Carefully shape the electromagnetic pulse to keep the plasma contained. Pump the volume with a short pulse laser to create the virtual barrel. High velocity shock of gas spurts out the railgun port. Problem solved, except for all the hard work that will keep a dozen engineers employed for a decade.īut I write science fiction and how would this work on a spaceship? No readily available atmosphere in space! Simple. A longer barrel for an aircraft-based micro-satellite launching railgun. If connected to the active elements of the railgun, the plasma can become a virtual barrel, imparting extra kick to a payload. This plasma channel can conduct electricity. Since the laser pulse is traveling in a straight line, the plasma stretches behind the pulse resulting in a plasma channel. This intense electric field tears apart the gas molecules in the atmosphere creating an ionized plasma. All very good, but what does this have to do with railguns? This many photons corresponds to a very intense electric field. So you end up having these photon pancakes whizzing about at (nearly) the speed of light. The cool thing about short laser pulses is that they compress a lot of energy into a very tight package. So how would one extend the barrel without adding more weight?ĭigging back to my original interest in railguns, I thought of ultrashort high power laser pulses in the atmosphere. This is why longer barreled rifles typically have a much greater range than short barreled handguns using the exact same cartridge. The longer the accelerating force can be applied to a projectile, the higher the muzzle velocity will be when it exits the launcher. (Laser weapon technology still has limitations, but that’s a whole different discussion.) The nice thing is that it doesn’t use chemical explosives to accelerate a kinetic projectile to very respectable velocities. Except that bit of electrical discharge passes through a conductor which moves and can be used to fling a projectile. It’s somewhat related to the Jacob’s Ladders that are sometimes seen in old movies featuring a mad scientist of some flavor. However, nothing came of it and we moved on to other things, but the idea had stuck in my writer’s brain.Ī real railgun, as you can read about on Wikipedia or see in numerous Youtube videos, uses electromagnetic forces (Lorenz Force to be precise) to accelerate a projectile. We thought we had a research proposal in the making. This would require putting it on an airplane. (Not because it was useful, but because it would be fun to have a one-shot millimeter-sized launcher that would require an ultrafast laser to trigger.) Then we talked about putting a railgun as a micro-satellite launch system. I thought they were cool and admitted to wanting to build a miniature-scale railgun using semiconductor industry techniques in grad school. Because that’s what you do at parties.Ī few months previously, I had gone in to talk with my old postdoc mentor and he asked me what I thought about railguns. Specifically ship-to-ship combat and I shared an idea that I had been playing with. So I was at a party with Ty Franck and talking about science fiction. But we finally have permission, so here it is! He talked through this with me years ago, long before we were producing the show, but it’s taken this long to get his guest post written and up because he’s an actual scientist who works on government projects and we had to be sure he wasn’t violating any non-disclosure kind of stuff. Reiten about the technology behind the railguns in The Expanse universe. Hey all, we have a guest post from writer and scientist M.T. We are only halfway through the season and In the meantime, keep watching and (hopefully) raving - and making noise.
#Daniel abraham tv#
Talented cast and crew who put their hearts and souls into every episode.Īlcon TV Studios is doing everything they can to find continued life for the series.
The passion of our fans has been matched only by the passion of the incredibly I'm still trying to put my head around it. Story, the characters, the look, the sound, the audience engagement, the reviews,Įverything were clicking like The Expanse. But I have never been on a show where the So when the end came it was okay because we’d said what we wanted to say and I've been on shows that had good, long runs, I've been on shows that were so awful and so awful to work on, that I would pray forĬancellation (mercifully granted).
0 kommentar(er)
