that have token magitech stuff love to put in a faux railgun or at least borrow terminology evocative of railguns. Everyone loves and wants a railgun.
>>63103214>Current railgun projectiles are very precisely machined and are extremely expensive.They're extremely expensive because current railguns are extremely expensive. They're demonstrators for ship based cannons.There's no reason a handheld railgun would need anything more than some dowels. Maybe hexagonal ones if your railgun has helical rails.Hobbyists making small railguns today just fire cut up rods or ball bearings.
>>63103214The current railguns that have ever worked all use specialized ammunition with the intended design of hitting shit from 100km away with ballistics alone.A handheld railgun will not have that range, but it won't need that level of specialization either. It just needs to hit something at a kilometers range with some precision with ammunition not too unlike currently produced calibers.
>>63103316DnD railgun is a meme, by actual rules the last peasant just throws it with regular peasant throw speed, it's not cumulative.
>>63102473>>63102478Imagine the kino
>>63103420Nor does anything in dnd do damage based upon its velocity. We know, anon.
>>63102412>Is there any reason to use them over traditional firearms?Depends on their size, weight, performance, capacity, accuracy, etc. and what the state of body armor is at that point in time.If we have the incredibly dense batteries that would be required to make handheld railguns practical the world is going to be a radically different place in a huge variety of ways. Incredibly shit question.
>>63103365>Hobbyists making small railguns today just fire cut up rods or ball bearings.And they have massive problems with projectile stability even over very short ranges.
>>63103389There are handheld railguns available to buy now (albeit they're producing airgun tier muzzle energy). They will fire pretty much anything but have a problem with projectile stability due to lack of spin. Finned projectiles is probably the solution although people are trying to get magnetically induced spin.
>>63102412One day we will be concealed carrying compact spartan lasers. Is there any reason to carry them over traditional firearms?
>>63103878Larger railguns use fins, right? Seems like the simplest solution unless finless projectiles are that much easier to produce.
>>63103982>>63103878Also how would you even create magnetically induced spin? Some kind of programmed solution where you're using several rails but firing them up in sequence instead of all at once or something? Or a separate mechanism that just throws it into a spin?
>>63102412Will handheld railguns make cool sci-fi noises? I think that'll be a very important factor to consider.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl8mZawnv0M
>>63103864>my last thread on a similar topic failedI'm sorry.
>>63102412If the power system can be scaled down enough to offset the weight savings (over half of a bullet's weight is propellant and casings) then a railgun user would be able to carry 2x as many projectiles with superior performance or carry many times as many smaller projectiles with equal or better performance due to higher muzzle velocities.tl;dr with enough power a railgun could either be an automatic anti-material rifle that carries 600+ rounds or a squad-portable CIWS with thousands of rounds.
>>63102502How would maintaining a handheld railgun be any different than a regular gun for a grunt? You clean it and if something is significantly fucked you replace the part.It's fundamentally just magnets, a rail and a battery/capacitor. Replacing a rail or one magnet out of a sequence should be no harder than replacing the barrel of your gun provided the design of the gun is not retarded.
>>63102492The problem is that with any kinetic weapon, recoil will always remain proportional to the energy of the projectile. So, while a very powerful railgun could theoretically accelerate a bullet as small as a grain of sand up to relativistic speeds, it would also recoil so hard that it would rip your whole shoulder off.Modern firearms are basically already at the upper limit of the lethality of a man-portable weapon firing solid metal projectiles, so things like railguns are really just a side-grade that changes the logistical footprint of the weapon, not an upgrade to the amount of energy deliver downrange.
Unless if we get better barrels and cooling no. If your rifling gets fucked after a handful of shots it's pretty pointless. You could hypothetically go for some kind of a flechette thing but if your flechettes spin at absolutely insane speeds you'll just get a repeat of the stabilizing fins blowing themselves up that we got in some of the previous attempts.
