[limpet chicken]

I had an idea.

The problem with railguns and coilguns is the requirement for the massive power to accelerate a projectile to very high velocities right?

They are, however, silent, so what about using a railgun design to accelerate a 60mm explosive or phosphorus grenade.

I have built a few grenade launchers in my time, ranging from childhood experiments with fireworks, to a cased system using a blank shotgun cartidge in a casing using black powder, connected to a CO2 cartridge filled with a fused charge of a chlorate/wax material as sort of an improvised shrapnel/explosive grenade. The detonation of the shotgun blank, and blackpowder charge obviously gave out quite a hefty THUMP! noise, so what about the idea of using a lower-end rail or coilgun to fire a standard grenade, perhaps using a built in electric igniter for a fuse just before activation of the railgun.

Of course the grenade itself would still explode as normal, but you wouldn't be able to tell where the grenade/incendiary shell was fired FROM as there would be none of the thumping or fizzing of a standard fuse/blackpowder charge going off

[hmx9123]

I would imagine it would be easy enough to build a silencer for a grenade launcher because it is a subsonic round.  Unfortunately, most of the time people really want to silence the actual killing capacity of the round, and you just can't quite silence a high explosive.
  As for the rail guns being silent, I'd have to see that to believe it.  AFAIK, the round itself is supersonic, which means that it's definitlely not silent.  If it's supersonic, then it's loud.

[limpet chicken]

A railgun or coilgun would only produce such a sonic boom IF it had a high enough power to accelerate the projectile to supersonic velocities would it not?

I was more imagining a low powered coilgun, to fire the grenade at a speed such as 300-400 FPS a second or so, just as a normal grenade launcher would do, and it could also eliminate the recoil produced by conventional explosive propellants, and the need for break-action singl shot launchers, you could simply build a spring loaded magazine that slots into the launcher, and just keep pulling the trigger, the only limitation on fire rate would be how fast the ammunition could be delivered into the launch chamber by the magazine, and the power supply of the coilgun.

[Corvettaholic]

Good idea, but we run into similar problems with the coilgun as with the plasma gun. Power! To get 10m/s of a drywall nail, some dude used caps with total power that came out to something like 10J. Nothing to sneeze at! Range on that coil gun was about 15 feet. A grenade is a lot heavier, so I think thats beyond our scope. Now if borrow the marx generator idea from the plasma gun, well... maybe we can do something with that. I don't think any of the electronic weapon guys on the net have ever tried to integrate a marx generator, I wonder why? Maybe they don't know about them, I didn't until a couple days ago.

Also, with a coilgun of enough force to fire that grenade, that grenade will be in an extremely hostile electromagnetic area. Hopefully that won't set anything off! The grenade WILL get torqued to some degree, and I imagine won't fly very good. Still, so long as it goes boom I'm happy!

Limpet, don't suppose you have any decent caps laying around? If so, try building a small marx generator to make sure it works as we need it to. I'm going cap hunting this weekend, hopefully with good results!

[limpet chicken]

Just at the moment, I haven't got the money to buy any supplies, but I DO know of an old car scrapyard, where I could probably pinch a few caps from radios and assorted car parts.

I thought of the possibility of the EM field prematurely igniting the grenade, I suppose it depends on what I put in the grenade as to how bad it would be in an accident, but I DEFINATELY don't want something along the lines of a WP grenade, or high explosive round going off in my face, I had another thought as to an interesting munition too, how about a shell built out of a lightbulb, with a small HE charge at the base, and the glass globe filled with a concentrated acid, sulfuric would be easiest for me, or perhaps a mixture of sulfuric and nitric, as it would perhaps cause runaway nitration on neaby organic materials, leaving potentially explosive residue on the scene, the "fear factor" would also be high as such an acid filled round would certainly be a brutal weapon

The acid round could be built, by filling the bulb with acid first, and then sealing off with something like epoxy resin, then attatching a small low explosive dispersal charge to the base such as a small fused canister filled with a non-EM sensitive explosive, perhaps picric acid or mercury fulminate etc.

Perhaps using a couple of marx generators to launch the grenade, we could acheive a good range before detonation.

I think it would be wise to test fire the acid round as a blank, filled with water and weighted to compensate for the difference in weight between water and concentrated acids, as H2SO4 in particular, is quite heavy when concentrated.

[Corvettaholic]

I don't think a lightbulb would survive sudden acceleration thats high enough to give the round any distance, although I DO like the acid munition idea. What about using the protective globe around certain types of street lamps? Or maybe old lab glassware? It'd be expensive, but that glass is going to need some thickness. Or you could just fill the thing with flourine. Heh.

[limpet chicken]

I actually been thinking of pinching a few streetlight bulbs to scrounge the barium that acts as a getter for residual gases, but now you say that, I think I have a little more incentive

Interesting idea with the fluorine...I wonder..silver fluoride decomposes to give fluorine with heating.

As crazy as it sounds, i think that might make an interesting, if gory antipersonnel round. Use a fully fluorinated resistant plastic such as teflon as the casing, with something like metal wire woven into the casing material itself to act as something for the EM field to accelerate.

I don't think it would be very heavy, use a thin section on the nose of a shell which would break on impact with the target, fluorinating it to hell.

A very low concentration of fluorine gas will burn a living organism down to the bone in 0.6 of a second. I'm not too convinced about the immediate stopping power of such a round, although the lethality would be high, and possibly delayed, tying up medical facilities with casualties thus depleting hostile forces, and inspiring utter terror "hey! these nutjobs are chucking fluorine at us"

Would make for an effective terror weapon, and cause delayed fatalities, both tying up manpower AND killing hostiles.

[Corvettaholic]

Next question, where the heck do you get a sizable quantity of flourine? And how do you handle it safely, like loading it into a shell?

[limpet chicken]

What about combining a charge of the silver fluoride itself wit ha thermite charge, so as to heat the AgF2 and liberate fluorine at the target, rather than actually storing elemental fluorine.

I think producing a practical to use EM grenade laucher is the most impotant thing though, ammunition could be customised away from the usual explosive/smoke/tear gas/WP rounds later

[Corvettaholic]

I agree, the trick is to find out to accelerate anything using electromagnets. Our plasma gun idea is pretty much the same thing. The ammo just happens to not be solid. The best way to do this I think is just to build it and mess with it as we go.