Newsgroups: sci.electronics Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: How to make a RAIL GUN? Message-ID: <1991Mar26.165529.28754@zoo.toronto.edu> Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1991 16:55:29 GMT References: <27EE910A.10011@ics.uci.edu> <1991Mar26.094649.28010@colorado.edu> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology In article <1991Mar26.094649.28010@colorado.edu> rainer@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rainer Malzbender) writes: >The astute reader will no doubt recognize this as a mass driver, not >a rail gun... No, the astute reader will recognize it as a coilgun. The mass driver, Gerry O'Neill's invention, uses recirculating payload carriers ("buckets") so that it does not need to throw away a magnetic element with each shot. If it doesn't decelerate and re-use buckets, it is not a mass driver. (Although the early O'Neill/SSI/MIT prototypes were called that, based on their intent as proof-of-principle experiments for a true mass driver.) -- "[Some people] positively *wish* to | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology believe ill of the modern world."-R.Peto| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry