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.
