Railgun pew pew 5.56 at wew speeds

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insta-bump

>>34996635
Assuming a railgun efficiency of 75% and m855A1 out of a 14.5" barrel has a kinetic energy of about 1700 joules at the muzzle. So it would take about 2300 joules.

>>34996635
Roughly 1-1.5k joules, i.e. throw it out at roughly 2315-2835 fps.

>>34996764
Even at 1.5k joules that would take a 500,000 watt impulse over about 0.003 seconds

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>>34996747
IIRC the highest efficiency railguns were like 60%. I'll post better source once I'm home and have my files. Here's some rando railgun patent diagram showing 47% though, and a dtic.mil quote

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA389605
""A medium-caliber hypervelocity shot (MCL122), which achieved a fairly high transition velocity, had a launcher efficiency of 40%, with a distribution of losses as follows: residual inductive 5%, rail resistive 35%, and armature losses 20% [6]. One of the most recent largecaliber firings had a launcher efficiency of 45%"

>>34996635
Handheld railguns are only going to be a comparable option to chemically accelerated projectile weaponry when affordable superconductors are a thing.

>>34997234
Not just that, you'd need hyper efficient batteries, rugged as fuck computers, and durable and easily replaced armatures.

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>>34996776
Even if we had compact power storage to do 30+ half megawatt discharges, the heat dissipation from half megawatt discharges over that time-frame would be harder to overcome than the heat created by current smokeless powder.