ALIHISGREAT wrote:yeah being able to say you have a real working plasma rifle will make halo fans wet themselves from excitement.
Well, it couldn't work like plasma rifles in films and games do, firing a mystical glowing mass of gases - for one thing, I don't have the facilities to create a complex magnetic containment field for that.
There's still a thrill for being able to show someone a working, if ghetto, version of something they thought was only something that they thought was just something a video game designer thought up.
Gauss guns are one of the more entertaining things to show people, as long as they keep their fingers clear of the high voltages.
@DYI: If I could make prototypes of half of my wacky ideas, the forum would need a whole new section for them.
The plasma ideas I have work by briefly converting air into plasma with a large electrical impulse and creating a huge spike of pressure and heat from that, which will be used to propel a conventional projectile.
As for plasma containment, I don't think that will be too heavy an issue. It should be possible to focus the plasma with an appropriate neodymium magnet to get best performance out of it.
I think if it can be sorted, I could get a .47g BB supersonic from a 2' barrel.
I'm still trying to create a spreadsheet model to work out how much electrical power would be needed, and the potential difficulties with ionised gases as well. More on that later then.