The future of the pistol is here

[D-FENS]

This is pretty freaking cool. Check out the video. It's no .45 but it's a start.

[jdlv4_0]

WOW! And I thought Aubie with his 800+ posts had a lot of time on his hands...

[Mike45]

Can you pick up the Phillies game on that thing???

Mike45

[aubie515]

NiCd batteries huh. The pistol grip looks a bit wide.

[whoshisface]

Cheap ammo coming soon!

Not really impressed. With a great engineer and some $$$ they could easily approach mussel velocity of a regular gun. Surprised this hasn't been done yet, actually I'm sure it has.

[fultonCoShooter]

thats sweet! until you drop it in water or it rains

[MiniDevil]

I wouldn't be caught dead with that.

Well, okay, I take that back. I would be caught dead with it because its worthless

[Suburban]

Cheap ammo coming soon!

Not really impressed. With a great engineer and some $$$ they could easily approach mussel velocity of a regular gun. Surprised this hasn't been done yet, actually I'm sure it has.

This is what you would call a rail gun, right? Yeah, the idea has been around a while. The guy who ran my physics lab in... 1999 said that he built one and broke the clock on the wall with it. First time I ever heard of a pistol though.

[Rule10b5]

Wow -- that's just awesome.

I've been reading about gauss guns in sci-fi books for as long as I can remember. Really neat to see that someone actually built one, even if it is a toy at this point.

Imagine how neat they're going to be when the technology is mature. You'll have shoulder fired weapons throwing 1-2 grain needle projectiles at tens of thousands of feet per second through iridium or diamond lined barrels, with a livable recoil impulse because the projectile is accelerated over the 20 inches or so of the barrel with no explosion. Totally flat trajectory. Explosive results on target. Extremely high rate of fire, too, I'd imagine, because once the barrel is energized all you have to do is keep feeding projectiles...

Too cool for words.

[junyo]

Here's the problem. From a logistical standpoint the nice thing about the modern chemical reaction cartridge fed firearm is it's utter dependability. There are very few things that can really go catastrophically wrong with a well designed and maintained firearm that will render it completely inoperable. Each cartridge carries it's own power supply; a few spring and metal bits are critical, but also usually easily replaced.

It's hard for me to see how these things would ever be anything other than fragile toys. Anything that disrupts one of a couple of systems (power, power management, timing circuits, ammo feed, etc.) renders the guy useless. And in a world where people still can't program a VCR, what are the odds that most people are going to able to diagnose and repair a burned out trace on a circuit board in the middle of a fight? Maybe military applications, where you could overbuild and harden it to a ridiculous degree, and have it cared for by an armorer, but for the average Joe?