spray_and_pray wrote:
Eugefunk84 wrote:
IsaacLeavitt wrote:
to fix the problem for infantry you could use high power capacitors that would be charged at a powerful energy source... these would then be used as ammunition in the portable railgun ... and to fix the recoil you could have the armature "blow back" when it reached the end of the "barrel" instead of stopping, causing an opposite force reducing the recoil greatly...
anybody catch my idea?
btw- railguns have a slightly parabolic range of fire... like a sniper rifle, exept way more powerfull...
Railguns have no recoil. There is no explosion contained behind the projectile to propell it out of a barrel, therefore there is no explosion pushing the actual gun in the opposite direction. As far as your capacitor ideas, it wouldnt work. In order to store that much charge, you would need way too many capacitors. Think about this, you ever see those huge car audio capacitors? Those store 12 volts, and deliver about 10 amps of current. Power=Voltage*Current, which in this case equals 120 Watts. This is not even close to enough power for a rail gun. So you would need to carry hundreds if not thousands of these comparably large caps to provide power for a shot, and on top of that, it would only be good for ONE shot, absolutely not practical. Railguns will always be subject to a massive power supply, such as those found on warships. It will probably never be available for foot soldiers.
That is impossible according to newtons 3rd law ninja said it every action has an equal and opposite reaction if a bullet travels down a chamber at extremely high speeds its going to push back the weapon once it exits the chamber.
OK, ill concede, there is SOME recoil, but in negligibly small. In the case of a traditional gun/cannon, its trivial to see where recoil arises from. And in a crossbow, recoil comes from the tensile force of the taught string. When it is released, the middle of the string where the arrow is sitting comes flying towards the front of the bow, but it also pulls the bow back towards the end of the arrow. Thats where crossbow recoil comes from.
Now, in the case of a railgun, things are slightly different. There are three forces involved here. The electromagnetic force propells the projectile forward on the rails. The second force is that of friction, which is experienced by the slug grinding against the rails during its acceleration. This is assuming that the projectile doesnt "roll" down the rails, which would cause no friction, but would also cause for a lot of spin once the projectile exits the rails. The third force is that of air resistance in front of the projectile, which also slows it down.
Hence, the only two forces that could cause recoil are friction and air resistance. The force of friction can be calculated by finding the mass of the projectile and multiplying it by a scalar, say X, which is based entirely on the material of the slug. Seeing as the mass of a slug/bullet is very very small, the force slowing down the round would be miniscule.
Now, the main cause of recoil would be the air resistance in front of the accelerating projectile. As it travels down the rails, it builds up air pressure in front of the round, which will push it back. The only thing coupling this with the rails themselves is the force of friction. Hence, if the force of friction is small, the amount of force that the "gun" will experience is very small as well.
Funk