The Gauss Rifle (Question)

Why are there no "gauss rifles" in use in the military? From what I seen they are not too hard to make. A young student from MIT made a working Gauss rifle. And it fired projectiles at an incredible rate.

Hell you can even make a "Gauss rifle" out of house hold items.

So I guess my question is, why are these not in the military (wide use), and should they be? I mean chunks of steal instead of bullets that would be more difficult to produce (compared to a chunk of steel)

scitoys.com...

[edit on 5-3-2005 by e 2 e k 1 a 7]

Well gauess rifles are prett good, I dont myself know why they dont use them.
Seems a smart and brilliant idea.
Mabye should try and make one.
Also I tried to make one of the below in class, it didnt work grrr.

did you use neodymium magnets? the regular sort probably won't cut it.


personally, i think the rail gun/gauss rifle is the future of both infantry and artillery weapons; ammunition is easy to produce, there is no gunpowder or combustion required, and magnetic propulsion can fire a projectile at very deadly speeds.

they have their drawbacks, though; a gauss rifle or rail gun would need to make use of powerful electromagnets in order to fire at suitable velocities. this means you'd need a power source that would have to be durable, very long-lasting, and probably replacable.

Originally posted by Odd
did you use neodymium magnets? the regular sort probably won't cut it.

Actually come to think about it I never asked what the magnets where made of lol.

personally, i think the rail gun/gauss rifle is the future of both infantry and artillery weapons; ammunition is easy to produce, there is no gunpowder or combustion required, and magnetic propulsion can fire a projectile at very deadly speeds.

Just need to figure out a way to get it on auto fire.

they have their drawbacks, though; a gauss rifle or rail gun would need to make use of powerful electromagnets in order to fire at suitable velocities. this means you'd need a power source that would have to be durable, very long-lasting, and probably replacable.

Yeah, but a gauss rifle just needs normal magnets.
Would be an interesting sniper rifle, silent and deadly also no flash.

Read all of the site and use a little bit of common sense.

You'd have to move everyone of those balls back to fire another shot, which would take how long? The magnets you have to use are also 'very easy to break', so they'd have to use electomagnets to compensate for this. Taking up a lot of energy, to get each shot out.

Now go by their design, go build it and then see how much damage it does to brick then go look at how much damage is does to brick and 10 feet, 20, 30, etc.

It gets to the point where it won't reach (10 foot), so you'd need a massive burst of power to fire even one shot - at the moment it's not worth it. In the future, once the technology works they'll do it.

But that's a good 5+ years away.

if this were to be made into a weapon, it probably wouldn't use a wooden ruler as a chassis...

and i recommend that you, too, read the rest of the site, especially the bit where it says that this model has been scaled down to avoid anybody getting hurt. the site is for "science projects you can make with your kid", not "creative ways to kill your fellow men".

I've been looking at the site since it I first got to see it about 6months ago, I keep checking back if they put anything worthwhile on it.

My point still stands, that it'd need to be given a lot more power. Since modern armies are looking on ways of lowering the combat weight of weapons. If you had to make the magnets larger, give it a larger chasis, etc, it would only add to the weight and yet again make the gun 'pointless'.

It is why so much work is being done on weapons like the SCAR or the work H&K are putting into their PDWs, the Modern Army wants to be light and quick not tied down with large bulky equipment. Also the fact, electromagnetic signals in a large area (such as an army full of gause rifles) would give their position away.

I don't know why the military would want to make Gauss Rifles. I mean, they were pretty crappy in X-COM. Wouldn't even scratch a Muton.

Originally posted by Odium
I've been looking at the site since it I first got to see it about 6months ago, I keep checking back if they put anything worthwhile on it.

My point still stands, that it'd need to be given a lot more power. Since modern armies are looking on ways of lowering the combat weight of weapons. If you had to make the magnets larger, give it a larger chasis, etc, it would only add to the weight and yet again make the gun 'pointless'.

