Grrl Power #165 – How to pop the wheels on a tank
AKA Coilgun, Gauss Gun, Scram Cannon (sort of), Kinetic Bombarder. I think we’ve mostly settled on “railgun” as the common name for the things, though I sort of have a soft spot for Gauss Gun. Really big one would still be called mass drivers I assume. Deciding on where the railgun/mass driver demarcation is the next debate I suppose.
Drawing debris is tedious. I probably should have drawn more crap flying out of the tank, but I need to figure out how to do that without making that take up the bulk of the time I spend on the page.
I just found this comic over the weekend and thought it was really funny. It’s called Superbitch. I’ll let you guess what it’s about. I’ll just say the titular character and Maxima would probably get along… for a little while anyway.
Update: Looks like linking to Superbitch took down their site (oops) but it’s sorted out and they’re back online if you didn’t get a chance to read it yesterday.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
is that a certain scientific rail gun or did she get the plans from a certain magical index?
got it from a certain magical index tested it against a certain scientific railgun and had iit touched by the the demon god destroyer…. By god i love anime references!!!!
I love you for this. Take my thumbs up~ ouob
Well, that is a better demonstration for Achilles than his headbutt. Now, which one gets the applause? The one with the railgun or the one about to shrug it off.
Why not both?
Is it just me, or does the ‘time-out’ box and the words look more like they were poured rather than scrapped out? Still works, but it’s probably just the shading/shadowing
Yeah, I couldn’t quite figure out how to make a perfectly convincing “line in the dirt” effect which sounds like it’d be easy. Maybe I put the shadow on the wrong side.
That would be my guess – just from dealing with fonts (not advanced stuff like this), that’s exactly the effect that “shadow on the other side” produces (switches raised/lowered).
Totally called it on the ‘crossbow’, Dabbles just took it to the next level and created the ‘railbow’
I can’t be the only one that, when I read the word ‘railbow’, pictured a rainbow trail following the projectiles it launched.
Yeah, knew that would happen :D
Reminds me of the railgun from Shadow Warrior. Hers looks different though.
I prefered the Gauss Cannons on my mechs, at least when I was playing Mechwarrior Mercenaries. Partially because the effects looked cool.
This page is awesome and hilarious. Seeing someone perform a Fastball Special, seeing Achillies have so much fun being a superhero, seeing what looks like a fancy shotgun but is actually a super-long range weapon that kills tanks. And the way Dabbler talks about that gun it sounds like she knocked it out in a afternoon and felt like showing off after seeing a sniper.
I call them Gauss Rifles or Gauss Pistols from playing the Traveller RPG.
Loving Sydney’s sullen expression in the first panel (shows she can follow orders, for as long as she remembers, even if she’s not happy about it)
What is the soundeffect of the projectile hitting the dirt?
And ‘ecky ecky ecky’? Is that supposed to be the sound of a dolphin/porpoise?
“Ecky ecky ecky ecky ptang zoo boing” is the new phrase adopted by the knights who formerly said “Ni” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail
I think ‘ecky ecky ecky’ is Dave’s idea of what a train sounds like as the wheels roll over the points/gaps in the rails – as in railgun.
That makes sense, thank you (would have been more of an ‘eckity-eckity-eckity’ to me)
It’s the tell for the best Monty Python reference I’ve ever seen, anywhere – subtle enough to not bother those who don’t care, specific enough to be absolutely certain it was intended. It set a new standard on Monty Python references.
Now I’m just being nitpicky, but there IS a difference between coilguns/gauss guns and railguns. A coilgun has a series of magnets along the barrel that fire and turn off in sequence as the projectile goes down it. A railgun consists of two electrically conductive rails down the length of the barrel, and the projectile completes the circuit between them, causing it to get pushed out by the magnetic force as it slides along the rails.
Both use magnetic force to accelerate a projectile, but the mechanism is substantially different.
Also, the Monty Python reference almost killed me. :’)
A coil gun uses a long coil of wire. You run a current through the wire generating a magnetic field that pulls th e projectile through the coil.
You are still describing Ian’s description of a coilgun, but Ian’s description is of a multi-coilgun you described a single coilgun. The coil becomes and electromagnet and attracts/accelerates the ferromagnetic projectile down the barrel.
