is it feasible to make an electromagnetic machine gun powered by a battery or bank of caps?
it would have the same advantages - cheap projectiles, no gunpowder and mostly silent.
there's also this:
it would have the same advantages - cheap projectiles, no gunpowder and mostly silent.
there's also this:
Once the electrical rail machine gun is built, the per-shot costs are pretty low (copper, lead, machining) and grid supplied energy (hello supply-lines), but then a 7.62x51mm NATO round is $0.42 (in volume).
The rail guns that being trialed are monsters: not a whole lot of point in shooting a $0.42 NATO round when you have nuclear power generator to recharge the gun. By the same token, there's probably not a whole lot of point spending $100k per soldier to kit them with a barely portable weapon that is matched by a $2,000 AR-15 firing $0.42 mass-produced ammunition with a mature supply line and easy portability.
But, yeah, I'd like to see them, too...
Incidentally, such a Tesla-machinegun would not be regulated as a firearm in many/most jurisdictions.
> the per-shot costs are pretty low (copper, lead, machining)
Bullets are not machined (except for exotic uses where insane accuracy is required-- 1000yd championships employing exotic chamberings and weapons, etc).
I'm reasonably sure that anything that can fire projectiles with more than a few Joules is a weapon in Germany.
I watch it for Jörg's cackling laughter and facility in ginning up impractical weapons, but it's good for the above reason as well.
Yes, you would obviously need a (1-3 shot) capacitor bank, along with 1/8th of the Tesla's battery pack.