Railgun

A Railgun is a conarm capable of shooting various projectiles at extreme speeds up to eleven times the speed of sound. It was tested by france during 1948. But they couldn't finished development untill the end of World War 2. In the downfall the first produced railguns that didn't use old leftover parts were sterling drivers designed to bolt things together as massive nailguns.

The Railgun works on the basics of electromagnetism, an extremely high current is flown from the power supply from one rail through the conductive projectile or armature and into the another rail back into the power supply, the caused currents cause extremely strong electromagnetic fields which push the projectile ultimately accelerating it to speeds of 3-11 Mach.

The projectile of a railgun thus has an outstanding range and the kinetic energy that it carries is powerful enough to turn metal into plasma on impact and even cause deadly shockwaves around it's path of travel. Just by traveling through atmosphere.

The extreme forces driven into the rails of the railgun are known to be a problem and often cause lots of wear after even a few full power shots requiring railguns to either be built with extremely strong materials or to have rails capable of being replaced.

Due to the nature of the propulsion, it needs extreme amounts of electric power, the power supply needs to be able to deliver a massive ammount of Amps in the peak of only a few milliseconds.

## Types

There are several kinds of Railguns that have different advantages, disadvantages and also uses.

Railguns are either designed to fire a conductive projectile directly or they use a sliding armature that is stopped at the end of the rails that pushes the projectile forward. The armature variant is in general considered to be compatible with more projectile types however the simplicity of maintanence and easier production of direct firing railguns makes them far more common.

Certain railguns are designed with rails being replaced as they wear out over the course of many and many battles while there are types of railguns that instead need to have their rails replaced after only several shots. These are called HRR (High Rail Reliability LRR (low rail reliability).

The advantages of HRR railguns are less maintenece as they generally heighten the gun's performance however the rails take time to replace and the system holding the rails in place is very heavy.

LRR railguns tend to act up a lot more, they can only handle a limited ammount of shots (most of the time less then 10) and their upkeep is more costly then a HRR's when looked at in the long run. They still have the advantage of being much lighter then LR railguns

### Static voltage

Static voltage railguns are limited to firing at a specified voltage and often perform poorly when forced to fire at a lesser power then their intended one. They tend to have a very short spinup before firing.

### Variable voltage

Variable voltage railguns are capable of having their volatge changed before firing either as a gradient (20% - 100%) or in stages (20/40/60/80/100%). They are somewhat more complex but require a bit more spinup before firing outside of their calibrated voltage.