Depends on who you are and who you talk to... Supers supposedly have 3GW Iron Man arc reactors to play with.
I once tried to build a coilgun using mains 3-phase electricity as a linear motor. It fused with a hell of a bang when the insulation melted. And melted the breaker box where the breaker had been replaced by a nail. There was a lot of amps going through that before the wires themselves fused and broke the circuit.
Which is where I learned that generating the energy is the easy part. Containing it all.... that's hard. All that power just wants to get out. I also learned not to look directly at an arc flash... oops.
But, you could probably handwave insulation to be unmeltable. Wouldn't protect you when it gets damaged, mind.
Loss wise, you've got eddy currents generated within the coils and within the barrel itself by the changing magnetic fields. You've got heating of the cabling itself, which can get pretty high since it's proportional the the square of the current. And then the inductance of the coils as they switch on an off rapidly. The impedance from this is going to be extremely high, and be a big limiter on rate of fire.
And again, all that reactive power from the inductor will generate even more heat....
Only then, do you generate the magnetic field to propel your bullet.
Inside the bullet, you're loosing energy to eddy currents in the projectile. Friction can be minimised since there's no need to worry about barrel sealing but it'll still be there.... Oh, and you're heating the bullet.
Of course, that's without superconducting and other weird effects.
Yeah.... handwave that. It's easier. Or build a railgun and only worry about waving the rails so they don't erode after every shot.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
I once tried to build a coilgun using mains 3-phase electricity as a linear motor. It fused with a hell of a bang when the insulation melted. And melted the breaker box where the breaker had been replaced by a nail. There was a lot of amps going through that before the wires themselves fused and broke the circuit.
Which is where I learned that generating the energy is the easy part. Containing it all.... that's hard. All that power just wants to get out. I also learned not to look directly at an arc flash... oops.
But, you could probably handwave insulation to be unmeltable. Wouldn't protect you when it gets damaged, mind.
Loss wise, you've got eddy currents generated within the coils and within the barrel itself by the changing magnetic fields. You've got heating of the cabling itself, which can get pretty high since it's proportional the the square of the current. And then the inductance of the coils as they switch on an off rapidly. The impedance from this is going to be extremely high, and be a big limiter on rate of fire.
And again, all that reactive power from the inductor will generate even more heat....
Only then, do you generate the magnetic field to propel your bullet.
Inside the bullet, you're loosing energy to eddy currents in the projectile. Friction can be minimised since there's no need to worry about barrel sealing but it'll still be there.... Oh, and you're heating the bullet.
Of course, that's without superconducting and other weird effects.
Yeah.... handwave that. It's easier. Or build a railgun and only worry about waving the rails so they don't erode after every shot.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?