Coil guns vs. mass drivers

--- In spacesettlers@egroups.com, "bill t" wrote:
>
> 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.
show stopper there.

The actual argument made was that the rise/fall time of each coil
limited the maximum velocity to below the km/sec range. Like I said,
whether this was right or wrong, I'm unsure.

Dr. Snively said that one thing O'Neill's mass driver did to solve
the coil rise/fall time problem was that at the high speed end of the
mass driver, you went from fewer coils with multiple turns to greater
numbers of single-turn coils. I've never heard anyone say whether or
not the DoD funded coil gun team ever tried this approach.

O'Neill assumed (and achieved with models) an acceleration of 1,800
G's.

Regards,
Mike Combs