Post by ash19256 on Nov 16, 2016 15:33:43 GMT
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.)