Railguns vs Cartridge Weapons

Battlescape
41

The english word for Puma is Cougar

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42

Cougar, puma, mountain lion, panther, and cantamount are all the same thing.

43

Reference = not gotten. :wink:

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44

Note that the “sam” line is muddled. It’s “what in the Sam Hill”, which is a euphemism for “what in the hell”.

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45

this doesnt say anywhere that cartridges will continue for a long time.
just that bullets are here to stay

46

The point is that a chemical explosion in a confined space is the best way to release energy to propel a kinetic projectile. Not chemical rocket rounds, not electric propulsion, not mechanical propulsion, nothing.

Not yet, anyway.

Just as we’re getting into things like graphene and carbon nanotubes, which are materials interesting for their mechanical and electrical properties, we may start to figure out how to create atomic-scale structures that provide a kind of custom explosive force. When gunpowder goes off, a lot of energy is lost to heat and to expansion in all directions. What if the energy was directed only along the barrel? Imagine a material that was like a coiled spring - at the atomic level. Trigger the release of that energy and you get a silent, extremely-energetic push on the bullet. The only sound would be from the bullet moving through the air.

Interestingly, a closed barrel would interfere with the efficiency of such a round.

47

Maybe in future sensors and countermeassures are so good that long distance weapons are not effective anymore. That would make bomber and short-distance fighter attacks more effective against big ships.
And it’s more fun for the players

48

And maybe in the future it’s the other way around. :wink:

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49

and that gets around the exhaust speed limit for gas fed guns… how?

because what you are describing sounds like an explosion, a technobabbly contained and directed one, but still an explosion with the same limits.

magnetic guns have the very big advantage that their muzzle velocity directly correlates with the power you can supply to your gun.

and if it has to be a system that operates without permanent generator supply, there are prototypes of capacitors providing 300kJ/kg (With potential improvements to about 1500kJ/kg), which is within an order of magnitude (or even reaches!) to the 1.300kJ/kg for modern 30x173mm ammunition.
(200kJ/150g)

thats two or three decades until we have capacitors that have (the effective) mass energy densities of modern propellant charges.
and beyond that you only win with a magnetic gun, ammo mass wise at least.

add in a few thousand shots of ammo and the electric gun wins in terms of mass, muzzle velocity, recoil and is on par with the outside energy needs (no energy to fire the gun, only to orient it)

and when you start re-using the caps you can have an amount of them charged on hand which you recharge when used and you have leftover energy, or you just run the gun directly from the main generator and just fire the projectiles without charging the caps inbetween.

works for high power, works for low power, may even works manportable.
can be run “cased” by expelling the discharged caps as heatsinks, can be run “caseless” by reusing the caps.
can be run single belt, cased, by arranging them in semi-conventional cartridges, can be run with two belts, one for projectiles, one for backfed caps.

edit: sauces
https://www.orbitalatk.com/defense-systems/armament-systems/30x30x173mm/docs/30x173mm_Fact_Sheet.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor#Materials (graphene)
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2010/nov/26/graphene-supercapacitor-breaks-storage-record

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50

just made them different in game aspects. game should be fun. and fun is variability in tactics and strategy. for example

“powder” guns - low/medium speed, low/high ROF, zero EMI (firing signature. its actually stealth weapons), low heat, rapid use(no charging), zero power use

railguns - high/superhigh speed, low/medium ROF, high EMI, very high heat, need capacitors, need medium power

coil - low/medium speed, low/high ROF, medium EMI, medium heat, rapid use, need big power

goal is diversity

51

We don’t know yet what type of technology our kinetic weapons will use - be it closer to traditional bullets, rail guns, etc. At the moment we’re just focused on having a “gun” that fires kinetic projectiles and needs to be balanced accordingly. That being said this thread certainly has provided a great list of possible technologies and I suspect will be referenced heavily once we’re ready to make a final decision.

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52

Not saying that I need this, but being able to shoot a giant space lightning bolt would be awesome. But, I need this.

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53

But do you have an electronic system that can cycle thousands of times per minute from full capacitor load to zero to full to zero without overheating/breaking/exploding/etc? Because we do have that for powder guns.

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There’s a capacitor in each bullet, precharged. Just load and shoot as fast as your mechanism can operate. Recharge after firing, just like doing a reload of a gunpowder and primer bullet.

In fact, I can imagine a line of rounds being pushed straight into the back of the barrel, with the loading mechanism slicing the round in two, putting the capacitor in the battery slot and the bullet into the barrel (battery slot and barrel would be adjacent). As everything reaches the right point, the capacitor discharges and the bullet races away. Discharged capacitors just fall out the front of the battery slot, to be collected for reuse. The firing rate would be limited by the stresses on the electrical system and the launcher rails or coils or whatever.

Alternately, just feed two distinct lines of objects, one of capacitors and one of shells. It’s a bit like loading a shell and bags of powder behind it into a naval gun - except that the capacitors and shells don’t actually need to be anywhere near each other.

Of course, that’s a ways off. Even after supercapacitors are equivalent in energy density, they’ll have to compare favorably in cost, maintenance, damage tolerance and so on. That includes the electrical work, the launcher, etc.

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55

well, if they can provide muzzle velocitites (much) higher than your tech can archieve with chemical guns other concerns will probably be pushed back, as speed is king in space.

and if you allow your nanosprings to be a viable alternative to gunpowder/electrics, supercaps surely are viable alternatives :stuck_out_tongue:

56

there are many and big such systems.
the national power grids for example, they cycle 50 times (if you look closer actually 100 times) a second form full amperage to no amperage and back.

and they have been working for decades without large problems (at least in europe, where we have actual redundancy and robustness in the electrical net)

also industrial facilities with high inductive loads (read: electrical motors) have large puffer capacitor banks connected in parallel to their grid connection, which afaik also dis-/charge with net frequency.