>>63103218They'd actually be quieter. A lot of the noise from a gun comes from unburned powder leaving the barrel and exploding in the open air. The equivalent for a railgun is an electric arc as the bullet leaves the barrel and breaks contact with the rails. The faster the round goes the less time for that arc will last.
>>63102478First we need to invent lasguns, then figure out the hard way that you get a nuclear explosion when you cross the two.
>>63105344There's a wide margin between the 4000 fps max speed of gunpowder propelled bullet and the 9,80000 fps of a relativistic railgun.
>>63102412Yes, much smaller/lighter ammo, variable velocity to pen armor but you can dial it back to reduce recoil, not report so it is vastly quieter, variable rate of fire, your fire control system/optic can sync with the velocity control to calibrate perfect shots, etc.It is more useful for artillery, but as soon as we have coil guns that can hit firearms velocity at comparable weight firearms will be obsolete.>>63102487The limiting problem is power output not batter capacity.>>63102492It doesn't need to be that fancy. Even if they just reach the velocity of current firearms they will have some huge benefits. >>63103316Rifts has them everywhere.>>63105344>Modern firearms are basically already at the upper limit of the lethality of a man-portable weapon firing solid metal projectilesThis is simply false. If you had room temperature superconductors and supercapaciters and energy near the theoretical limit you could have a gun that will pen any tank armor we have. But you don't need to get to that sort of sci-fi level to make rail guns and coil guns useful
what is the difference between a railgun and a gauss gun?
>>63106707A railgun is when you have two high powered rails and bridge the two with a conductive projectile.Some electromagnetic bullshit shoots it forward. It also quickly destroys itself by welding the projectile to the rails every shot.A gauss gun is pic related. It sucks.No one cares about it so they just use the term as a cooler way to say coilgun.A coilgun uses a series of electromagnets surrounding a barrel to pull a magnetic projectile forward with precise timing.These don't destroy themselves and have more potential as actual weapons. You can buy genuinely lethal and reliable handheld coilguns today.
>>63105344>ful railgun could theoretically accelerate a bullet as small as a grain of sand up to relativistic speeds, it would also recoil so hard that it would rip your whole shoulder off.Yeah, but you can adjust the velocity or even have a ballistics computer give you just as much as you need to hit and pen a target.
>>63106830Coil guns using mag lev in theory could produce higher velocity at a lower weight with less barrel wear. And having a drone feed you targets while a computer can calculate the velocity needed to land right on top of them would be huge not only for artillery but for using HMGs, automatic grenade launchers, and auto cannons more in an indirect fire role. These things often have huge range, more than 2 miles, but cannot often be used in an indirect fire role effectively due to line of sight issues and the difficulty of arcing plunging fire correctly. We might be getting to a point where we can fix these though, e.g. a drone finds targets and the feed is on the gunners' screen with the approximate beaten zone where the projectiles will fall projected onto the screen. Small UGVs can also use 60-81mm mortars in this way, or they can be added as modules to IFVs. Obviously, you don't need coil guns to link drones directly to ballistics computers and autonomous mortars, etc. We are already doing that. However, it would help because right now it is much more difficult to alter exit velocity as needed for a perfect arc that maintains maximum velocity on contact.But the lack of report on electric guns alone would be huge because artillery would stop giving artillery men hearing loss and TBIs.Fire mission rates could be fast and furious and incredibly accurate once drones are fully linked to autonomous systems. And you can also fire spotters into the air with your guns, or create a network by doing this, allowing you to deal with them being shot down rapidly.
>>63106707Railguns make the bullet part of the circuit. Just put the round between the two rails and run some ridiculous amperage between them. Good news is that it's more efficient. The bad news is that the bullet being part of the circuit introduces all sorts of complications like rail erosion and shorting from moisture and fouling messing with conductivity.Coilguns use a series of coils turned on and off real fast to push the shot forwards. Think of it as a series of solenoids. Not as efficient as a railgun but it's cleaner and more practical. No worrying about if the rails are dirty. >>63106830That's...not a coilgun. In fact, I don't know what that is or why it keeps showing up.
