I thought I was crazy...

Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Sun Nov 02, 2003 12:40 pm

I got this in my news account, not sure why but it looks interesting. have no clue what it's for, but the fact that it's high voltage and has plenty of warnings makes it look like fun.

http://www.rollette.com/railgun/

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Chris Vogel · Post by **Chris Vogel** » Sun Nov 02, 2003 4:00 pm

Funny, I thought you were crazy too.

EDIT: I'm not quite understanding.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Sun Nov 02, 2003 4:04 pm

I don't really know what the device is supost to do, but by the pictures I know it involves high voltages, and risk of electricution. So I'm sure it's fun.

sort of along these lines but more dangeraus...

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Wren · Post by **Wren** » Sun Nov 02, 2003 4:49 pm

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manadren_it · Post by **manadren_it** » Sun Nov 02, 2003 6:12 pm

well it does say it's a railgun blog so I would assume that's what he's building

It's called a rail gun because it requires two "rails" to work. A generous amount of voltage is shot up one rail and down the other, an the resulting magnetic fields created by all that voltage is used to push a slug down between the two rails - like a bullet down the barrel of a gun. It takes a lot of juice to be very effective though.

It's a very interesting concept, not only as a possible weapon [like the depleted uranium slug shooting railgun of Quake 3] but also in space travel. If you can create a railgun big enough and long enough with enough electricity behind it, you could even shoot a space shuttle into orbit. And in the long run a railgun type launch system would be a lot cheaper and environmentally freindly than the rocket fuel we use today. Alot of scientists have said that such a system is what we need to make space travel cost effective enough for regular people.

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Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Sun Nov 02, 2003 6:58 pm

Cool so that's what it is. I was wondering what a rail gun was, there's not good pictures of the whole thing. So in a way it's similar to a tesla coil.

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manadren_it · Post by **manadren_it** » Mon Nov 03, 2003 1:21 am

Not really like tesla coils, except in that it's pretty high voltage stuff and sometimes knowlegable geeks make them for fun.

Tesla coils are actually air-cored resonant transformers that produce high voltage, high frequency electricity, and a nifty light show when that electricity starts arcing. Railguns simply use electricity to generate a magnetic field to propell an object.

the guys at this site have a more recognizeable railgun with some good pics of the completed project.

this is a pic from their site:

on the far end in the background with the blue tubes on the sides, that's the injector. You'd stick the projectile in that end, and it would shoot down the barrel, out the end in the foreground. Electricity flows through bars on either side of the barrel [you can't see them here, they're deep inside the barrel casing]. Electricity produces a magnetic field anytime it flows through a conductor, and since the electricity flows down the one side, and then back up the other [oppisite directions], the magnetic fields are opposing each other. Normally this would make the bars push away from each other, but since they are fixed in place, they can't move away, and that repelling force can be used to push an object between them, away from the power source on the injector end, and out the muzzle.

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