First read this post on my website: http://rp181.fortscribe.com/?p=384 Any ideas? That damage seems way too severe for a recorded 850fps on a 8.11g projectile (around 200 joules kinetic energy). This is supposed to be UL level 3 bullet resistant plastic (from thickness, I think its level 2). A level...

What, you have never used a liquid straw?
Of course its not styrene, its probably polystyrene, and styrene is the base.

Make your tube rough to increase the surface area. I have found a sort of film forms after low power shots, try sanding it.

try decreasing the amount of foil, and water.water should not be able to drip.

the most common problem is way too much chamber volume. Try to decrease the volume somehow (add more plastic perhaps). Try wetting the barrel a little (very little, run some water through it, and shake it all out).

nice start.
Stick with it, soon it will take you around 10 min. to make something as simple as that (even though I hate sketchup, prefer Blender)

From the pictures, My guess is he put a coil in series with the capacitor bank, and the plasma is generated just from the dielectric breakdown. The coil serves to accelerate the plasma. My guess is that was the intended, but the coil does not do anything, perhaps increase pressure by a minuscule amo...

ramses meant Helium. Atoms are completely stable in octets, or 8 electrons. Without 8 electrons, the atom becomes more and more unstable, hence the oscillating pattern of the above picture. I think you are confusing ionization (remove an electron) with excitation (electrons jumping levels). The jump...

@ramses
Either a machine shop, or piercemetals. The insulator will probably be teflon.

try a harder projectile/softer plate.

I live in colorado, and our snowfall was low (less than a half inch).
Bring it on!

Do you have a picture of all of your slingshots in a pile? I want to see how big that pile is

I've been at that "really small scale test" stage for more than a year now. Even if my situation allowed me to up the power, I couldn't. It's taken this long just to get it to hold together at 500J input. Even at this low energy, brass chambers were plastically deforming beyond usefulness, and I wa...

I think it could. On that board, it seems all there is is a RS232 interpreter (can be had for $2 or sampled) and a mux.

They could, but the shots would get worse and worse as the tube is covered in residue.

I bet thats the rate which the image is retrieved from the camera. Just beware the maximum is 30 fps, with a lag free program.