Laminated low cost rails and armatures for rail launchers

Experiments are being conducted in a small rectangular bore (25 mm rail-to-rail by 12 mm high, nominal length one meter) railgun using laminated rails and a new armature concept, the “pseudo-liquid” armature. Presented are some of the results obtained in these experiments. A second aspect of this work is the design of the railgun itself. It is arranged so that it can be used with simple breech current feed or with one turn of series augmentation. Because the gun has what amounts to an open top, some in-bore diagnostics are simplified, and rails can be replaced with a minimum of effort