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Post by evilmcstalin on Nov 1, 2016 2:48:02 GMT
Hi all, I was messing around with coilguns when I managed to create this monstrosity: Attachment DeletedIt has a muzzle velocity of about 38 km/s. I was told by a friend (who also plays this game, and is quite a bit smarter than I) that this is physically impossible. If so, that's a shame because it's a kick-ass coilgun. Question: what makes something like this impossible? I'd hate to be using weapons that can't exist in real life (realism ftw)  |
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 1, 2016 3:01:30 GMT
Well, it's got ~22 and a quarter megajoules coming out the end ~180 times per second, for an output power of ~4000 MW.
So, yeah, it's extremely impossible.
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Post by evilmcstalin on Nov 1, 2016 3:08:46 GMT
Well, it's got ~22 and a quarter megajoules coming out the end ~180 times per second, for an output power of ~4000 MW. So, yeah, it's extremely impossible. Forgive me for asking (it's been a while since HS physics), how do you calculate the megajoules and output power? |
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Post by cuddlefish on Nov 1, 2016 3:31:21 GMT
Kinetic energy is a function of the mass and the velocity of the output - one half mass * velocity squared. 1kg moving at 1m/s is 1 Joule. There are a lot of calculators online for this, which was how I ran it, because I'm pretty lazy.
To get the output power, we look at the rate of fire - in this case, 5.58ms between shots. 1 second / 5.58 milliseconds is ~180 per second, again via online resources because I'm lazy. A Watt is 1 Joule per second, so if we count the Joules total elapsed in the second (The energy of each check times the number of shots per second), that's how many Watts we're dealing with.
That gives us the amount of raw kinetic energy coming out the muzzle per second, which we can then compare to the input power, and see that lots of energy is being generated from nowhere.
A plausible weapon would have a (often massively) lower wattage coming out the muzzle as projectile energy than goes into it as electric power, as the process of turning that electricity into projectile motion is imperfect, producing waste heat and so on.
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Post by evilmcstalin on Nov 1, 2016 4:32:56 GMT
Kinetic energy is a function of the mass and the velocity of the output - one half mass * velocity squared. 1kg moving at 1m/s is 1 Joule. There are a lot of calculators online for this, which was how I ran it, because I'm pretty lazy. To get the output power, we look at the rate of fire - in this case, 5.58ms between shots. 1 second / 5.58 milliseconds is ~180 per second, again via online resources because I'm lazy. A Watt is 1 Joule per second, so if we count the Joules total elapsed in the second (The energy of each check times the number of shots per second), that's how many Watts we're dealing with. That gives us the amount of raw kinetic energy coming out the muzzle per second, which we can then compare to the input power, and see that lots of energy is being generated from nowhere. A plausible weapon would have a (often massively) lower wattage coming out the muzzle as projectile energy than goes into it as electric power, as the process of turning that electricity into projectile motion is imperfect, producing waste heat and so on. That makes perfect sense! Thank you!  |
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Post by wafflestoo on Nov 1, 2016 5:12:24 GMT
It still looks pretty awesome |
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Post by zuthal on Nov 3, 2016 7:46:33 GMT
At the input power you are running, you SHOULD be able to get about 2.5 shots per second or something like that (i.e. a reload time of ~400 ms). Can you make the fire rate that low by dropping loader power?
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