I tried to watch the gauss gun, but the footage was all blurry.....


My kid built a 4-stage version of this, ( 4 sets of magnets and balls) and the final stages shoot so fast, you can't follow the ball with your eye at all. Too bad the impact forces are strong enough that the magnet's's glue joints fail after a couple dozen shots.

DeltaPunch: The only question is how many balls are needed before adding more is pointless?

You can always put more mass into the system, but soon the magnet will shatter or the balls will deform. They're probably already pretty close to the limit of breaking that magnet.

DjangoStonereaver:


I've always regretted that painting. "Hey! I'm Andy Warhols clone! I'll make you famous!" Not exactly what an aspiring rogue and intergalactic spy needs...

Besides, he got the face and hair all wrong. He made me look like "Race" Bannon.

DeltaPunch: Rail gun would like to have a word with the Gauss gun.


Yes she would.

IronTom: The magnet speeds the ball up and launches the other ball with the increased energy.

Where did the energy come from?

Jim DiGriz: Besides, he got the face and hair all wrong. He made me look like "Race" Bannon.

Well, I'm sure one of the many disguises you've worn did make you look like Race Bannon, if only by accident. C'mon, Slippery Jim, you're not getting all attached to one face now, are you? Marriage really has made you soft. Or will. Damnable time travel.

Mikey1969: I don't know, does it speed up right before impact, and we just don't see it

The smaller the distance between, the greater the force of attraction. Since the masses aren't changing, a constant force would be causing acceleration. This is an increasing force, so the velocity should be increasing quite quickly with proximity. That's why when it gets close enough, the magnetic attraction overcomes the frictional force of the magnet and the big mass moves as well.

"Magnet Gun heres how it works"

The maths! No! NO PLEASE...THE MATHS!

Going from comments above, would it be possible to make something that caught the early slower balls, and then kind of 'recycled them' inside a mechanism so that you could just fire out a really hard one every second or so? I mean, could it be made into a proper gun? Have I smoked to much pot, or not enough?

It does work like a Newton's cradle, the momentum is transferred thru the ball bearings and the magnets if they are all in contact.

However you start the process, be it an inclined plane on the start or a flick of your finger to start the first ball, the first ball speeds up from the attraction of magnet number one, adding to it's initial velocity. It strikes the magnet on what we'll call the receptor side, and transfers momentum thru it to whatever contacts the other side. In this case, two or more ball bearings with the same mass.

It transfers enough momentum thru the magnet and the row of balls on the far side of the magnet to overcome the magnet's pull on the next ball in the chain.

It launches that ball with the total amount of kinetic energy gained from the first ball, (minus a fraction for friction, overcoming the magnet, heat, etc.) towards the next stage magnet, which imparts additional acceleration.

The next impact transfers most of stage one and stage two's kinetic energy to stage three's ball, and so forth. You should have more balls on the departure side of the magnet than the receptor side, (receptor side needs no ball at all, actually) so that magnetism is just barely holding the balls together in order to transfer the momentum...and not adding too much braking power to the departing round.

It's really more a demonstration of the kinetic energy equation than anything. And when my kid made one for a school project, I insisted he always called it a "magnetically-activated kinetic energy transfer demonstrator", instead of "gauss gun".

A, because school personnel can't get past the word "gun".

B, because a real gauss gun wouldn't use such a clumsy way to accelerate a round; it would use a solenoid coil or series of coils, to impart a momentary magnetic attraction or repulsion force to a round.

t3knomanser:

Well, you know the boys have basically taken over the business. I keep my hand in just to keep them on their toes. I can still show them a thing or two... Hmmm. I'm starting to sound like an old fogey. Might be time for another longevity treatment, and then a nice, complicated, test of a bank or museum... Maybe even a planetary governments deep archives. Just for fun.

I don't generally crow about how close my calculations are when they are off by an order of magnitude.

DjangoStonereaver:

Damn, all my favorite authors are starting to look like that... The ones who are still around.

/pours out a drink for those who are no longer with us

Does this really have anything to do with magnets?

I thought it was just the balls being aligned like that...if you have superballs instead of magnets, and you drop them from a height, the balls at the bottom don't bounce up but the top one rockets up into the air. You can see this happen if you're shooting baskets with 2 basketballs and they land on each other...the bottom one stays put and the top one bounces far higher than the height from which it fell.

In physics class we calculated that you'd only need to drop 8 linked superballs to fire the top one into space (idealized conditions of course). The magnet is just a way to hold the balls together...if there is space between them there isn't the same efficient energy transfer.

I guess with the magnets though, you have a far smaller initial "push" and all of the balls are not involved in the push as they are when they are dropped from a height, but I can see some similarity at least in the two phenomena.

DjangoStonereaver: Mr. Harrison is a lovely, lovely man. I've never had the pleasure of sharing a pint
with him, but did have a nice chat with him back in the 80s when he was a guest
at Lunacon.


Very nice to hear. Most of the authors I like seem to be reasonble, nice people. There are some exceptions, such as Harlan Ellison (allegedly... I've never met him).

Wonderduck: DeltaPunch: Rail gun would like to have a word with the Gauss gun.

[i132.photobucket.com image 640x360]
Yes she would.

DjangoStonereaver: Ellison is a nifty guy, but you have to approach him rather gingerly, kinda like
how you'd approach a pitbull you've never met. If you start out praising his
work on CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER, though, he'll rip your throat out
and show you your own jugular as you expire before his laughing eyes. I've
seen it happen; it wasn't pretty.

Complement him for THE SOLDIER, however, and he'll love you like a brother.



That's good to know too... All I ever heard about him was stories from conventions, where he was described as being rather... Primadonnaish... at best. I'm glad to hear that he's not that way all the time. :)

Jim DiGriz: DjangoStonereaver: Mr. Harrison is a lovely, lovely man. I've never had the pleasure of sharing a pint
with him, but did have a nice chat with him back in the 80s when he was a guest
at Lunacon.


Very nice to hear. Most of the authors I like seem to be reasonble, nice people. There are some exceptions, such as Harlan Ellison (allegedly... I've never met him).

You have to say that, or else he'll sue you.

t3knomanser: Jim DiGriz: DjangoStonereaver: Mr. Harrison is a lovely, lovely man. I've never had the pleasure of sharing a pint
with him, but did have a nice chat with him back in the 80s when he was a guest
at Lunacon.


Very nice to hear. Most of the authors I like seem to be reasonble, nice people. There are some exceptions, such as Harlan Ellison (allegedly... I've never met him).

You have to say that, or else he'll kill you, eat your colon, THEN sue you.

FTFY

Any Pie Left: I tried to watch the gauss gun, but the footage was all blurry.....


My kid built a 4-stage version of this, ( 4 sets of magnets and balls) and the final stages shoot so fast, you can't follow the ball with your eye at all. Too bad the impact forces are strong enough that the magnet's's glue joints fail after a couple dozen shots.

your kid sounds cool.

Well, I drew him the plans for it, and bought the materials....

We used a pair of yardsticks glued together at right angles to make a v-shaped trough. It keeps the ball bearings and magnets aligned quite well, the magnets have two points of contact for epoxy-ing, three if you run thread over the top and around the outside of the device, and you can use the measurements on the sticks for calibration. It looks more badass placed inside a clear plastic sleeve, the kind for protecting fluorescent light tubes from shattering.

I got as far as the math. I was told there would be no math.