>>63102412Railguns can impart energy to the projectile constantly over the entire length of the barrel, which minimizes recoil. Since recoil is the limiting factor of small arms this means more capable small arms. It also means you can build guns "lighter" since they don't have to contain a disproportionately large pressure spike in all directions at the chamber, but that's unimportant compared to the recoil factor. If there's a sci-fi propellant that produces a constant pressure curve this advantage will be gone though.>>63105344You're wrong, but not because of any of these idiots replying to you, who clearly read somewhere that small projectiles make sense for railguns (besides all the problems with small fast projectiles) but don't actually know why. Recoil is not proportional to the energy of the projectile. It is much more related to momentum. With the same amount of energy, a grain of sand will have less felt recoil than a bullet with the same amount of muzzle energy.
>>63107587>Fire mission rates could be fast and furious and incredibly accurate once drones are fully linked to autonomous systems. And you can also fire spotters into the air with your guns, or create a network by doing this, allowing you to deal with them being shot down rapidly.I predict that by 2075 all infantry in modern armies will fight under complex, overlapping AD umbrellas. Once you umbrella starts to go, you retreat, because trying to fight against an opposing force using drone spotters and autonomous mortars/artillery will just be a death sentence.There will probably start to be small scale air wars above any decently sized infantry/armor clash because drone-hunter drones/spotters will start being employed too.Of course, AD is also developing rapidly. You won't just be able to hurl a single round at a laser interceptor vehicle. It's going to be defended by a variety of counter measures. So you will probably see AI fire mission queues that help coordinate a number of different fires on a single target to overwhelm its interception capabilities and take it out.Basically, what already holds for naval warfare will become standard for battalion level engagements to some extent.Same think with fire control systems. Just as its unthinkable to not use a fire control system on a tank, all small arms will have them. We already have SHARP, which lets you just hold down the trigger and then the gun only fires on calculated hits, which makes recoil way less of an issue (important since calibers will probably go up due to drone screens resulting in longer engagement distances and improvements in armor).Coil guns would be big here in that they could help with penning new materials. Although, depending on how material sciences improves we might see grenade launchers becoming much more numerous. With a good fire control system those little 20mm grenades could offer a good solution to the proliferation of armor capable of offering decent coverage.
>>63108121The "retards" replying to him didn't say anything counter to what you said, which gets at some of the benefits.Being able to dial up velocity as needed, or reduce it to reduce recoil is another factor that helps with recoil.And when people talk about ammunition size and weight, I assume they are talking about a comparison to the full cartridge. Most of the weight and volume is for propellant. So, right of that bat, something like 100 round mags being standard seems a lot more feasible.
>>63107889>That's...not a coilgun.That's why it's labeled gauss gun in the post and filename and not coil gun.>In fact, I don't know what that is No one does, that's why there are no actual examples of them and why the wiki page is just a stub that says "often confused with coil guns".
>>63102412You can switch between super- and subsonic whenever you need to. A niche advantage, but an advantage nonetheless.
>>63105274You're mistaking a coilgun for a railgun. Coilguns actually are pretty complicated because they have to perfectly time pulses of magnetism to guide a projectile in one direction. Railguns do not use magnets, you literally just blast electricity through a projectile and Physics makes it suddenly go really fast at a 90 degree angle to the direction of the current.
>>63103214There is nothing about the concept of a railgun which requires expensive ammunition. The current testbeds use it because they're testbeds. And they have MIC money to blow on it.A practical handheld one is just going to use conductive metal slugs. Probably with graphite on them for lube.