Dangit, I KNEW I was forgetting a nuance somewhere. Several nuances, even. I guess that means I fail at picking nits.
railguns… they use a pair of rails closely placed to the barrel of a gun, a very high voltage arcs the short distance to the projectile and does something in relation to magnetic flux. if the projectile isn’t moving fast enough when it enters the rail section, it’ll simply weld the rails together and your system explodes. fortunately, the threshold speed is actually rather low. your main drawbacks to railguns are that the rail distance has to be very precise (and hence somewhat delicate), your power source must be rather large, and the capacitor bank size makes them relatively non-portable. obviously, alien materials don’t figure into that.
coilguns (or gauss guns) use a series of very strong electromagnets to suck the projectile through the barrel. yes, you can use a singular, low strength magnet and a very small projectile, but you get crap results. the main difficulties of the coil gun are that the timing between the magnets firing has to be exact and the distance between them have to be relatively close. disadvantages? I don’t think anybody’s managed to make a powerful working one, at least publicly sold. I would imagine accuracy might also be an issue, considering the systems seem to work better smoothbore.
I’m no physicist, but…
a) physicists don’t get to have that much fun
b) there is research to be done on the people who are…still alive.
*hands a slice of cake to Motoko*
I knew such a discussion would take place in the comments the moment I read the first sentence in the comic commentary. (^_^)
I read up about the difference between the two quite some time ago, myself. But I’ve noticed that quite a lot of people aren’t aware of it at all. Even among tech geeks and rpg’ers, who would usually be the first you’d expect to know such things.
Debris wise, it would cut out conical holes with the narrow end towards the railgun (not melted, there’s no time for it to melt), and the shrapnel would look like a highly directional fireball coming out the other side (iron, splattered into white hot plasma and self-igniting in air) and smoky pulverized powder.
I LOVE the tiny Mr. Amorphous throwing Achilles in pannel 2
Achilles’s ‘weeeee’ is even better than Sydney’s from https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/479
Between Sydney being in time out, Achilles apparent laid back goofiness, and Dabbler’s blaz’e attitude about her creation, I’m giggling my ass off here.
I can only imagine what the shocked, awed, and horrified expressions on the news monkeys faces as they watch the demo. LMAO!!!
Dave! YOu! Are! Amazing! I LOVE railguns!
Ergo, I love you.
Whee!
I typed up a rather long comment about the difference between railguns and Gauß guns. It apparently got swallowed by some character limit. Well, it has all ben said, so I don’t need to repeat it. Anyway, two smaller nitpicks:
-We have to assume Dabbler’s using magic to prevent herself from the blown away/apart by the substantial recoil this gun must have (she’d fly at least as far as Achilles does)
-She certainly got a remarkable accuracy for someone shooting from the hip.
Actually most modern gun have some springs and stuf that supress the recoil. No reason this thing can’t have something of the sort
You can delay the onset of the recoil and extend the time over which the momentum transfer occurs, but you can’t actually get rid of it. All that momentum has to go somewhere, or you’re breaking the principle of conservation of momentum.
A railgun, similar to a crossbow, would actually launch itself forwards not press back against the shooter. Railguns work on the principle of ‘pulling’ the projectile at high speeds out of the barrel.
No matter how a wespon moves the projectile if the projectile goes fast one way the weapon is transfered that momentum in the other direction (conservation of momentum). So Dabbler is cheating hardcore with that weapon. That said it works by the rule of cool.
Well, she’s already generating enormously powerful magnetic fields in the weapon. Perhaps she also uses the fields to dissipate the recoil into the planet’s magnetic field–essentially driving a magnetic “anchor” for the gun. Of course, given the relative weakness of the planetary field, the anchor field would be strong enough to make everything in the area magnetic for the duration, including the oxygen in the air. This is why the field generator is made of handwavium.
she could also be generating a gravity field that increases the apparent mass of the gun itself, thus reducing the effect of the recoil that would be felt if it didn’t have that mass increase. for example, hold a .45 cal pistol in your hands and fire it… you are pushed backwards by the recoil say, 5 inches (not scientifically accurate, just pulling numbers out of the aether) OK… now weld that exact same gun to the body of a 75 ton tank and fire the gun again… how far did the tank move backwards that time?… not bloody very far at all… the only difference was the mass of the person/object holding the gun… so, if she increases the mass of the gun for the micro/nano second it takes to fire the projectile, then shuts off the effect afterwards… poof! no recoil is FELT, it still happens, it’s just not transferred to the user… remember that this is the same person that can teleport objects, which implies that she has the technology to warp space-time itself… applying a bit of temporary mass to an object should be child’s play compared to that.
