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JimmyRustles
06-21-2012, 7:30 PM
Lately I've been doing a lot of research on California gun laws, and I realized something, California has no laws regarding railguns.

So here's my idea: A railgun built on a modified AR15 lower reciever. Detachable battery packs would go into the magwell, and projectiles would be loaded from the top (like a P90 mag). The safety switch would turn the battery pack on, while a pull of the trigger would move the projectile into firing positing between the rails, the projectile itself completes the circuit. It would be a retarded DAO with a mechanical safety, but it could work. Just replace the barrel/handguard assembly with the rails. When you run out of batteries you just drop your old battery pack and put a new one in. When you run out of ammo, you just pop in another mag. The railgun would be front heavy, but that could be offset by the top loading design and battery pack. The buffer tube/buffer/spring will be removed and replaced with a folding stock. You can still have picatinny rails and all that crap. Every railgun out there is a monstrously unwieldy piece of crap and are not combat effective. This way you can have the ergos of the ar15, with a minimal amount of retraining, most of the controls would be same as ar15, and an effective weapon.

The gun wouldn't require cleaning, as there wouldn't be any residue left after firing. The gun would be able to propel projectiles faster than a firearm, giving you more kinetic energy and you would be able to carry more ammo in your mag and on your person (less ammo weight as the only ammo it requires is the metal projectile). The gun would have negligible recoil as there isn't a force going the opposite direction.

Only technical problem I can see so far are the batteries. Are there even batteries with enough juice to make this plausible?


Pros:

You can have any evil features you want and have "high capacity magazines" because it's not a firearm.

Minimal recoil

More kinetic energy (lethality) in about the same size package as an ar15

Controls similar to ar15

Less Maintenance


Cons:

Heavy battery packs

DAO trigger

More complex trigger mechanism

You would have to carry battery packs and ammo

Librarian
06-21-2012, 9:36 PM
Google (http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=9MI&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=X&ei=xAPkT67NGarC0QGzlPDHCQ&ved=0CAcQBSgA&q=man+portable+railgun&spell=1) 'man portable railgun'.

Most of the first 30 results attempt to consider the idea seriously.

robcoe
06-21-2012, 9:50 PM
Serious answer, your big problems are going to be weight(you need some massive coils to get a projectile moving that quick without burning out the coils)

charge capacity(you can actualy charge it with low voltage batteries and a step up dc-dc converter, but you will drain any battery that can fit in a magwell pretty quick)

charge time(to get sufficent energy to be lethal you would need to charge a large, heavy bank of capacitors, and given the current limitations of any chargeing circuit you could build into this thing and still deal with the heat and weight you would be looking at charge times measured in at minimum the several second range per shot)

Lethality(can be done, I have seen home built coil guns, and thats what this would need to be since they can be made much smaller than true rail guns, that could kill someone, but it aint easy and those were only portable in the vehicle mounted sense)

Accuracy(smoothbore, and you can't have the barrel as tight as on a normal gun, so you basicly have an old school musket)

Also isolation(this would have to be a high voltage design to not melt all the internal components), size, sights, wear and tear

Those are just the problems off the top of my head, really it would probably be easier and cheaper to buy off the California state senate and the Govenor and pay them to change the gun laws.

JimmyRustles
06-22-2012, 7:39 AM
What if instead of large coils, many many many small coils were used?

No idea how to reduce the wear and tear though or reduce charge times.

I guess this will be another idea that sounds good on paper, but will have to wait for superior technology.

robcoe
06-22-2012, 8:04 AM
What if instead of large coils, many many many small coils were used?

No idea how to reduce the wear and tear though or reduce charge times.

I guess this will be another idea that sounds good on paper, but will have to wait for superior technology.

Lot's of small coils gets into length problems, also timing issues since if you fire one coil while the previous one is still charged you could possibly slow down the round.

I have built a couple coil guns over the years(I typically use multiple large coils in series and have a solenoid to start the projectile moving), they are fun, but I have never managed to make one particularly accurate or powerful. Biggest I ever managed with cheap off the shelf parts was about 5 feet long overall, weighed a good 50 pounds and if I went full charge could get about the energy of a 22 short(there is a lot more energy in gunpowder than people think). If I went with more expensive IGBTs or maybe Mosfets for energy control I might have been able to raise that quite a bit, but Eraser it's not.