Power storage and density memes aside, the rail actually eroding is a huge and likely unsolvable problem.They could work on ships or static emplacements where you can actually store replacement rails, but they wouldn't make sense in smaller scale applications.Coil guns have more potential if we make some serious leaps in superconductor magic.>>63106055Any railgun worth firing would come with a serious plasma discharge. Either as an unwanted side effect or a bonus for propulsion.>>63104022Put bushings or bearings in your sabot and rev that fucker up before firing.
>>63108633>Power storage and density memes aside, the rail actually eroding is a huge and likely unsolvable problem.coat it in some sort of ceramic, retard >>63108633>Coil guns have more potential if we make some serious leaps in superconductor magic.this too
>>63108695>coat it in some sort of ceramic, retardThat would prevent it from conducting the current, retard. You'd probably need some kind of expanded graphite foam or wizard up some kind of conductive oil.
>>63108695>coat it in some sort of ceramic, retardWill still get fouled and causes inherent loss of performance.>m-maybe you can send a plasma arc after it to clear it
>>63102412assuming we're shooting small project SPIW style tungsten darts, they'll have far higher penetration. I think gauss weapons will be more preferable for every day use though. By their nature they're just safer to be handheld. Railguns are a very violent weapon, gauss are more of what you'd consider a small armmy sci fi dream though is one use man portable anti tank rail guns.
reminder that some random guys built a railgun in their trunk 10 years agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMT97bqaOdM
>>63108633Railguns make more sense for a spaceship where you don't have to worry about oxygen or water vapor. Coilguns are perfectly fine on planet Earth where a mach 10 round would probably scorch the shooter's eyebrows.
>>63108787>Railguns make more sense for a spaceship where you don't have to worry about oxygen or water vapor.While yes, but also, heat.Railguns as a concept are kind of shit.
>>63108805>While yes, but also, heat.True about just about every weapon system ever created. Lasers are the worst offender by far and even cold launched missile will produce some heat just booting up the missile. Railguns aren't as cold as a missile being ejected with compressed gas but they're way more efficient than a laser.
>>63108891The issue isn't really heat generation, it's concentration,The majority of heat is concentrated in the relatively tiny rail surface, even with a ridiculously impractical cooling system your firing cycles are going to be very far apart.
>>63108913So barrel erosion, not a new problem. A replaceable graphene lining would help. It's conductive, heat resistant, and lightweight. The lining would never be as conductive as the rails but at these voltages the current would push through anything. We could also use revolving rails like a gattling gun or spray compressed gas onto the rails. We could even shape the rails as cylinders and spin them to expose fresh sides. There are plenty of options.
I think electric weapons systems will be best used in a mounted anti air capacity. A high velocity projectile means it's easier for computers to accurately target and hit moving objects.
>>63110426That's what Japan is thinking. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/05/21/japan/japan-defense-railgun-development/
>>63102412I've been toying with the idea of adding an RFID tag to magazines. For coilguns, this means the magazine can tell the coilgun exactly how to fire the type of ammo currently loaded. This should simplify the coilgun since you don't need any sensors in the barrel.
>>63110392As far as I know graphene doesn't improve abrasion resistance, just tensile strength.A self healing rail system would work but then we are entering sci fi magic territory.
>>63102412Arent traditional fire power stored in the bullets themselves? Where as the railgun bullet energy has to come from the rail gun itself via electricity?
>>63112604REPLACEABLE linings. You swap them out between shots. Carbon has a high specific heat so the graphene acts as a heatsink and while one is cooling another is put on the rails. When the graphene gets damaged you can just throw them out and pull another from storage since they're so lightweight.
>>63112626Batteries, fuel cells, super capacitors, microturbines, take your pick.
>>63103237Dude, look up Rifts. It's a d20 Palladium game but the weapons books and combat are tits. The lore is mental too, check out what happens to Russia lol!
>>63104181They'll likely explode anyone standing too close to the muzzle if it's saboted.
>>63108551Please be graphite from Chernobyl...
>>63112894That's a feature.
>>63104181It will not sound like that and sure as fuck will not have that rate of fire. The round size will be about right though.
