Rail Guns Closer to Reality 475
emtboy9 writes "Yahoo News is reporting that scientists at Sandia National Labs have created a magnetic pulse gun (rail gun) that can accelerate small aluminum plates at 34 kilometers per second, faster than the Earth travels through space.
The accelerated plates strike a target after traveling only five millimeters, or less than a quarter-inch. The impact generates a shock wave -- in some cases, reaching 15 million times atmospheric pressure -- that passes through the target material turning matter into various states almost instantly (solids into liquids, liquids into gas, and even gas into plasma)."
Shitty weapon in Counterstrike (Score:3, Funny)
They should use some of the technology for cold fusion to accelerate small metal plates into things... That would be hella fun!
Re:Shitty weapon in Counterstrike (Score:2)
Re:Shitty weapon in Counterstrike (Score:3, Informative)
Or turn it around and try to use railgun technology to produce warm fusion. I'm not really sure if it would work (effective confinement is one *bleeping* hard thing to do), but it might offer the possibility of fusing a large amount of matter. Now how can we extract energy from the extreme neutron flux without losing the machine in the process?
Re:Shitty weapon in Counterstrike (Score:2)
Re:Shitty weapon in Counterstrike (Score:5, Funny)
Yeehaw! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeehaw! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yeehaw! (Score:4, Funny)
And we will plasma pleasures scream
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.
Quake (Score:4, Funny)
And speaking of Quake... (Score:4, Funny)
At least, it worked that way in Quake II at LAN parties.
Though it sometimes caused the person with the gun to drop out of the game, reboot into Linux, and start denial-of-service attacking the guy who was chanting...
faster, how? (Score:3, Insightful)
Faster, measured against what frame of reference? A marker on the equator versus the center of mass? As seen from the moon? Sol? Alpha Proxima? Vega? The center of Andromeda's galactic core?
Re:faster, how? (Score:2)
Re:faster, how? (Score:5, Informative)
The Sun circles the center of our Galaxy at about 250 km/s, but the Local Group of galaxies moves at about 600 kilometers per second relative to the primordial radiation of the big bang. [nasa.gov]
Re:faster, how? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:faster, how? (Score:3, Informative)
Probably the Earth's orbital speed around the Sun.
It's far too small to be in reference to the cosmic microwave background radiation. The temperature of the CMBR varies as a dipole across the sky, with a temperature difference of 7.7 mK, because the Sun is traveling toward the Leo constellation at about 370 km/s relat
Re:faster, how? (Score:5, Informative)
Most sensible people would take it as being the sun spinning around the sun, and leave it there.
Since there is no pleasing you therein, the earth is more or less 149,668,992 km from the sun, which gives a circumfrence of around 940,398,011 km which over 365 days gives 29.8 km/second.
So, there you go, it's around the sun.
Re:faster, how? (Score:2)
Ok, which planet are you from ?
Re:faster, how? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:faster, how? (Score:2)
Plates don't liquify people (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Plates don't liquify people (Score:5, Funny)
Futurama, of course (Score:5, Funny)
"How is it?"
"Well, it varies from person to person."
Rail gun + Japan's robot suit = (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Rail gun + Japan's robot suit = (Score:2)
I bet the respawns are gonna be pretty hard...
Re:Rail gun + Japan's robot suit = (Score:2)
That would be taken care of through uploading your brain (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05
The n00bs would still spawn camp though... and still get their ass kicked anyways.
Did you not do basic physics at school? (Score:5, Insightful)
We were taught this at the age of 14 - what were you doing?
Acceleration is measured in distance per second per second. 34 km/s is a velocity. So did you mean it accelerates it to 34 km/s? Or did you actually mean it accelerates at 34 km/s/s? This is
Re:Did you not do basic physics at school? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Did you not do basic physics at school? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Did you not do basic physics at school? (Score:3, Informative)
Or in SI units, 2 picoseconds.
Re:Did you not do basic physics at school? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Did you not do basic physics at school? (Score:5, Funny)
This is /. were pedantic nerds with nothing better to do hang out, not CNN.
And as one such, I can't help pointing out that "were" should be "where".
Re:Did you not do basic physics at school? (Score:3, Informative)
Practical use for a rail gun (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll bet this railgun on fires a few millimeters because they have problems with longer magnetic "barrels" exploding from the shockwave produced by an object moving "at t
Look at the possibilities! (Score:3, Funny)
How about this: In Soviet Russia the Railgun ... ummmmm ...
No, I can't really see any easy beneficial (which is, I guess, to say "non-military") applications for this tech, unless you can tell me how this could aid in space exploration (a means of launching spacecraft, maybe?) ... or how it might help in the advancement of processing or data storage technology...
