Plasma power

[BigGrib]

so basically you'd have like a giant tesla coil with contacts inside the chamber or whatever possibly pressurized so that you have a plentiful amount of air, inside the chamber to be converted into plasma possibly kept in place by a burst disk and then when you're ready to fire you power the tesla coil to generate a huge spark inside the chamber which heats and ionizes the pressurized air inside which causes an enormous expansion inside the chamber bursting the disk and launching the projectile?
what would you have to make the chamber and barrel out of?
do you think that aluminum would work or would steel or even stainless steel be a better option?
what kind of voltages and power supply would you need to create a spark say maybe up to a foot long or is that too long or not long enough?

[boilingleadbath]

My understanding is that the amount of energy that is dumped is more important that the voltage or the current.

Obviously, a fair amount of voltage is required to make sure you discharge your bank in the time alloted, but otherwise, I don't think it's important.

And it'd be a bad idea to discharge your bank through a tesla coil - they have a lot of inductance, and will slow you WAY down.

(plus, I'd expect them to explode, quarter-chrusher-coil style)

[BigGrib]

i wasn't really saying use a tesla coil, just something along that line, something that is gonna make a huge arc

[VH_man]

what about those funky balls that give out the purple sparks that go to your hand when you touch it?

i know when i ripped one of those apart it made a spark that was nearly an inch long and PURPLE... (and judging on what ive learned aobut the electromagnetic spectrum that puts it nearly 3X hotter than the sparks you get out of a taser.......)

[BigGrib]

yeah but how much energy is contained within those deals? maybe a supersized one

[Fnord]

That's called a plasma globe.
They are usually power by a relatively small flyback, so no, it won't work.

Really, anything that produces a continuous spark won't work for crap. You need something like a bolt of lightning. Edit: 1.21 jigawatts!!

Another way to put it, the amount of energy needed for such a gun would probably cause you to explode if it went through you (of course, given rag's previous luck in near-death experiences, he would probably just acquire some type of semi-useless super power).

[Hotwired]

The words are Capacitor Bank.

[Ragnarok]

1.21 Jigawatts baby!
I have a semi-useless super power already though.

@BLB: About the 3rd idea - if you think of the plasma as sort of a (very) lightweight magnetic wadding in a coilgun (which then allows you to fire non magnetic projectiles), that's the general idea - although a quite bit more complex than that in reality.

Coilguns can put out very high forces, beyond just about anything else short of solid propellants, and the trick is using those forces on a much lighter projectile to get insane accelerations.
The other thing is that coilguns have no velocity limits, so you could punch things way past the sound barrier or past hypersonic with the application of enough power. Simply reaching the sound barrier would be a great achievement as far as I'm concerned.

It may not be unique, but I'm pretty pleased with the concept nonetheless.

[Skywalker]

Interesting Rag, but if you take a look at Sam's stuff on powerlabs, you can see that it takes a lot of money to get that kind of electrical energy storage, and its definitely not portable.

I think people have done what you are talking about, a plasma sabot, but with a railgun instead of a coilgun. From what I gather, coilguns are pretty crappy, at least on an amateur level. I don't know much about the high-powered ones, but the amateur ones seem to get less efficient with increasing velocity, putting a real limit on the muzzle velocity.

[DYI]

Coilguns become more efficient with increasing velocity, not the other way around. Coilguns probably have the potential to be better than railguns, but they are very difficult to build well on an amateur level because of the low efficiency at low velocities. I don't know for sure, but with injection velocities of Mach1+, efficiency probably wouldn't be too bad.

[Skywalker]

Hmm. That's weird. When I read up on coil guns on the 4HV forum, they told me that as the projectile speed increased, the pulse width needed for the coils went down, and that meant lower efficiency. And they never talked about any kind of injection. I am terrible at EM physics, though, so I really have no idea beyond what I am told.

[Ragnarok]

This is something you should probably hear about. I only recently found out about this, but there is a machine known only as the Z-machine.

And this thing is not dissimilar to what I've been talking about. With a recorded velocity of 34,000 m/s, 100x the speed of sound - and done by a mix of plasma and electromagnetic fields...
So, I was right about my theory, that's leagues beyond light gas guns - and even twice as fast as the fastest ever railgun.

In terms of energy, it's only about 600 kJ, because the projectile only weighs about a gram, but it's still impressive.

And I'll tell you something - impressive as the railgun picture was, this is much cooler when fired - way cooler
I have a new desktop background.

[Fnord]

That's awesome, but I think your neighbors would notice the above-ground swimming pool filled with cooking oil and the periodic power drains followed by their appliances shooting lightning.

[Ragnarok]

They probably would notice, but it's proof that plasma powered concepts could work - if not achieve practicality.