Yes, railguns could theoretically accelerate projectiles over escape velocity. One foreseen use is in fact to use small projectiles to repeatedly hit an orbiting spaceship, until enough energy is transferred to make it reach its escape velocity.

The system calls for a two-mile- long rail gun that will launch a scramjet, which will then fly to 200,000 feet. The scramjet will then fire a payload into orbit and return to Earth. The process is more complex than a rocket launch, but engineers say it’s also more flexible.

Railguns are being researched as weapons with projectiles that do not contain explosives or propellants, but are given extremely high velocities: 2,500 m/s (8,200 ft/s) (approximately Mach 7 at sea level) or more.

Railguns use magnetic fields created by high electrical currents to accelerate a projectile to Mach 6, or 5,400 miles an hour. The velocity is sufficient to give the EMRG an effective range of 110 nautical miles, or 126 miles on land.

Railgun projectiles are non-explosive and safer to manufacture, transport and store. Projectiles are guided to the target after leaving the launcher, and reach a target faster. At 100 yards, railguns sound no louder than a . 30-06 rifle firing.

The U.S. Navy’s $500 million electromagnetic railgun—capable of slinging projectiles at hypersonic speeds—lacks funding and has no coherent plan to deploy on warships. The Navy is instead pursuing an offshoot of the railgun, a hypervelocity projectile it can fire from existing gun systems.

China is testing a ship-mounted railgun “capable of striking a target 124 miles away at speeds of up to 1.6 miles per second,” according to CNBC, citing anonymous sources familiar with the report. “China’s railgun was first seen in 2011 and underwent testing in 2014,” sources told CNBC.

Are you able to buy a railgun in the U.S.A. for personal use? Yes, but finding one actually for sale might be a little tough. One of my classmates built a fully functional electromagnetic rail gun.

However, to get it in story mode, you must be a returning GTA player. In GTA Online you can access the Railgun regardless of whether you are a returning player not. However, you can only access it in certain missions, since it is too powerful and would otherwise give you an unfair advantage over other players.

A coil gun doesn’t seem to meet the definition of a firearm per CA law, nor does it meet the definition of a firearm per federal law. Therefore, it is not a “gun”, legally. It’s a magnetic “gun” that uses electromagnets and pulsed electricity to fire a projectile.

The styling is straight out of a video-game, but inside the engineering is very real, and very lethal. A coil-gun uses a magnetic field to accelerate a bullet up to projectile speed.

The general difference in how they apply that force is that coil guns (aka Gauss guns) use coils of magnetically charged material wrapped around the barrel to accelerate the projectile while rail guns use parallel rails (or bars) of magnetically charged material along or under the barrel.

2.0 to 2.5 km/s

A Gauss rifle works by transferring kinetic energy from one ball bearing to another, known as the conservation of momentum. The energy is then transferred through the magnet, then through the first steel ball on the other side and into the second ball, just like how Newton’s cradle works.

Kristian Birkeland

There are many hypothesised magnetic weapons, such as the railgun and coilgun which accelerate a magnetic (in the case of railguns; non-magnetic) mass to a high velocity, or ion cannons and plasma cannons which focus and direct charged particles using magnetic fields.

The magnetic cannon, sometimes referred to as the Gauss rifle is a simple device that accelerates a steel ball through conversion of magnetic energy into kinetic en- ergy1–4. The energy conversion at work is reminiscent of other electromagnetism-based accelerating device, such as rail-guns5.

The gauss, symbol G (sometimes Gs), is a unit of measurement of magnetic induction, also known as magnetic flux density. The unit is part of the Gaussian system of units, which inherited it from the older CGS-EMU system. One gauss is defined as one maxwell per square centimetre.

10,000 gauss

One gauss corresponds to 10-4 tesla (T), the International System Unit. The gauss is equal to 1 maxwell per square centimetre, or 10−4 weber per square metre. Magnets are rated in gauss. The gauss was named for the German scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss.