Railgun at 10% The Speed of Light??

My friend was talking abuot how he read soemwhere that there are railguns that can shoot at 10% of c...c being the Speed of Light. He cant find any proof to back this up....is there any truth behind it?? I think its 100% bull#...what do yall thing?

Forgive me for being ignorant. What is a railgun?

www.securityarms.com...

I would think that with that kind of velocity you could penetrate the toughest armor with something as simple as a golf ball. Right?

Yeah...i guess....but thats not what i want to know. I want to know if there is any truth at all behind is claims?

It said that the rail gun would shoot 150 km per second. I think the speed of light is 186,000m per second. Not quite a tenth

10% the speed of light? That's 30 million meters per second, 98 million feet per second, or around 67 million miles per hour! Inconceivable! Currently the fastest (unclassified) railgun, at Sandia National Lab, can fire a 0.1 gram projectile to 16000 m/s (12.8 kilojoules of kinetic energy), three orders of magnitude less than what your friend proposed. Equally impressive, Maxwell Labs has a railgun that can accelerate a 1.6 kilogram projectile to 3300 m/s (almost 9 megajoules of energy!). For comparison, an average pickup truck travelling at 80 mph only has about 1 megajoule.
Sam Barros' Power Labs has some great information regarding railguns, and other advanced technologies.

Maybe your friend was thinking of a particle accelerator? Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator can accelerate particles up to 0.98 TeV (trillion electron volts), which is 1.6e-7 J. Doesn't sound like much, but you have to realize that it's a proton that's begin accelerated, which has a rest mass of only 1.7e-27 kg. Now, calculating the velocity is a bit of a pain, since we need to account for relativistic effects, so I'm going to leave that as an exercise for the reader. Just know that we're talking darn near the speed of light (I beleive it's something like 0.999c).

So I was right???

Originally posted by hockey_crazy
It said that the rail gun would shoot 150 km per second. I think the speed of light is 186,000m per second. Not quite a tenth

No offense, but there isn't a single correct fact in this statement. The 150 km/s is an estimated maximum that railguns will eventually be able to achieve. I believe dreamlandmafia is referring to current technology. The speed of light is not 186 km/s, it's about 300,000 km/s. Regardless, 150 is nowhere near one tenth of 186 or 300,000! You may want to get a new calculator.

If you even COULD make a weapon that shoots that fast, I am sure that it would need a massive power source for that kind of projection.

aswell, the tech could be used for other things, like spacecraft.

your freind is very mistaken dude

Using it for spacecraft is rather inpractical at the moment given how it would kill any human passengers due to the accelleration.
As for military use, it won't be useful on anything that dosen't have some sort of nuclear reactor anything less just dosen't have the juice.

[edit on 8-6-2004 by Amur_Tiger]

you could try checking out metal storm's unbelieveable weaponry. Some are stated on this website but below is a link to there own.

www.metalstorm.com...

Chris

Originally posted by Catfish


If you even COULD make a weapon that shoots that fast, I am sure that it would need a massive power source for that kind of projection.

aswell, the tech could be used for other things, like spacecraft.

your freind is very mistaken dude

umm are u saying that rail guns cant reach that speed?

10% of light speed? This is a good joke :-) Lets say we create a reilgun with 6km/s (I highly doubt you will see some practical railgun with more) But it is only 0.00002 of light speed. 0.1 is an absultely different speed category.
It is believed that interstelar ships with termonuclear engines could travel at 0.1 light speed.

You people need to get your heads out of your arses, instead of limiting the human race to what it can do, how about thinking about what it could achieve, such as a rail gun that can send a single projectile one tenth the speed of light.

It is very possible, just not by our means of making it possible, for once how about all of you start thinking AHEAD, pfft, the future leaders of America my arse...

You people are stuck in the ignorant ago of the 1960's, anything is possible if you think about it, what do you think all that hippy comotion was about?

Shattered OUT...

Originally posted by ShatteredSkies
You people need to get your heads out of your arses, instead of limiting the human race to what it can do, how about thinking about what it could achieve, such as a rail gun that can send a single projectile one tenth the speed of light.

It is very possible, just not by our means of making it possible, for once how about all of you start thinking AHEAD, pfft, the future leaders of America my arse...

You people are stuck in the ignorant ago of the 1960's, anything is possible if you think about it, what do you think all that hippy comotion was about?

Shattered OUT...

hey im all for rail guns so dont no hate mail my way !theres no need
i love rail guns
and it might be possible to make it reach the stated speed by building it in space because it would have no airfraction

Let's restrict this to scientific debate?
The energy involved in a mass moving at 3x10 ^ 7 (as suggested) is
9 x 10 ^ 14 Joules
Let's put this into a relative thing.
This is 214285714285 calories
aka what we eat in 61224489 days..
aka 170,068 years of eating (at 3,500 calories a day)
This is enough energy to lift 1 kilogram 900,000,000,000 km.
That's..
300x as far as Pluto is from the sun
Another way to look at it;
That much energy would mean a person would be running at (of 60 kg);
5,477,225 metres per second

Comparatively,
that's enough energy to heat 1 kilogram (litre) of water up to...
200,140,000,000 degrees celsius (if it stayed a fluid, somehow, all the time)

Or,
power the entire world for 0.0000024 years
or 1 minute and 15 seconds...
powering the ENTIRE world...

10% of c...c being the Speed of Light

*falls out of seat* Holy Sh*t!!