Talk:Coilgun

In Science Fiction

A Coilgun is also to be found in "The Neutronium Alchemist", volume 1 of the "Night's Dawn Trilogy". Known as a "Gaussgun" in the book, it is the only man portable weapon effective against possesed humans, until other weapons are developed later in the series.

the gauss weapons in x-com 2 can be fired above and below water, which makes them a valuable dual-purpose weapon -Lordraydens 05:15, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

This article may be mislabeled in some aspects. Mainly that a search for "gauss gun" comes to this page. [[1]] that is what an actual gauss gun is (sorry about the site the video is on but it's the only place I could find it). I don't have the time to write an article about that myself, but it should be changed so that a search for "gauss gun" takes you to a page saying it needs an article as opposed to this article.

Paranoia

Paranoia Gauss guns aren't coilguns, they just fire focused bolts of EMP. (Just leaving a note to that effect.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vogon (talk • contribs) February 23, 2006 (UTC)

Too much cruft.

I came to this article because I wanted to find out how coil guns work. As a reader, I find that the list of trivia from video games at the end to be excessive, unnecessary, pointless, etc. It also makes the subject itself look trivial, even though it is definitely not trivial. I'm going to trim it down considerably or remove it. Revert me if necessary, but please understand how bad it makes the article look to have a list of video game trivia as long as the article itself. Brian G. Crawford 22:01, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

All magnets on at the start or switching each one on when needed?

Under the Construction-heading is the following phrase:

"A large current is pulsed through the coil and a strong magnetic field forms, pulling the projectile to the center of the coil. When the projectile nears this point, the coil is switched off and a next coil can be switched on, progressively accelerating the projectile down successive stages."

However, under the Operation-heading it says:

"The gun starts with all of the magnets turned on, and then turns them off one by one before the shell reaches them."

So which is it? --ZeroOne 15:44, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

it can be either, although, given current power limitation and use of capacitors as a power source, it is univerally usually the earlier --88.106.60.51 18:59, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

advantage of coilgun over railgun

The 'Operation' section asserts that the coilgun can be made arbitrarily long, implying that a railgun cannot be arbitrarily long. Is this true? I don't see why a railgun of arbitrary length couldn't be made. Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 12:44, 5 July 2006 (UTC)