Wrong. The recoil on the gun will always be in the opposite direction that the projectile is traveling. It’s the equal and opposite reaction to the projectile’s action for Newton’s Third Law.
You do know how a cross bow (or even a regular bow) works, don’t you?
I’m thinking that the “remarkable accuracy” has more to do with Dabbler’s cybernetics than anything else. If I were building a gun designed to shoot satellites, I would link it to my vision along with various other bits to make it as accurate as possible. Probably some sort of FOF targeting, too, so that I don’t accidentally shoot some poor schmuck, rather hitting the schmuck I want.
Especially considering the collateral damage on that thing. “It shoots through schools.”
a rail gun has two rails that complete a circuit when the payload touches both while a mass driver uses coils that generate magnetic fields to catapult a ferrous payload (or carrier/cage)
As to what the gun actually is … remember, Dabbler sometimes has issues with our language. So she can’t find a good word for it. I expect to see more mangled words in the future, sometimes done on purpose to annoy people(especially Max).
Sydney’s comment however fits what I expect your “typical” geek might say after seeing it in action. “It’s a Mass Driver”. as the more serious and logical response, and then the Geeks response, “No no no, its a Railgun! Much cooler!”
But interesting discussion about the various types of weapons, some of which I myself didn’t even know about (nice getting a science lesson with my funnies).
Rail guns. First conceived by the Nazis. Their test bed disintegrated upon firing. Smashing two rails together to create a powerful magnetic pulse could be done. It was just making it a repeater was the difficulty.
Mass drivers can fire asteroids if set up properly. got to see them in action on Babylon 5.
Heh, used to LOVE Railguns when I played Red Faction. there was also a similar gun in Perfect Dark. Heat Scope to allow you zero in on enemies then shoot through multiple walls to nail em in the head chest or wherever. My fave was getting a Five for One shot from six rooms away on an elevator =3
My understanding is that Gauss gun/cannon/ect refers to a coil gun, while mass driver refers to railguns. They’re similar but different; rail guns use magnetic fields to push the slug, coil guns use magnetic fields to pull it.
You know, this highlights for me the absurdity of the invincible concept. That a human being is somehow going to be more resistant to damage than a tank. Its just bazaar.
A wizard did it. Or to put it another way, all of these powers are impossible by any normal explanation. It just goes with the genre – once you’ve gone over the hurdle of the fantastic, who can say what’s possible? Although I admit Achilles’ in particular are quite hard to get your head round that he can survive energy levels that should atomise him but still be comprised of atoms which presumably have the same nuclear interactions (hydrogen bonds, chemical reactions to make neurons fire etc) as normal matter.
… Nope still not got a convincing explanation even a hand wavy one. I’m gonna have to go with every atom of his body has a little flak jacket and soup-bowl helmet. Or due to some extra dimensional aspect, his atoms only interact ‘normally’ with each other and very weakly with normal matter/energy. Ok I’ve rewritten this enough times, his powers do make my head hurt.
Yeah, it’s something I’ve mostly just suspended disbelief on up until now, but the set up of this page using the casual realities of his power just drove home how strange it is.
Of course this is a way better demo of his power than smashing his face into a tank…
I’m sure there are a ton of incorrect differentiations between these terms.
coilgun/gauss rifle uses coils to induce a magnetic field (thus propelling the bullet) generally these only work in low gravity cause otherwise you need some sort of containment between the coils and the bullet or you need to tilt things to levitate the bullet as you fire it.