Wait! I've got it:
Railgun confirms: Tank crew is dying.
Ahh, that's more like it. Now I can sleep. :-)
Re:Look at the possibilities! (Score:5, Interesting)
Powering spacecraft or launching cargo or many other things [oz.net]...
not a rail gun, fer cripes sake (Score:5, Informative)
Let's hear it for reading comprehension! Between yahoo news and he submitter, we're somehow left with the impression that this is a rail gun. It's nothing of the kind. It's an implosion machine. As described in the LiveScience.com article linked: "The Z uses a short burst of intense electricity - only a few 10 billionths of a second long - that forces an ionized gas to implode." So we can stop the handwringing over the morality of this "weapon", as to use it as such would require luring the enemy into a chamber the size of a soup can and asking him to hold still while you blast him.
I wish you'd just stop your name calling ... (Score:3, Funny)
morality debate (Score:5, Funny)
HEAR HEAR! I quite agree with the parent. This should be a discussion about the morality of lureing your enemies into soup can sized implosion chambers and asking him to hold still.
(It doesn't sound cricket, if you ask me...)
Re:morality debate (Score:3, Funny)
It doesn't sound cricket, if you ask me...
It does sound like Football , especially the kind a Arsenal Vs. Man United game is.
Re:not a rail gun, fer cripes sake (Score:2)
I'm already real. (Score:3, Funny)
Curious as to the value (Score:2)
On a serious note, this seems a useless device for most purposes. It MAY have implications for nuclear fusion, especially if used in any future space-based drives, as you can't exactly place the JET fusion laboratory in space - it's rather big.
It MAY also have implications for subway systems built along similar lines as the Japanese Bullet Train. What I am picturing here is a subway system that
Re:Curious as to the value (Score:2)
Which is exactly why I've always thought it best to use a near-vaccuum in a subway setting, as then you have next to zero air resistance.
And how on earth could they not consider air resistance THE major problem? It increases with the square of the velocity, so doubling the velocity quadruples the air resistance. In other words, let's take two trains - one g
better link (Score:2, Informative)
Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing to see here, move along. (and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain)
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Funny)
Anyway, nice one, you should elaborate that into a treatise on marxistic-leninistic high energy physics.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, couldn't resist. So mod me down.
Railguns not for fusion (Score:5, Interesting)
Rail guns are unlkely to be useful for driving implosions. It would be very hard to focus a symmetric implosion with a railgun. However, you could use the same pulsed power to drive an implosion like a plasma gun. Get a thin gold tube, fill it with DT, and whack in a pulse. The pulse goes up the outside of the tube. The gold outside goes directly to plasma, stops conducting, and so the current can move inward. If you can get the shockwave reaction from the expanding plasma to approximately match the speed of the current penetration, then a nice, cylindrically symmetrical implosion should be yours, and the small burst of annoying penetrative radiation and the hair loss that goes with it.
There is another effect - the Z-pinch - that is a bit railgun-ish. This gets a lot of mention in the Sandia webpage. People used to have great hopes for that - it was quite the thing in the seventies, when people could still use phrases like 'everlasting power from seawater' without laughing - but it is hard to get a symmetrical pinch before instabilities run riot.
Don't take my word for it. Maybe, I'm too old, and things have moved forward since I last was in this field. Sandia is a seriously cool place, even if the people who write their webpages are a bit too keen now and then.
I think I know how that sequence ends... (Score:5, Funny)
Let me guess - it then turns plasmas into solids.
So the war of the future will be an evere more complex version of Liquid, Gas, Plasma, Solid - far more sophisticated than the three state method of old including Rock and Paper.
The perfect non military use (Score:3, Funny)
Nooklear Waste (Score:2)
These are not the rail guns you are looking for (Score:5, Interesting)
However -- rail guns are on the cusp of military viability. The University of Texas at Austin's Institute of Advanced Technology got 10 million dollars [utexas.edu] to develop viable rail guns. Just a month ago Janes reported [janes.com] that a prototype of the military rail gun had been tested, and that it was nearing viability.
That article really made me wish I had a Jane's subscription. Apparently, the limiting factor is the size of the capacitor -- if they can get this down than naval applications within a few years are plausible.Incidentally, a fun game, if you're ever bored, is to imagine what would happen to the human body if one were to hold and fire a rail gun [imdb.com](even a wimpy one that shot at a mere 1,600m/s and not at "near the speed of light"), and the law of conservation of momentum actually worked. Really! Try at parties!
