Week 14

            Last week, I honestly did nothing for ISM because it has been the start of the new semester. I spent most of my time getting ahead in Digital Electronics. However, my mentor Justin Masias passed the background check, so now I can start the shadowing process. In the future weeks, I plan to meet with him, and to start the evidence of learn reports. The blog posts will also be fill with more content in the future weeks.

Week 13

            Over the last week and Christmas break, I have started to do the math behind the railgun. I found a dissertation from a person at the naval postgraduate school in 1996 that built and tested a similar designed railgun as me. With this dissertation, there were all his equations that he used. With these equations, I plan to put them in a program that will do the math for me. Also, after reading it, the amount of force that is required scares me. For an example, he used 20,000 amps in his test fires, and it only takes two amps to kill a person. Thus, I will be having an electrical engineer make sure everything is safe before I fire my railgun in the future.

            Last week, I also found out that a friend of mine is making an aiming program that he would like for me to put my railgun on. With the program, I could have the ability to type in coordinates and have the railgun hit that location. However, I am worried that the magnetic field that comes off railguns will ruin the computer that is running the program. However, I will cross that bridge if we decide to go down that route in the future.