railgun’s run an electric current through the bullet, which if you know you electricity and magnetism results in interaction with the current flow on both rails such that both rails’ electric fields push on the field from the bullet. You *need* contact and thus friction on this type of “electromagnetic canon” “mass driver” (or whatever other term you want to use as the superset of rail guns and coil guns). These are much better in gravity because you have a natural an unavoidable force pulling the bullet down on the rails. Often times a disposable sabot that takes the damage from friction along the rails is used in rail guns. This allows for the electrical properties to not be requirements on the bullet itself, but on the whole bullet + sabot assembly, hence you can say make a copper or aluminum sabot and a depleted uranium round, or you can make a composite sabot with a smaller contact area and a larger low friction surface like teflon or one of the ultra high molecular weight polymers… AND the aerodynamic properties of the round can be preserved without the need to be subjected to high current, heat and friction…
There are obviously other differences as a coil type gun would require high switching speeds whereas a railgun doesn’t need any complicated, just high power output.
to be clear mass drivers are a much more general term as I’ve always heard it used to encompasse all electromagnetic acceleration methods. Although I notice the wiki article seems to have moved towards classifying them as coil guns because some people drew up plans for a moon based coil gun and called it a mass driver.
Who’s the guy that threw Achilles?
Mr. Amorphus
I kinda guessed it might be… But his portrait didn’t show up in the “who’s in this episode” section…
DaveB tends to forget to add portraits of people who don’t actually play an important role (in Mr Amorphose’s case, he was simply there to get Les to the tank in the quickest amount of time)
I can’t decide if I love Achilles or Jiggawatt the best
Who says you have to choose only one?
So when do we get to see Sydney’s energy blast? It’s been like over a year now since it was mentioned and we still have yet to see it.
You mean, other than the flashback where she had set the rainforest on fire?
BFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Under whatever principles of science that suggest those particular initials, in my mind, BFG will *always* mean “Fig F***k’n Gun.”
Arrrgh!
“Big,” not “Fig”
This website really DOES need an edit function for the Comments…
Who knows, maybe the gun likes f**king figs in it’s spare time.
That is EXACTLY what I was implying. Every super team needs someone with a BFG.
Bad guy: Aww…what a cute little gun. What do you use it for?
Dabbler: Knocking planets out of my way. Want to give it a try?
Bad guy: Umm…pass?
Yeah, the ‘Big’ part of the name kinda implies that it is physically big, what you are thinking of is the ‘Cricket’ from “MiB”
Or do it the River Song way, but insted of naming yourself, point the ‘Cricket’ to the side and put a very big, very visible hole in that huge mountant ten miles away (meaning THROUGH), THEN say something like: “Come again?”
I actually meant the “big” in either way. Either large in size or effect. Dabbler seems the type that she would enjoy making a weapon that looks unimpressive but could carve her initials into the sun.
Or something that uses stars as projectiles.
Remember that episode of Futurama where Fry used several stars to ask Leela to marry him?
Looks like superbitch.com was blocked or something. too bad, got to see the first few strips, then it was 403’d.
I love your Comic!
Sorry, http://www.superbitchcomic.com
I suspect the extra traffic from here has exceeded their hosting quota, or something like that.
Congrats Dave, your first slashdot? :-)
403 is common when a site gets more traffic than it can handle.
why is it restricted? WHY? T_T
I think she’s sorted out the hosting, the site’s back up now. Never had that happen before.
Dave that’s a worse can of worms than a size line demarkation :)
He’s the breakdown (if I remember correctly)
Mass Drivers are a top level category (as opposed to particle weapons, thermal, emp, laser, gravitic, etc)
Under Mass Drivers you have the different way the mass is propelled (chemical, compressed gas, magnetic)
Under Magnetic Mass Drivers you have still more types
-Coilgun (and sometimes Guass Gun, though Guass Gun can be one that only uses the magnetic field as a weapon and doesn’t launch anything) is a coil of wire that creates a magnetic field that pulls the slug to the middle then cuts off (like a solenoid switch).
-Railgun has two rails fixed in place and the slug can move so when an electric circuit is created the magnetic field pushes to the outside of the loop and pushes out the only part that can move (the ones used by the US Navy have a piece of copper that vaporizes and the copper gas pushes the slug, less friction that way).
-Magnetic slingshot will make the slug swing around in the loop of the magnetic field until the magnetic field is shut off and it goes flying.