Fond wishes,
Moiche
Three times the velocity (Score:4, Interesting)
Does not. (Score:5, Informative)
This does not bring rail guns any closer to reality, by which I mean it does not bring military rail guns any closer to reality.
The Z-machine [sandia.gov] is a hanger-sized experimental device akin to a particle accelerator. This was an experiment designed to study extremely high pressures, such as those thought to have been important in Jovian planetary formation.
Saying that this experiment brings rail guns closer to reality is like saying that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN brings PPCs closer to reality.
Re:Does not. (Score:2)
Thanks to Steve Jobs, PPCs are now closer to unreality.
An improvement (Score:2)
"Small aluminum plates" is highly misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and to link to a two-year-old image... with a caption of "have created" that implies it's brand new... PLEASE.
Once again, the question must be asked: where's the moderation system for STORIES?
Re:"Small aluminum plates" is highly misleading (Score:2)
Draft dodger! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Draft dodger! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well...it's not so much the _point_ that's the hard part, but more the respawning mechanism itself.
How long till we hear... (Score:3, Funny)
The uses for this: (Score:5, Interesting)
As said above, it's not a rail gun. It's not really even particularly useful for rail gun research.
What it's for is to put small amounts of matter at tremendous temperatures and pressures.
There are a lot of reasons to want to do this. Some of it is just basic research. i.e. What happens to matter and the laws governing it at these extreme conditions?
Another application is fusion power research. You can compress deuturium and tritium to the point they will fuse in this machine. Though it's not made to generate power, you can learn about the details of the fusion reaction.
That said, the main reason why this machine was built was indeed for military research. But even that is in a grey area. The US hasn't conducted a nuclear test detonation in quite some time. The reason it was able to do this is that computer simulations and other methods got good enough that they were able to be used instead of actually setting off a thermonuclear or nuclear device. Indeed, many of the Department of Energy's most powerful computers were created specifically to do that sort simulation (ASCII White, IIRC, for example).
When running computer simulations, you have to have some way of calibrating the simulation and checking that it's getting the right answer.
In the case of a supercomputer run simulating a car crash, you can validate it by conducting crash tests, and seeing how closely it agrees with them. Wrecking a few of a given car model is acceptable in return for it.
But, when simulating nuclear weapons, you would often run into cases where to validate the code, you'd, at first glance, have to set one off. The conditions in a nuclear blast are so extreme, that it's difficult to put matter into that sort of state. If you're trying to maintain a test moratorium, that kinda undermines the whole idea.
That's a big reason PBFA 2 and the follow on Z machine were made. They let DOE check the computer simulations and do basic research that would otherwise require nuclear testing. One of the biggest areas of interest is what happens when the materials in a bomb age. A lot of those weapons are getting quite old.
They have many other basic research uses, but a big one is making it possible to keep the nuclear test moratorium.
So, it's grey area. On the one hand, it's used for weapon research. On the other, it helps keep the test moratorium. It also has a lot of basic research uses. So, just like a supercomputer, you have to make your own decision about whether it, on the whole is a good or bad thing.
Bad link? (Score:4, Informative)
Acceleration (Score:2, Interesting)
Accelrates at 34 km/s?? I thought that was a velocity. If .5 (at^2) = .005 m
And at = 34000 m/s
...then that makes the time about 3e-7 s. That would be something like 11.8 billion g's.
Not bad. Even for such a small projectile, that's an impressive impulse.
-ex
Equal and Opposite (Score:3, Interesting)
Now I foresee a human-carried model! Shoulder rocket launchers let the rocket go on its own - no recoil but don't stand behind the tube. Well, let's replace the burning rocket fuel with a rail gun. The rail shoots out the back in slow motion and the payload goes out the front much much faster. Right? But we're talking magnetic fields at work so....the rail can be curved!! What does that mean?
North and south. Poles that is - double barrel shotgun. As long as both barrels shoot at once one side balances the other as long as the force should cancel at the back end.
Just in case some entrepreneur wants to build one now, remember Equal and Opposite. The rail has to be flexed. In other words, think sawed off shotgun, and even think crossbow. The rail has to be horizontal for the most part until the ends where the ammo is turned by the electromagnetism to shoot forwards. Almost all the force should occur in the horizontal portion while the forward pointing portion doesn't give any more force than a normal gun.
Kind of scary, espcially if the high speed projectile doesn't want to turn the corner at the end, not to mention the long lever arm will make the rails flap. Automatic fire will have to be timed.
The only problem left? electric power for something like this must be pretty big. Kinetic energy = 1/2 mv^2 so even a small m will require a lot of car batteries. I don't see 007 running around with this weapon protecting ski bunnies while his batteries freeze.
