Hi, Just got finished reading book 3 of the Fifth Foreign Legion series
(Cohort of the Damned)....good book.
In the first chapter the aliens (Ubenfrarr) land on the planet surface and are
trying to knock out the main planetary defense which is a linnax
railgun........can anyone give me a description of what this weapon is?
I
have a rough idea,but want to make sure.
Also what material is linnax? I have heard it used before at work but do not
know what it is.....
Last, were there any more books in the Fifth Foreign Legion series??
Thanks,
> On Sun, Jan 26, 2003 at 03:52:43AM -0600, Mark & Staci Drake wrote:
> In the first chapter the aliens (Ubenfrarr) land on the planet surface
I haven't read the book, but it sounds like a corruption of "linear
accelerator" rather than a type of material. Since I'm not aware of any
shades of railgun which are _not_ linear accelerators, it seems a bit
superfluous, but perhaps technology has changed by then. Apart from details of
implementation, this is basically the same thing as a gauss gun, magnetic
accelerator, etc.; something which uses a series of magnetic fields to
accelerate a projectile, thus avoiding the inconvenient speed limit imposed by
gunpowder's combustion velocity.
> On Sun, Jan 26, 2003, Roger Burton West wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 26, 2003 at 03:52:43AM -0600, Mark & Staci Drake wrote:
> and are trying to knock out the main planetary defense which is a
In general you're correct, but not quite. The thing that separates a
railgun from a gauss gun / magnetic accelerator / coil gun is that the
railgun (surprise) features rails. In the railgun, the projectile is in
contact with two parallel rails, forming the bridge between them and
completing a circut. As such, it feels a force and accelerates, remaining in
contact with the rails. This has obvious problems in that, for high
velocities, you have a good chance of things melting due to friction, or
needing really high power levels. It has the advantage that we can build them
now. Often in SF, the term "railgun" is mistakenly used when another term (I
use "linear accelerator", but "coilgun" is another possibility) should have
been used instead. A coilgun consists of a series of rings of some magnetic
material (or some material that becomes magnetic with the introduction of an
electric
field -- you want an induced dipole rather than a permanent dipole. The
projectile is fired down the middle of these rings by magnetic acceleration.
You could, in theory, probably also use a solenoid for this, but I'm not sure
how that would work in practice. Since there's no actual contact, the coilgun
removes some of the friction problems, but adds others (if you *get* contact,
what you really have is a very high speed collision, and things will probably
not go well for you).