February 20, 2008

Dekamegajoule Railgun

The navy is trying to build a humongous railgun, a crazy, probably pointless weapon that shoots a projectile purely through electromagnets. Which is why I have no clue where all that fire is coming from. The video is still pretty cool though. The test depicted below involves roughly 10 megajoules of energy and Mach 7 for the 7 pound projectile. This site says "an 8 megajoule test shot has an impacting force that the Navy describes as being the equivalent of 'hitting a target with a Ford Taurus at 380 mph.'"

Oh, and by the way, the flames are from the ignition of aluminum particles on the outside of the shell, heated to 1,000 °C by the aerodynamic drag.

1 comments:

Joel said...

Ryan, you are boring us.

We demand esoterica!

(just noticed you haven't posted in a while)