Faster Than the Earth... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just because we can do a thing... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just because we can do a thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Second paragraph:
Housed at Sandia National Laboratories, the Z machine attracted a lot of attention eight years ago when its energy output more than quadrupled - raising hopes that the reactions in the Z could provide a new source of clean, abundant power. To help further progress towards t
Re:Just because we can do a thing... (Score:2)
Re:Just because we can do a thing... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just because we can do a thing... (Score:2)
Re:Just because we can do a thing... (Score:2)
Re:Just because we can do a thing... (Score:2, Informative)
Space travel (Score:2)
I refer you to the article:
One purpose of these very rapid flights is to help understand the extreme conditions found within the interiors of giant planets in our solar system. By creating states of matter extremely difficult to achieve on Earth, the flyer plates provide hard data to astrophysicists speculating on the structure and even the formation of planets like Jupiter and Saturn.
What's more, this is 3 times Earth escape velocity and so if one had a huge heat sheild it would be a good way to help
Re:Space travel (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not some projectile launcher. It's a massively expensive device that creates immense magnetic fields in a tiny region for fusion and shock wave experiments, of which one thing that you can do is propel miniscule items over short distances. It doesn't "scale" to rail gun applications, and it's not designed to - it's already a monstrously large device. Besides - when it operates
Tighten your tinfoil hat (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just because we can do a thing... (Score:2)
You can never un-invent weapons. There are somethings that should not be created. Look at atomic bombs. They were created, used, and now for the rest of our existence we have to deal with the repercussions. Knowing that a war could easily level most of the civilized world, or that a single weapon in the hands of the wrong people could kill millions. This is discussed in great detail in The Tragedy of the Commons [sciencemag.org] (Hardin, 1968). If you haven't read it, then do.
Re:Just because we can do a thing... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Railguns, Exactly What We Need (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How about a love gun (Score:2)
They don't want weapons that leave injured bodies and people screaming. That's "cruel"
Which is why you have to shatter the bodies, and kill the people outright. No suffering that way...
Hope this clears that up for you...
Re:How about a love gun (Score:3)
Re:How about a love gun (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, not every enemy feels the same way.
Re:How about a love gun (Score:2)
War is just the process of forceably making your enemy love you, current methods however involve the the death of the target individual.
I hate to reply to myself right now but... (Score:2)
Re:How about a love gun (Score:5, Insightful)
This is nothing to do with rail guns. It's just a silly inflamatory headline (or maybe railguns are cool 'cause they're in Quake).
This is all about generating massive shockwaves to examine the properties of matter in extreme conditions (without having to heat it up to enormous temperatures).
Re:How about a love gun (Score:2)
Re:How about a love gun (Score:3, Informative)
The Z machine isn't a railgun at all.
It doesn't accellerate the flyer plate linearly. A Z-pinch machine, which the Z-machine at Sandia is an example of, implodes a thin hollow cylinder of
Re:How about a love gun (Score:3, Informative)
The fact that several mods decided that you post was insightful makes me very uncomfortable with the quality of mods lately. If you read ANY of the TF
Wake me... (Score:2)
I mean, love is great and all but that's just cool.
I'm sure it has some practical non-war mongering use like ridding the world of used car salesmen.
Re:How about a love gun (Score:2)
Re:How about a love gun (Score:2)
Well, I'd rather make an enemy than kill a friend.
But what if your friend is also your enemy. Now, there is a true dilemma. Or in that case, maybe you just say, "fuck it," and kill him anyway. Or maybe you just both kill each other and that way it's even.
Re:How about a love gun (Score:2)
Re:To what ? (Score:2)
Not quite that simple (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:2)
( Another story, the B-36 I think it was was spec'ed with alu
Re:Just what we need. (Score:2, Funny)
While it's theoretically possible that a weapon might be derived from this research someday, but for a moment think about what this is really talking about.
It's a machine that can accelerate a tiny disc of metal very quickly, but only for a short distance, and AFAICT, it's all happening down inside of a big machine so about the biggest thing you could kill with it might be a cockroach.
Right now, as f
Re:So uncivilized! (Score:2)
In the meantime, an army with guns would certainly defeat people with swords, even if they were laser-swords, because it is just not humanly possible to deflect so many bullets (or blaster fire).
Which now makes me wonder - which came first: the jedi or the lightsabre? Did the jedi develop and invent lightsabres as a weapon that was matched to their abilities, or did people invent
Re:Faster then the Earth? (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, that's significantly slower than Earth's `orbital' velocity around the center of the galaxy: 300km/s (yes, 0.1% c) assuming the sun is 100000 ly from the center of the galaxy and it takes 100 millioin years to go complete an orbit.