It is why so much work is being done on weapons like the SCAR or the work H&K are putting into their PDWs, the Modern Army wants to be light and quick not tied down with large bulky equipment. Also the fact, electromagnetic signals in a large area (such as an army full of gause rifles) would give their position away.

The rail gun and guass is a sound weapon in my opinion.
I mean the fire power put out by these things is immense, stick it in a tank and bang you got yourself some nice weapons.
Also the only people carry EM scanners are pretty much the navy for ASW, they would need to actually carry a hell of a lot of tech to find them and even then the range is limited.
The bit about the balls I think can be solved by the use of a cocking handle or even just a simple gas canister.

Railguns use a EM burst to fire projectiles, am I right? Wouldn't that fry the electronic equipments nearby? E.g. Walkie Talkie, Nightvision, infared vision, ATGMs and others?

Originally posted by COWlan
Railguns use a EM burst to fire projectiles, am I right? Wouldn't that fry the electronic equipments nearby? E.g. Walkie Talkie, Nightvision, infared vision, ATGMs and others?

I dont think so.
They tested it in the lab and it worked fine, cameras worked.

No, we don't need it.

Bullets kill just fine.

I read somewhere that rail guns were being worked on as part of the U.S. anti-missle defense system (Star Wars under Reagan). In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if there were deployed systems at this point since the Bush II administration has put such an emphasis on ICBM interception (with good reason!). Rail guns are the most likely kind of system to have been perfected since the 1980's - all you need are good superconducting materials, fast computers for targeting and lots of power. We have all of these technologies and you could put a lot of cheap rail gun shots in the air to intercept an incoming ICBM, increasing your chance of hitting the target. Any misses would just keep going (way past escape velocity) out of the atmosphere. I would imagine it would be like the Phalanx system used for naval point defense but bigger.

There isn't a power source we have even dreamed of that could be used to power a man-portable rail gun. Any mobile rail gun systems would have to be very large, with large power generators such as a nuclear pebble reactor, or large gas or steam turbines. I think that it would be too large for a truck, and it isn't practical from an aircraft (shooting the thing would slow it down so much it would crash (Newton's third law of motion) ) so my guess is that it would have to be deployed on a ship. It could be big enough to fit everything and still be mobile.

[edit on 5-3-2005 by CaptAvatar]

I also read a report for a electrical engineering project from a university on an attempt to build a rail gun, it appearantly shattered titanium reinforced barrels for some reason.

One thing that I've never understood is why most if not all mag powered prototypes seem to go for stupidly high rates of fire, just because they can. Think about it why design a system that can shoot a near solid line of lead when you could simply increase the velocity to .8c or something and have an instant kill weapon. It should be possible to also make it accurate enough so that the first shot has a good chance of hitting. Even then it would have a decent rate of fire.

The first place I can imagine a rail gun is mounted on the turret of a tank. Then you have the power source avliable to power a strong electromagnet.

Originally posted by COWlan
I also read a report for a electrical engineering project from a university on an attempt to build a rail gun, it appearantly shattered titanium reinforced barrels for some reason.

High speed, it goes so fast it rips the air makes plasma.
The rods might have been tough but mabye not tough enogh to stand the heat.

Would be an interesting sniper rifle, silent and deadly also no flash.

Wrong, It wont be silent, it would be EXTREMELY loud since it breaks the sound barrier 10~20 times over, so you'd need a hell of a silencer, it might still produce a flash too of electrons possibly some sparks flying from friction in the barrel.

It would a top-notch anti-material/armor weapon for sure, the FCS was going to have a EM gun like that but they scrapped the idea for something more conventional...

On a less serious note, yeah the Gauss Rifles in Star Craft totally sucked, they couldn't even kill an alien in some primitive exoskelleton...lol

In Total Annihilation however, Gauss guns rocked...

I heard they have made one (older project) but ya its just too damn big

Railguns need so much power that they would be mounted only on nuclear powered ships, like USA carriers and some heavy cruisers, where they could be anti aircraft, anti missile and anti ship weapon in one.