Coil guns vs. mass drivers

The inductance will limit the acceleration not the velocity. The DOD
were building high acceleration devices (>100 g). I had did the
calculations about a decade ago, and came up with a safe acceleration
to escape velocity of about 70 m/s^2. I'll try to dig up my old notes
and transcribe it for everyone and you can try to find problems with
the physics.

Bill

--- In spacesettlers@egroups.com, "Mike Combs" wrote:
> --- In spacesettlers@egroups.com, Ian Woollard
> wrote:
> >
> > Coil guns can do about 2.5 km/s which is enough for the
> > moon (or punching though armour plate), but I think it runs
> > out of 'steam' after that. The inductance of the coils gets
> > to be a huge problem.
>
> Actually, I've heard pessimists proclaim that coil guns can't even
> get up to 1 km/s, which would mean that they couldn't even be used
as