chapotraphouse

It's made with duct tape

I don't understand what this has to do with trust. This is just a regular news story whose existence is easy to independently confirm. Here is a link to the actual story on NHK.

Do look like Phillips bits

Probably not if the bullet is fast enough, right? Air rushing into barrel, or bullet breaking the sound barrier

Oh you can build one out of literal trash from the 90s.

It's just... So there's a lot of energy in gunpowder. Like, a lot. And even being super inefficient and losing a ton if that energy, it's really good at pushing stuff. Its just naturally good at exploding, and over the years, we occasionally make it even better at exploding.

And we have some pretty good batteries but they really dont compare.

And then, you know, you need to release a shit ton of energy all at once right? And batteries aren't very good at that. Even if you make them be explosives instead of batteries, they still aren't anywhere near as good as gunpowder at that.

So you also need a capacitor. Which is more stuff.

And you've still got a really weak gun, and you need to charge it between shots-not just the battery, but the capacitors(?) In a way you can't really just rotate out-notice how there are three sections of wire there? Thats three thingies to accelerate the slug, which each need a quick (and super well timed but thats not usually a problem AFAIK) boop from a capacitor. So you can't fire fast for long even if youre carrying a huge battery. And overheating is a huuuge problem, because remember what heat does to conductivity. They are not friends.

So you can't use it in a sustained fight you can't (as easily) hurt someone armored and you can't make your dick feel big with it. Which are most of what militaries care about.

AFAIK what the military has been researching are large (naval) railguns. Coilguns are a novelty with minimal utility (note that the actual principles involved in them are used in real things, but mostly for accelerating things along rail systems, not as guns or cannons), but railguns have some promise in pushing the upper limit of what artillery can do (and AFAIK what they were focused on was specifically a hybrid system that would launch a shell with conventional propellant into a railgun barrel that would then accelerate it even harder) because they can get things moving faster than gas can expand and put more force on a projectile than conventional propellant alone could without having a building sized barrel to accommodate the force.

Ultimately the project made a big fixed emplacement that could launch a projectile faster and harder than any other system, but which was both logistically infeasible due to it rapidly destroying its own barrel (a seemingly intractable problem with railguns is that at high power levels the surface of the rails oxidizes and the rails themselves can warp), and obviated by missiles largely replacing the role of artillery along with "what if we could put a single shell somewhere near a target even faster than a missile, once, and it would take an entire ship dedicated to this task" turning out to not be as useful a niche as sci-fi brained military officials thought it would be fifty years ago.

From what I know the only practical military application of coil guns would be artillery. It's quieter than conventional artillery and also produces no flash or smoke. Small arm coil guns seem hilariously inefficient unless you poison the round or something.

There's a coil shotgun on the market that has a muzzle energy of about 85 joules. For comparison an average pistol will be around 550 J. A 5.56mm rifle is around 1800 J.

Yeah that coil is way too short to impart any serious amount of acceleration.

No idea on that one, but you can definitely engineer railguns with off the shelf parts that can be put out similar energy to .22lr I think.

Saw a video recently of someone creating a homemade railguns that could, if set up properly, exceed the Irish govt's firearms limitations.

Hell, just searching YouTube I saw a bunch claiming "1.5KJ" which (depending on efficiency and projectile ballistics) could impact similar energy onto a target as a 9mm handgun, if my duck duck go-ing serves me right.