Railgun Not Speeding Up Projectiles

[Pamparampampamparam]

So this is my cannon

30m barrel with 4 rails around it
20,000 rail gun charge per shot
500mm gauge

And my ammo...
AP cap
Solid Warhead Body
Solid Warhead Body
Solid Warhead Body
Penetration Depth Fuse
Frag Warhead 180 cone angle
Flak warhead
Stabalizer Fin
Stabalizer Fin
Base Bleeder

My shell barely goes anywhere, just arks right into the ocean. I thought railguns were supposed to replace gunpoweder propellants. I'm using the devtest build.

[Sabertoothproton]

You probably dont have enough batteries. If the gun has a fast fire rate the shells will fall in to the ocean because the railgun cant charge fast enough.

[Pamparampampamparam]

I fired when the charge was at max at 40000

[Sabertoothproton]

Are your rails hooked up properly?

[Pamparampampamparam]

They are all spinning and when I mouse over them they do not say "Not conected to fireing piece"

[rditto48801]

You need more energy.
Also, the base part of the rails (forget the name) must be directly connected to the Adv Firing Piece.

My quad rail, 30m barrel rail gun fires 8 part (4m customizer) shells that 'only' go a few hundred meters per second with a 470,000 energy shot.

[Pamparampampamparam]

How much energy would you say? Or rather, how many battaries? The game doesn't seem it fit to tell us how much energy every battery can store.

[rditto48801]

My prototype railgun has a house sized battery setup that holds 940,000 energy total, with dozens of rechargers. I lost track of how many batteries it has, but I am sure it is close to 100 of them.
For a 50cm diameter shell, I would probably aim for I think at least 500,000 energy (250k per shot).
I am not sure of an exact energy amount, but I try to aim for a minimal velocity of 300m/s for big shells. Just aim the camera crosshairs at the gun barrel or many other parts of it to see the gun stats. I think it should show the estimated muzzle velocity it can achieve with the present energy charge.

[Harold]

if u have no gunpowder, you have no cooldown which means that the first shell will be accelerated but the others won't. Also, there is a bit of a bug atm which means that railguns will not calculate for the extra speed increase :/.

[Pamparampampamparam]

Is there a way to make the cannon use all its energy per shot instead of just half of it?

Why do I need special railgun batteries anyway? Cant it draw it directly from the engine just like everything else? Why do those batteries need to be on the turret themselves?

Each battery does not need its own recharger, right?

[rditto48801]

@Doge
I had not noticed that issue myself. I will half to keep an eye out for it next time I work on my railgun.

@BasileusMaximos
I think the Rail Guns only used a fixed amount of energy (half of what is available) per shot, from what I have seen.

Rail Guns cannot use power from normal batteries that electric motors use.
Rail Gun Batteries are more like Capacitors. They are designed to release their energy in an instant.
Electric Motor batteries are technically designed to release their energy over time.

If a Rail Gun 'could' use direct energy, it would likely require a complex energy transfer system (maybe something on par with how laser transceivers work), and an engine of stupuidly absurdly mammothly hugely gigantic size.

It takes almost a minute to recharge my 470k energy in my railgun energy with dozens upon dozens of rechargers, for a shot that will use up that energy in a fraction of a second. That means if direct energy from the engine was possible, I would likely need to increase my engine output 1,000,000 fold to produce the equavilint amount of energy 'on demand'.
Suddenly, having house size stacks of rail gun batteries isn't so bad.


Rail Gun Batteries are setup like normal batteries, in that you only need to have the rechargers connected to a battery that is a part of the group.
One thing I do is make a huge block of batteries, and I make 'pillars' of batteries that have 4 rechargers on the sides, with these recharger surrounded battery pillars located in the block of batteries, and more batteries in all the spare spaces, and if space permits, rechargers plastered all over the outside of the block.