The Glade 4.0

These projects cannot be allowed to be cancelled. When my fleets begin their campaign for my domination of the galaxy, railguns and laser weapons will be a necessity. Missiles and chemically propelled projectiles are simply not viable in the black of space.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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We need more harsh language research. Words hurt too, you know.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I find this rather surprising, considering the entire weapon is a magnetically propelled salt shaker. There are frictionless HVAC systems which use magnetic fields to hold up and turn fan blades, without needing any axles or bearings. These have no real application in commercial and industrial HVAC, because it takes more energy to generate the magnetic fields than you would lose due to friction. The machine was developed not to be more efficient, but to reduce noise.

The developer was the United States Navy. I'm not sure when exactly they were developed. At the time, it sounded like it was Cold War technology.

I'm a little surprised that the Navy can hold a big fan blade in the air and make it turn, but can't do the same with a railgun bullet.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I'm not an engineer, so I can only speculate, but I would imagine that it's simply an issue of "it's more complicated than that." Most likely, the velocity has a lot to do with it; I doubt a fan blade needs to attain hypersonic velocities.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The thing about engineering is that so much of it is multi-purpose. This is why whenever there's a major breakthrough, you see a burst of advancement in seemingly unrelated fields.

Break it down in steps. What does the device need to do?

1) The projectile needs to attain a certain angular velocity. You typically want a bullet to spin.

2) The projectile needs to attain a certain linear velocity. In this case, in excess of the speed of sound.

Additional concerns come in.

3) The device needs to remain below a certain amount of heat buildup.

Problem #1 and #2 have both apparently been solved. Now we're working on efficiency, in order to resolve problem #3. One of the problems with #3 is friction between the projectile and the rails. We have a solution to the friction problem already existing, and it conveniently uses the same fundamental principles (electromagnetism) in order to operate. A fan blade turning is problem #1. Yes, it's more complicated, because the fan blade doesn't have to perform task #2. (Supersonic speed is totally irrelevant thus far - it's more complicated simply because the fan blade isn't required to have any translational motion).

The main point here is they aren't starting from scratch. The U.S. Navy has carried out a significant body of work on precisely the problem they're looking to resolve. The complexity of the task doesn't alter the fact that idea X can be used to solve problem Y. Now, at the same time, that doesn't necessarily mean you want to use idea X. For example, I believe fighter jets still use vacuum tubes for a lot of their on-board computer systems.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I realize all that, but the fact of the matter is that problem 3 hasn't been solved, and it's a matter of friction as well as simply heat in the conducting elements. Whether they're starting from scratch or not is irrelevent; evidently the problem is sufficiently different from previous similar ones that it's not easily solved.

By the way, it's hypersonic, not supersonic, and that introduces complications that don't arise at lower mach numbers. There are problems with air compression and friction in jet engines for proposed hypersonic aircraft that don't arise in existing supersonic aircraft. I can only imagine what complications this might create in a hypersonic railgun.

I'm quite sure that everything you've pointed out has occured to the people actually working on the project. There simply are problems that arise in complex systems that aren't that easily solved. No, they aren't starting from scratch, but so what? People trying to build fusion reactors aren't starting from scratch either; fusion weapons have been around since the 50's but still no one has managed to build a useful fusion reactor for power generation.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Bottom line is cancelling these projects is just a feel good maneuver that will have no practical application to the actual budget.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I believe you are talking about magnetic bearings, which are currently used in a lot of applications, including chillers. The fans still have shafts, its just those shafts are held in place within the collars by magnetic forces rather than physical bearings.

The difficulty with adapting this solution to rail guns probably stems from the manner in which the projectile is moved and the fast pole switching to attain the speeds required, whereas the magnetic bearings don't need to change poles, they constantly repulse in 360 degrees. I can see a lot of difficulty in trying to use a binary system to hold an object in a static location on one axis, spin it about that axis and then move it along another axis all at the same time.