The Engineering of the Helldivers 2 Railgun
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 ธ.ค. 2024
- The Railgun has been a favorite in both Helldivers 1 and 2. I decided to break down the history of the railgun as well as look at the math behind the railgun to see if it would be possible to make one using modern technology.
#gaming #helldivers2 #lore
Technically there are already railguns that are handheld, though operate at a fraction of the lethality, Demolition Ranch tested one, they are neat, they can hurt, but they aren't where youd want them to be yet, so the answer is technically yes, and definitely a plausibility in the future.
I dont want to sound like the Acktually meme, but i think those are just coilguns, feel free to correct me tho i did not research about handheld railguns, i know about the navy one tho, still bonkers :)
@@yeetyiu4505 You're entirely correct, nor sure how I completely forgot about coilguns, examples of which exist to some extent, lol. Coilgun projectiles are suspended via magnetic field, rail guns aren't.
What Cody tested isn't necessarily a railgun but more towards a gauss rifle. Still magnetic propulsion but different implementation - think more how a mag-lev train operates, just...well..faster.
In all honesty, I think the coil gun approach is a bit better, especially since you can do away with the heat buildup from the friction with the armatures(rails).
@@yeetyiu4505you are correct. They were coilguns. Definitely not the same thing at all.
@@drakko26 The downside of a coilgun is that they're inherently less energy efficient so even though you don't have any friction it's still harder to get your projectiles up to a decent velocity. Not to mention the projectiles need to be made of a feromagnetic material and have high mass to more effectively react to the magnetic fields which once again makes it harder to get them up to speed. Railguns on the other hand only need the material of the projectile to be conductive and work better with lighter projectiles.
I’m building one for school. The key to the power issue is that the railgun needs only power for a split second to launch the projectile, so you can use a capacitor to store energy from a much smaller battery and release it in an instant.
Seems like you beat me to it.
My guess is that the round white thing is a capacitor, it's fairly big for one too!
And the actual batterie is in the thing you load into the railgun, since it's fairly big and you toss it when it's empty/almost empty.
That explains the charging too, you load the capasitor by charging the railgun up.
@@danielgudi7446The energy needed for one shot can be stored in a smart phone battery. Pretty small for a high tech weapon imho. I love doing these "what if" questions.
@@danielgudi7446 I mean the laser guns seem to have practically infinite energy so long as they don't overheat so i'm assuming the railgun uses the same kind of battery.
The rail gun nerfed itself because it didn’t want to be anywhere near general Braschs power
As a quantum physicist i Still find it funny that engineers just go "eh it's close enough, ill get the right result 90% of the time."
“Since in fact handheld railguns do not exist in real life” well well well, who is gonna tell him?
All of us.
It should be all of us...
...With Arcflash Labs advertisements so he can buy one of his own and leave it irresponsibly in the woods around his house.
You forgot about Capacitors. Capacitors have high power output. The whole process of charging your railgun is a process of low power output source charging capacitor, then when you shoot - capacitor releases it rapidly. So, if railgun charges for 3 seconds, 67 kW capacitor would need 67/3 kW battery source (ideally). Then there is battery size. Average car battery has capacity of 40 kWh. It means, that if it would output 40 kW, it would last 1 hour. We only need 3 seconds of charge, which will considerably decrease battery size. Then pair three of those little batteries into one disposable pack that goes with projectile and you get some working prototype. But all of this are really rough approximation.
16:15 maybe they are generating the power in a small reactor? Or the ammo box is also a big battery
Feel please to double check my math in my comment, but the energy required to propel one slug once, can be stored within a battery that's in your smart phone or smaller.
Nate's incorrect, we do have railguns IRL, just not is mass production.
On the ArcFlash Labs' GR-1, the battery was bulky but not as heavy as a car battery.
hold up, the rail slug does a treyflip? seick
6:24 Ministry of Truth here: The Railgun/Coilgun/Mag-Kinetic gun does exist.
Consider the *ArcFlash labs GR-1 and EMG-02* magnetically accelerated weapons.
There are videos on these prototypes on the Forgotten Weapons channel, and it also saw some use on Demolition Ranch, I believe.
