|
|
Post by RiftandRend on Feb 6, 2017 19:23:02 GMT
Just an idea, would adding radiators along railgun barrels allow them to reach superconducting critical temperatures? Some materials are superconducting at ~30K and the boost in muzzle velocity might be worth the loss in fire rate. Even if superconductivity is not a possibility it should still have some performance benefit and shouldn't add too much to weight if you use lithium radiators.
Superconducting BiSrCaCuO railguns with UHMWPE reinforcement might compete with lasers for ship main armament.
|
|
|
|
Post by newageofpower on Feb 6, 2017 19:59:41 GMT
I'm all for this, though I'm dubious that lasers and missiles will get outclassed.
|
|
|
|
Post by Enderminion on Feb 6, 2017 20:47:03 GMT
there is a gram mass moving at 50+Km/s scraping the inside edge, that produces heat, lots of it
|
|
|
|
Post by newageofpower on Feb 6, 2017 20:56:17 GMT
Contact friction can be reduced with correct application of molecularly perfect machining (implied in CoADE), though I doubt my 212km/s gun would actually be able to fire more than 10 rounds before requiring barrel repairs.
|
|
|
|
Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 6, 2017 21:38:27 GMT
I doubt just sticking radiators on the barrel would do much. How long before they'd heat soak?
It might be worth running some numbers to see what benefit may be gained. I'd hate to have the dev jump down a rabbit hole just to find out it's insignificant.
|
|
|
|
Post by newageofpower on Feb 6, 2017 21:41:48 GMT
I doubt just sticking radiators on the barrel would do much. How long before they'd heat soak? It might be worth running some numbers to see what benefit may be gained. I'd hate to have the dev jump down a rabbit hole just to find out it's insignificant. We'd need more than radiators; active cooling to cryogenic levels for superconductivity would involve heat pumps and assorted machinery. But it would be worth it. Probably. |
|
|
|
Post by n2maniac on Feb 7, 2017 5:50:17 GMT
Wait, how often is your railgun design limited by not having enough current? Mine always complain about breaking the barrel, the projectile, or melting the projectile. If I have a really resistive barrel, maybe, just MAYBE, I hit problems with reload speed taking too long (due to cooldown).
If barrel resistivity is not your limiting factor, making it superconductive won't help you.
|
|
|
|
Post by someusername6 on Feb 7, 2017 6:00:08 GMT
Wait, how often is your railgun design limited by not having enough current? Mine always complain about breaking the barrel, the projectile, or melting the projectile. If I have a really resistive barrel, maybe, just MAYBE, I hit problems with reload speed taking too long (due to cooldown). If barrel resistivity is not your limiting factor, making it superconductive won't help you. This matches my experience. I tried modding in some existing materials to have negligible resistivity, just to see how they would behave in game. Mechanical properties were still the limiting factor. (Supposedly you could keep a superconductive material mostly charged between shots of a coilgun and save some energy / be more efficient that way, I think, but that's still not an enormous gain.) |
|
|
|
Post by newageofpower on Feb 7, 2017 6:10:02 GMT
Wait, how often is your railgun design limited by not having enough current? Mine always complain about breaking the barrel, the projectile, or melting the projectile. If I have a really resistive barrel, maybe, just MAYBE, I hit problems with reload speed taking too long (due to cooldown). If barrel resistivity is not your limiting factor, making it superconductive won't help you. If you had a material with the mechanical properties of Spectra (UHMWPE) but electrical properties of a superconductor, you'd get a pretty insane railgun. |
|
|
|
Post by RiftandRend on Feb 7, 2017 19:21:35 GMT
Wait, how often is your railgun design limited by not having enough current? Mine always complain about breaking the barrel, the projectile, or melting the projectile. If I have a really resistive barrel, maybe, just MAYBE, I hit problems with reload speed taking too long (due to cooldown). If barrel resistivity is not your limiting factor, making it superconductive won't help you. By using this system you could use materials that are normally too resistive. VCS or diamond railgun barrels. Heck, if you are willing to invest a huge ammount of mass you could use supercooled UHMWPE or boron as your railgun barrels. This can also apply to your projectiles, supercooled armatures are superior to standard ones. Considering that most of my railguns fire 1g projectiles this would be relatively easy to implement. I am not suggesting this system for drones or small ships. This would only become viable on larger ships where weapon mass is an irrelevant fraction of its total mass. In that setting even a 5% increase in performance in exchange for 300% more mass would be desirable. |
|
|
|
Post by lieste on Feb 7, 2017 19:29:07 GMT
Umm. I have a railgun carrier where the single weapon has more than 90% of the wet mass.
Even some of the more modest 'big gun' carriers are 50% or more weapon system based on wet mass.
Only** when getting down into my point defence armaments are the weapon masses (individually) negligible as a proportion of the whole.
**(or if you choose to exploit the physics bugs associated with most of the forum shared payload weapons - especially the insanely broken fleck-spacer fantasies that are currently popular).
|
|
