If you use 10 GJ to fire a lead round, the lead round's projectile will have up to 10 GJ of energy with which to propel it.

Nope. The actual force of a modern hammer striking a modern round is not the energy used to actually propel the round.

Modern projectiles are propelled by the chemical energy within the round. Same could be said for hybrid rounds, as far as you know.

Consists of two components: a shell of titanium and a core of lead atoms suspended in a plasma state. Railguns launch the shell directly...

Also: its a scifi game.

You're probably one of those people who don't think twice about correcting (criticizing) your girlfriend. Sorry, former girlfriend.

Go look up how railguns work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun

Also read the description of hybrid rounds: http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Lead_Charge_L

At 2.5 million meters per second, that is one hard hitting fart.

c) 250km is the upper range of large railguns. Since guns hit "instantly" we will use a value of 0.1 seconds for the projectile's travel time. This means that the lead projectile is traveling at 2,500,000 m/s (2.5 million meters per second.)

Should be
Lim T->0

That's as far as I got before deciding your maths is flawed.

Gee gratz dewd on your mastery of Ke=1/2MV^2

Have you thought that at 2.5 million meters per second even a light substance is going to pack a sizable kinetic punch

. also 2.5mill m/s is a little slow from what ive read about railguns the US millitary has managed to fire a slug at speeds of around 8.6 mill m/s

given this is set 1000s of years in the future speeds of 20mill or more should be more like it. That & these are being fired in space so friction isnt much of an issue :)

Summary
stuff

Yeah, yeah. At 2.5 million m/s, you're at 83% of the speed of light. Plus, the faster the projectile travels, the less mass it will have. I guess could have just plugged in 0.0008 seconds of flight time as the upper boundary, but it gets really silly.

If you assume 99% of c for the projectile, you're looking at a mass of 8.6437277081851349276334261731994e-8 kg (or 0.000000086 kg (or 0.000003 ounces.))

Pro tip: rail guns use a 'shoe' to fit over the sabot to accellerate it. the 'shoe' then falls away from the sabot after firing. The 'shoe' is a great conductor of electricity, allowing the railgun to work.

The weapon commonly referred to as a 'Railgun' does not utilize rails within the barrel of the gun that the charge slides on - mounting lugs are not visible on images of the charges.

It's the other way around : the more the projectile approaches the speed of light, the bigger its mass.

Plasma has very little mass.

The server clock tick is 1 second so lets assume a travel time of 1 second for the maximum range - not 0.1 seconds - so v = 250,000 m/sec

The activation cost of a 425mm railgun is 30 GJoules
...
So if the railgun is 100% efficient and accelerates the round with 30 GJoules

This man speaks the truth. That's why you can never break the speed of light using conventional thrust - your mass approaches infinity, thus the force required to accelerate any faster also approaches infinity (time dilation plays a role there too)

Also, it may already have been said, but railguns don't just use capacitor juice to launch...they're constantly drawing a significant amount of power (over 2 gigawatts is nothing to sniff at; that's the output of some nuclear power plants). I highly doubt that much energy is being used to make the thing turn and track. In zero gee, in a vacuum. Yah.

From evelopedia:



Pointless. Its a made up game about made-up spaceships using made-up technologies.

Further attempts to use maths/real logic will be met with contradicting quotes from a made-up wiki.

hey guys where did you all go to school?

Stuff

First, you can't just make up some number for the flight time and then strut about as if you've done some kind of rigorous mathematical proof.

Second, you make a false assumption by claiming that all of the energy to launch the projectile comes from your capacitor, or even your capacitor plus power grid.

You could very easily claim that each individual round has its own nuclear fission (or fusion) device to propel the round.

It would be entirely plausible to say that there is a one time use thermonuclear device that sends a sudden electrical surge to the electronics that power the magnetic accelerators.

Third, you don't need a car sized projectile to deal damage if you're launching it with 10GJ of kinetic energy. It doesn't matter if you hit something with a train that has 10GJ of kinetic energy or if you hit it with a grain of sand having 10GJ of kinetic energy. You're still hitting it with 10GJ of kinetic energy.

The combination of your assumption based reasoning and your fixation with fart gas leads me to believe that perhaps you have your head up your ass.

The description of railgun rounds says a "shell of titanium" contains the "lead plasma" and the shell is launched directly. So the mass also includes the (tiny) titanium case.

Summary
Additional Fun Numbers:
* The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 m/s. (3 million m/s). .

Thats pretty goddam funny. How exactly did you lose the two orders of magnitude? Not really any point looking at the rest of your "maths" after that one is there. More importantly why did all the other wannabe scientists in the thread not notice it. For those who still don't see it the speed of light is a shade under 300 million m/s, not 3 million m/s.

Probably the most famous and important number in science and you got it wrong in a "look at me" post.

It all seems to depend on the flight time. We don't know that information and we can't simply assume it's 0.1 seconds or whatever. Heck, if we even assumed it was 4.whatever seconds (the cycle time) that significantly increases the mass of the round.

1> You know we have warp technology right? The shells could easily be been propelled very slowly and the energy is used to fire is been used to create the warp tunnel, not to accelerate the shell.

3> I was under the impression that with rails/hybrids, each only used half the shell as an actual projectile, the other half was used as power/propulsion depending on the type.

4> ...Super-conducting loops would have similar properties and be capable of storing near infinite amounts of energy.

t describes railgun rounds as being accelerated by gravity. I wouldn't think that anything traveling via Eve micro-warp tunnel would be affected by gravitational acceleration

Judging from the size of a Cap Booster 25 charge, that's not likely. See a few posts up.

I agree that 0.1 seconds was arbitrary. However, the numbers go beyond silly if you assume shorter time units or even instant hits.

If you used a fission/fusion device to propel the round, then it would no longer be a railgun.

Railgun ammo containing a power source plus the warhead would make sense, if it was described anywhere in Eve, game-wise or in the fiction. There's also another big problem with the idea:

Let's extrapolate by looking at a Cap Booster 25. A Cap Booster 25 provides 25 GJ of energy with 3kg of mass in 1m^3 volume. Unfortunately, the volume of a large railgun round is merely 0.05m^3. Thus it's not far fetched to assume that Eve technology cannot create a large hybrid round that provides a significant amount of additional energy to power the shot.

It would matter if your teeny tiny itsy bitsy shell hits a whipple shield.

Other considerations:
* what prevents the "lead plasma" from smashing against the titanium case during acceleration?
* why would a railgun not have solid projectiles?
* why does Lead ammo require less power than an anti-matter round?
* why does the ammo type have such a drastic effect on range?
* why use anything but anti-matter?
* why can we fire through solid objects?
* why are weapon ranges so short?
* seriously, a shell full of lead plasma?

No dear, it's called playing with numbers. Some people enjoy analyzing the pseudo-science behind sci-fiction games to see just how far off it is.

I agree that it is very likely for the shell to have a power generation of some sort. Also, it would be the most accurate, in my opinion, to use the base energy consumption, without skills, as the cap efficiency would come from being able to use the fluxuating magnetic fields of your ship to get the power, rather than your capacitor.

Pointless. Its a made up game about made-up spaceships using made-up technologies.

Further attempts to use maths/real logic will be met with contradicting quotes from a made-up wiki.