Woupd be cool if weapons had sounds

I have actually thought about this as well.

I think for guns everyone seems to be forgetting the sweet sweet sounds of literally thousands of rounds being shuffled through munitions tubes and ammo belts. In addition to this the fire rate alone on most of these ships pushes them less from a nice familiar "chunk-chunk-chunk" and closer the the sweet BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT of the a-10,



i know allot of this is air resistance related but i am certain some amount of gun noise from the high rpm would transfer through the hull via vibrations. 

I agree with the rail and coil noises, but i think that they too would need the ammunition shuffling-loading noise. Now, maybe i am mistaken do the coils in a coilgun spin? Or simply charge? 

If i have some free time tonight i might just cook up some audio samples, though i should warn they will most likely be artistic, as gun fire rate and size vary hugely with design. I will still aim for realism though...

I can't wait for Zane to implement HD weapons farts.

That sounds like it's armed with assault sewing machines. I love it! :-)

If you could, wouldn't you?

Because I've wanted to build one ever since I was 12 and read about the concept in some scifi story. 16 years later I finally have the time, money, expertise, and technology to build what I wanted, and so I did.

Sort of back on topic, here are some random videos of it firing if you want to hear what it sounds like (if anyone is interested, I can try to get a better recording of just the firing sound this weekend):
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRhZ4i4iFxE
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhv15X3LPG4

It's quiet because it's small and low power. I guess you can't really hear it on that video unless you know what to listen for, but there's a bit of an impact sound as the coils twist around themselves and recoil against the sensor mounts. I took some video tonight of just a single coil triggering with no projectile: www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8DeC66kFs8
And here's an older video with a projectile actually shooting but no crickets in the background: www.youtube.com/watch?v=81cW1bzAhMU&t=32s

I've been on the other side of the safety glass from a 15kv cap bank repeatedly discharging into a dummy load and it makes a loud enough thoomp that osha would say you need hearing protection to be there. There's also a bit of a twanging sound as the various high current bus bars flex from the EMF.

As to how the sound would translate to a rapid fire design, I have no idea. Probably a constant roar with some twanging at a frequency equal to some resonance of your power bus length? My opinion as an amateur builder is that the coil and rail guns modeled ingame fire way more rapidly than would ever be realistic. At least not unless you assume some kind of magical pulsed power storage system. I shot some video of a rapid fire test for the sound also, but we're not really setup for shooting a stream of solid metal: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkPX3HebcZ4

I haven't bothered to exactly calculate the power draw, but here's picture of it: i.imgur.com/uC8FEAe.png Figure an average of ~28V @ ~375 amps for 14ms. Obviously the time is going to get longer as you add more coils, and shorter as you increase the power (projectile moves faster). For rapid fire sound without the impacts I could write some code to dryfire the coils in a fixed sequence based on data from a real shot. But I imagine it'd sound like the single click/thump from the single coil but multiplied by however many coils there (intervals getting smaller as projectile speed increases), then repeated for each shot.

I don't really have any solid numbers for fire rate either except that it's going to be limited by the power supply. The issue isn't necessarily the overall power consumption (e.g. my gun can do hundreds (thousands?) of shots on a single charge with just 4800mah of battery), but the fact that the consumption is very bursty. Nuclear reactors are great at providing a constant current, but not so great at dumping gigawatts of power into something for just a few milliseconds at a time. You need a cap bank for that, at which point it becomes a question of how fast can you charge and discharge your caps without damaging them and how much weight/space are you willing to sacrifice. e.g. say you can't cycle your caps more than once every few seconds. You can add in more cap banks and rotate through them (actually, this may be ideal because it would help smooth the load on the reactor) to shoot faster, but these things aren't small or light. Here's an article with a picture of the kind of thing powering the railgun the navy plays with: www.naval-technology.com/news/newsraytheon-delivers-pulse-power-containers-for-us-navys-railgun-programme-4904013 Then if you watch the youtube videos of it fireing, there are often multiple containers like that visible in the background. So imagine tens of these things per coil/rail gun on the ship, and having to add more the faster you want the fire rate to be (though come to think of it, this may be kind of covered by whatever the "loading mechanism" is in the module designer.)