-A Scram Cannon isn’t magnetic (though I guess you could use any of the above to get it up to it’s minimum scram jet speed)
-Kinetic Bombardment is dropping inert masses on a planet and letting gravity do all the work so a Kinetic Bombarder would be dropping a snowmobile on someone from orbit.
This is what she called it, and it also PERFECTLY deals with the “recoil” issue – essentially, you are accelerating the object in opposite directions, causing the weapon to wiggle (ever see one of those pens that makes your writing wiggly?). When it releases the object, all the acceleration has already taken place, leaving no kick.
It would take a LOT more energy, though, as you’d have to keep changing the course of the object to keep it going in a circle, and manually aiming would be INSANE (aiming by computer wouldn’t, though, as the position as the moment of release would be predictable, if you could control the moment of release to the nano-second or so).
That’s all good to know. Wikipedia and a few other sites I searched didn’t make quite as explicit a distinction, at least, not in an all in one glance format.
err superbitch site needs a password.
It seems he realized :)
wow after coming back to this comic after a while i am so glad so many more people found it.
My understanding is that a rail gun is a subtype of a magnetic gun, specifically one that uses a rail to guide the projectile out.
Anybody else think Dabbler went with Syd’s suggestion just to piss-off Max?
“Railgun. Sure, that sounds cooler.”
Considering Sydney’s reactions to hammerspace and a railgun, I’m calling it now that the third time Sydney fangirls over Dabbler’s powers/tech, someone points out that while it’s perfectly natural to be attracted to her body, there’s no excuse to having fangasms because of her powers, that’s just weird.
And a thousand geeks nerds and dorks cried out in outrage and horror
Just a technicality – scram cannons are completely unlike rail guns or coil guns.
The latter two use huge magnetic fields to accelerate the projectile, differing only in the mechanism used to form that field and couple it to the projectile. Rail guns use a cloud of plasma between two rails to form a linear homopolar motor, while coilguns switch coils on and off in sequence to form what amounts to a brushless DC motor.
Scram cannons, on the other hand, use no magnetic fields at all; instead, the barrel of the cannon is filled with a fuel-air mixture, and the bullet is shaped into as a special jet engine that digests the fuel in the cannon to accelerate as it travels down the barrel. It’s essentially a rocket that gives Tsiolkovsky the bird by flying through a combustible atmosphere instead of having to carry its fuel with it.
SWAN DIVE
There are two basic kinds of electromagnetic canon. A coilgun or gauss gun uses a series of electromagnets along the barrel to propel something; it needs a good onboard computer, is limited to ferrous projectiles (or ones that respond to magnets at least), and works best with long, thin projectiles instead of round stubby ones, but the moving parts are all simple, contact can be minimized, and it allows for rapid fire, making it the usual futuristic rifle thing in hard sci-fi. A railgun makes a circuit including the projectile itself (or a sabot around it) and then forces the circuit to expand by running massive current through it. It won’t work without a lot of power, loading is complex, and friction between the projectile and the rails means that heat and mechanical wear are big issues, but you can get a *lot* of power out. And then a scram canon is an entirely different thing with no magnets involved, so not that.
I’m going to call this probably a coilgun/gauss rifle, maybe a very small railgun. Mass driver works in either case iirc.
Schlock reference: OMINOUS HUM!
“……….. Damn, we are going to need a bigger timeout box.
They would probably need one starting at the North Pole, ending at the South Pole, and encompassing several planets and dimensions if they were serious about containing her.
Every time I look at Sydney in that first panel, I start laughing again. So much like one of my little sisters in sulk mode.
This might have already been mentioned…but of course the biggest problem with a hand-held railgun is the kickback. AFAIK, anything that could propel even a small caliber projectile at sufficient speeds would rip your arms off as the gun accelerated in the opposite direction.
Dabbler’s secret must be her second set of arms; that would do the trick :P
That’s why it is a railcrossbow: ain’t no kickback from a crossbow, jack
Yes, crossbows do indeed have kick, jill.
Crossbows (and bows) generally accelerate their projectiles MUCH more slowly than firearms, and the “kick” is thus much weaker but for a much longer (relatively speaking) period of time. It’s the difference between a strong push and a punch.
As to how she deals with the kick, see above regarding “magnetic slingshot” and what that would do with the recoil energy.