Need help getting this railgun to fire faster

[brad]

Been trying to break 7.95 km/s with a railgun, but I just can't get it any higher without shattering the projectile. It's made of Osmium, the strongest projectile material available unless I missed something. I can slightly lower it by making the barrel thicker, but that makes it far heavier and more expensive.

Here's the design I'm trying to improve on, I can switch the barrel to zirconium copper and reduce to length to avoid barrel shattering, ending up with 8.95 km/s. I either need a projectile material stronger than Osmium, which doesn't seem to exist, or a way to reduce the pressure. http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/439489832361207076/2A71A61F643948616193146B315DCF26FABE7A31/

[Ring System]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=774598396 14 km/s railgun. Thicker rails, longer rails. Not really made for what yours is (e.g., drone-mounting) to be honest- costs 500-something credits. Thanks for the idea of using an osmium projectile though...

[Ξ ＮＹＯ]

Originally posted by Doc Fizzix:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=774598396 14 km/s railgun. Thicker rails, longer rails. Not really made for what yours is (e.g., drone-mounting) to be honest- costs 500-something credits. Thanks for the idea of using an osmium projectile though...

That does not show the whole railgun setup.

[Ring System]

Originally posted by Crawling Chaos:

Originally posted by Doc Fizzix:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=774598396 14 km/s railgun. Thicker rails, longer rails. Not really made for what yours is (e.g., drone-mounting) to be honest- costs 500-something credits. Thanks for the idea of using an osmium projectile though...

That does not show the whole railgun setup.

Crap crappity crap crap. Fixing.

[Ring System]

http://imgur.com/a/dPRcn Fixed

[brad]

Thanks for the design, seems I've reached the peak where I can only go bigger to get better. My railgun is mounted to an ultra cheap drone, so I guess I'll have to settle with what I have.

[Cuddlefission]

It also seems to be a physics breaker - wolfram alpha claims a kinetic energy of 196kj for that mass at that speed, and it can't be spending more than a millisecond or two in that barrel... so powering that with only 200kW in seems... yeah. I really hope they're able to get these fails sorted out.

It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to calculate the kinetic energy at the muzzle and sanity check it against (say) the power input, the amount of chemical energy in a conventional gun propellant, etc.

[Ξ ＮＹＯ]

Originally posted by Cuddlefish:

It also seems to be a physics breaker - wolfram alpha claims a kinetic energy of 196kj for that mass at that speed, and it can't be spending more than a millisecond or two in that barrel... so powering that with only 200kW in seems... yeah. I really hope they're able to get these fails sorted out.

It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to calculate the kinetic energy at the muzzle and sanity check it against (say) the power input, the amount of chemical energy in a conventional gun propellant, etc.

That would be a good idea. Have a checker that eliminates things that are clear violations of the laws of physics, like that railgun.

[Cuddlefission]

That, and it seems like it gives Lasers a bad rap unduely, because there the math is easy to check, it spits an efficiency factor right at you. But when they're being measured against magnetic accelerators that pull velocity out of thin air, it makes them seem much less useful by comparison.

[Zarincos]

While the railgun getting around 2500% efficiency definitely needs to be looked at, I would like to defend vanadium chromium steel as a projectile. While it's around 30% less strong, it is around 3 times lighter, which helps make it go a fair bit faster. I do like making the barrel out of osmium, though, unless there's some big upside with zirconium copper that I'm not quite seeing.

[Ring System]

It breaks physics? Rats. Here I was, thinking I had found the answer to all my tactical woes.

[SquallTemnov]

140 mw, 50 meters long, 1 meter wide. 4.4 mm radius, 50 gram mass. Ferro-steel barrel, can`t remember the material of projectile right now. Mass is ~ 1kt. Projectile speed ~22km/s.