19 October 2015

Why are the dangerous ones always male?

P
Popular Mechanics has an article by Eric Limer about a kid playing with dangerous toys:
​Dabbling amateur armsmakers mess around with potato guns. Serious amateur armsmakers 3D print their own portable railguns. This man is clearly one of the latter.
Known as NSA_Listbot on Reddit, this guy clearly takes his projects seriously, and gets into all the nitty gritty details of his inadvisable but super awesome weapon in a long post on Imgur. Unlike a coilgun or gauss rifle, which use a series of electromagnets to pull a magnetic projectile down a tube at great speeds, a railgun operation on more complicated physics, but doesn't require its projectiles to be magnetic. What NSA_Listbot's got here is the same thing the Navy is building, but on a much smaller scale.
When all wired up, the railgun's twenty pounds of capacitors—three pairs of 300J, 350V, 5500uF​ units—can electrify the guns rails to fire tiny aluminum rounds like this: 
It may not look like much, but according to the video, that pellet was doing over 250 meters per second out of the barrel. For context, a standard velocity round coming out of a .22 does around 350 meters per second. This thing is serious.
For more pictures, stats, and science, you can check out the Imgur post on the build, or the conversation on Reddit. And it should go without saying, but don't try this at home. 
Rico says he wouldn't want one, but it'll be illegal soon...

No comments:

 

Casino Deposit Bonus