wooaa
New Member
Posts: 10 
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Post by wooaa on Oct 17, 2016 0:09:50 GMT
What characteristics do you think make for a good projectile?
With coil guns I tend to look for something with high magnetic susceptibility ( so they accelerate more) and good strength ( so it can survive said acceleration). nickel iron molybdenum seems to work well.
With rail guns I look for high conductivity. More conductivity=stronger electric field= stronger magnetic field= more acceleration. Tungsten seems to work okay.
With a conventonal gun I am not so sure. It needs strength, but other than that I don't know what to look for.
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Post by teeth on Oct 17, 2016 1:15:41 GMT
Osmium is by far the best for surviving acceleration, I use it for extremely high velocity railguns. Not sure about its ballistic properties though. Tungsten probably has good ballistic properties too, some armor piercing bullets have tungsten cores.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 17, 2016 1:55:11 GMT
For coilgun, I use iron because they are dirt cheap and pretty much the only thing that worked beside Magnetic glass and nickle iron molybdenum.
Also suprisingly enough, I used DIAMOND as round and it some how works well.
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Post by nerd1000 on Oct 17, 2016 4:30:50 GMT
High density is always desirable for ammo, as denser rounds will take up less space in your ammo bay and tend to penetrate armour better. For a conventional cannon I'd typically use Tungsten, Osmium or Iridium. Tungsten is the toughest and will probably give the best performance on impact (Osmium and Iridium are brittle and may shatter) but it costs more than the other ultra-dense metals. If I was on a tiny budget I'd probably go for iron, as it has acceptable properties and is quite cheap.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 17, 2016 18:16:02 GMT
Well the choice of ammo material matters a lot more for low velocity rounds because as velocity goes up the physical properties of the ammo stop mattering nearly so much as the mass and speed of the round and whether or not the enemy has a wiffle shield. So for low velocity rounds you want a sturdy strong and dense ammo but for rail guns you just want the fastest ammo with enough strength to give you a good mass and speed.
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Post by coaxjack on Oct 17, 2016 22:31:25 GMT
Use a jacketed armor piercing round - the actual penetrator can be made out of your tough metal of choice (W, Os, Ir, etc) but have a thin sleeve of something light and easy to vaporize along the outside. If there is a pointed end to the projectile this will destroy any initial armor layers of the target and allow your armor piercing component to delve further before it begins doing any mechanical work. These actually exist, they're known as composite shells or capped shells. A lot of them come with some kind of explosive filler, but that's not really necessary when a.) the round is going 20,000 ft/s and b.) the enemy armor is, by comparison to a tank or naval ship, paper-thin.
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Post by Durandal on Oct 17, 2016 22:53:42 GMT
Use a jacketed armor piercing round - the actual penetrator can be made out of your tough metal of choice (W, Os, Ir, etc) but have a thin sleeve of something light and easy to vaporize along the outside. If there is a pointed end to the projectile this will destroy any initial armor layers of the target and allow your armor piercing component to delve further before it begins doing any mechanical work. These actually exist, they're known as composite shells or capped shells. A lot of them come with some kind of explosive filler, but that's not really necessary when a.) the round is going 20,000 ft/s and b.) the enemy armor is, by comparison to a tank or naval ship, paper-thin. I take it you've tried using an inert AP-payload? |
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Post by coaxjack on Oct 17, 2016 23:19:26 GMT
Use a jacketed armor piercing round - the actual penetrator can be made out of your tough metal of choice (W, Os, Ir, etc) but have a thin sleeve of something light and easy to vaporize along the outside. If there is a pointed end to the projectile this will destroy any initial armor layers of the target and allow your armor piercing component to delve further before it begins doing any mechanical work. These actually exist, they're known as composite shells or capped shells. A lot of them come with some kind of explosive filler, but that's not really necessary when a.) the round is going 20,000 ft/s and b.) the enemy armor is, by comparison to a tank or naval ship, paper-thin. I take it you've tried using an inert AP-payload? Yeah, and the biggest takeaway for me was that using APHE rounds tends to grind the framerate real low, probably having to do with thousands of tiny explosions all at once. They do tend to get kills very quickly as they (apparently) blast a decent amount of shrapnel inside the target's armor, but the hassle of running at 3 fps isn't usually worth it when a 28mm tungsten rod with 1mm magnesium skin works almost the same. |
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