BOOM!
BOOM!
>>equivalent amount of destructive force as a Volkswagen Beetle traveling at 100 mph.<<
Which would be the first VW Bug to actually hit that speed.
Cool!
Good luck with that! No guidance system known to man can handle that acceleration and keep on functioning. Plenty of systems with far lower velocity/acceleration have proven impossible to function after being subjected to high g-forces.
I wonder why the odd shape? Did anyone see any info about exactly how fast this thing really is moving? Is it more than 5000 ft/sec?
HA! My series 3 photon raygun makes that look like a puss.Isn’t that right Commander Spock?
I wonder how long before they start doing rapid fire? I’d like to see them rip off a couple hundred in under a minute.
The gun and all related power systems need to be EMP hardened.
Not exactly your average pocket pistol;)
” .. for fear of accidentally losing control of one and hitting the White House”
Naval Research Lab?
I think the moon is the only place where solar panels can be effectively used without wasting space and energy.
Install these there and you go yourself a nice launching pad for outer space probes.
Seems like rather than keeping things secret, now we have to let the world know our latest tech developments and plans.
Ping
Just think about what they could do with one of these guns two miles long, that fired subatomic particles - in space.
(SLAC)
The article doesn’t give a price for the gun but it sounds like the ammo would be pretty cheap (aluminum blanks).
In the video, the clip from the down-range aimed camera shows the projectile yawing from side to side as it responds to aerodynamic forces on its tail.
The yaw frequency in the video looks like it’s about 1/3 hz. That’s after it’s been slowed down by a factor of, like, 200 or 300 (very rough estimate there).
That means that, in free flight, that projectile is wobbling at between 60 and 100 hz. Magnitude of yaw looks to my eye to be maybe 30° peak-to-peak.
Now look at the size of the projectile as that Navy engineer puts it in the breech. It’s got to weigh 10-20 lbs.
For those of you with some mechanical background, just imagine the torque necessary to get an object of length ~16 inches, weighing, say, 15 pounds, oscillating through ±15° at 60 or 70 hz
Then consider that that thing doesn’t really have fins in the normal sense. It just as a sort of wide tail, hewn from a block of aluminum by the look of it.
We’re talking some serious speed here.
In case you were wondering about what I would like for my birthday..................