"The Rail Gunner" Topic

Wyrd Miniatures published a new picture of the Rail Gunner for The Other Side

Main page
wyrd-games.net

Amicalement
Armand

Must have antigrav in the weapon to hold it up.

… polystyrene-light, super polymer and ceramic construction.

Still wouldn't want to be lugging that thing around!

Certainly would benefit from a tripod.

Is that a mechanical "tail" behind her? Does her armour actually have a robotic arm that digs into the ground to counterbalance the weight of the weapon? Cool idea to be sure, but I think a simple bipod might be somewhat easier to produce, maintain and use.

How does the miniature itself stay up? I would think that the oversized weapon would tip it over.

If this were a real weapon, it would have a bipod or tripod.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Not to mention what to do about the recoil

Railguns shouldn't have any recoil, but if it happened with that sculpt, she'd have her eye instantly replaced by the gunsight… :-o

Even lasers have some recoil.

The reason most lab-bench railguns or coilguns are claimed to not have any recoil is because they're a couple million times heavier than the projectile they're throwing.

You put 2000 Joules into a projectile, you put 2000 joules into the weapon. Weapon is a thousand or so times heavier than the projectile, so has 1/1000 the velocity.

A .45 pistol throws a 1/2 ounce slug downrange, and weighs about 2lbs, so it's ~64x heavier than the slug. Makes for a fairly hefty recoil in a revolver, not so bad in a semi-auto because the semi-auto uses most of the recoil force to toss out the empty and then shove in the next round.

Perhaps the gun is counter-weighted behind the shoulder.

Here is a snip from a discussion about rail gun recoil on another site:

"I was curious because I used to play RIFTS, and the Glitter Boy armor had a shoulder mounted railgun and a stabilizer spike that would deploy from the heels into the ground automatically when it was fired to counter the recoil. I wasn't sure if those were necessary but apparently they were!"

Maybe the claw thingy is the same sort of idea – a recoil support to keep the gun from burying its back end in the ground when it fires.

Yeah, unless you are firing a rocket or missile with its own fuel, there will always be recoil. Newton's law and all that jazz. There are some hybrids like smooth bore cannons that fire rocket propelled shells to boost their range.

This thing? It's an electric crossbow or ballista. :-)

Lion, kinetic energy is not conserved in that case. Momentum (mass*velocity) is conserved; the linear nature of momentum versus the exponential scaling of kinetic energy with velocity is what makes small-caliber, high-velocity cartridges have such low specific recoil for their muzzle energy.

Then the projectile has to be very small. On the order of a needle or so.