Y’know it’s quite cool how all of the planets have a perfectly breathable atmosphere
There is alot of future tech bs so i think every suit has a tiny oxygenator
Terraforming
@@collinkaufman2316 That doesn't explain the colonists though
All of the planets were once under S E control, hence the normal people, so S E. might have terraformed the planets to be breathable
@@Bertobot12 i forgot about that maybe implants i guess or the athmosphere is just breathable
It is probably nuclear powered. Note that this railgun explodes in overcharged unsafe mode, which doesn't make sense for an electrical explosion.
So, first, i think pick copper, as material for projecile is not very smart, bcs its very soft and most likely will doubt, rather then peretrate smth.
And, second, i think battery in railgun is not that thing on the back, its thing that we load into railgun. Its makes sense, since its singleshot, this container or bullet, that we load, contains projectile and power to launch it
Perhaps a copper jacket, or rings, over a much better material for launching, like depleted uranium, tungsten, or something the like.
The cartridge containing the slug definitely does something in relation to firing the projectile. It reminds me of Halo 4-5's Railgun. It's projectiles are housed in cartridges that connect to the gun's power source or energy system meaning they're a required component in firing slugs down range.
My two issues with the HD2 railgun are the lack of a magnified optic and the fact that the model is kind of ugly.
Thank you for making a fun science video on video game! I have something to contribute to this topic. I love science, since you have decided that projectile with the mass of 1 ounce,(~28 grams) and the muzzle velocity about 3 times of a 12 slug. With the screenshot you provided @6:36, we can easily compute the railgun projectile will have a muzzle energy of 3,204J x 3^2. Let's call that 29kJ to make it easy. 2ft barrel is around 60cm, or 0.6m, assume linear acceleration, with the Newton's kinematic equation, we can find the projectile takes 0.0008 seconds to accelerate in the barrel. Equipped with muzzle energy, and time spend in the barrel, we can find the wattage require to be about 3.6MW. Differ from your estimation by about 2 orders of magnitude.
Another disagreement I have, is deriving battery needed from wattage. Battery isn't particularly good that quick discharge, as you have shown. For fast and short discharge, the energy would come from a capacitor, like a pop up flash light on a DSLR camera, or IRL railgun, or in the fancy world of Helldivers 2, I imagine supercapacitor would be widely available, instead of our current lab use only. They should be able to provide the energy needed(~8Wh) for a shot with somewhere 3 to
I thought a tiny bit more on this for comparison. The most powerful electric car right now is a Lotus Evija @1500kW, our railgun is only at just over double the wattage. While the Evija pushes its power from a battery pack for sustain power. We only need the 3.6MW, or 3,600kW for 0.0008 seconds; super capacitors should be able to provide the energy and wattage.
Attach the gun to a battery pack, and use a super conductor as a sabot. You can't use rifling so just use a hexagonal barrel like those old confederate snipers. Or use magnetic levitation so the round doesn't have to touch the barrel at all. Theoretically there's a lot you can do with railguns.
Heck, given the proper alignment of the magnets, they could impart spine to the projectile too, and with the magnetic field holding it in place, it should be fairly stable. There are issues that would need to be worked out through testing, but that's one of the best parts, lol
@@headazrd imparting spin to a projectile reduces its overall muzzle energy, that'd be the worse way of stabilizing it. Best way would be fin stabilization so you can get the most bang for your buck.
The feasibility of using a superconductor is dubious at best. Given the energy requirements to make a superconductor a super conductor (it needs to be supercooled/cryogenically cooled), why would you waste it by chucking it at something. Not to mention that superconductors tend to repel magnetic fields. Might work in a coilgun(think one short burst of extreme magnetic field repelling the slug out the barrel), not sure it'll work on railguns.
@@drakko26 Bullet trains do it on a miles long scale. Surely making a maglev gun would be easier You don't need the entire projectile to be a superconductor.
You be surprised but theres already commercial available railguns on the market.
They aint the helldivers one but still we have them in our current time.
Handheld railguns kinda do exist, just the people who make em don’t want to give em enough power to be deadly.
I think Hacksmith made one, there was another British person who made one, and I saw one on Forgotten weapons that’s still a prototype.
The one on Forgotten Weapons was a coilgun rather than a railgun though. Completely different method of operation and far less energy efficient.
Considering even some suits have fusion reactors, it probably uses one.
3:23
Or a gun that hit enemies so hard it turns them into a frag grenade.
Imagine hitting a bug so hard that the shards of its carapace embedded themselves in the beating hearts of its treasonous brethren.
Isn’t science fun?
I think so! lol 😅
Great video, I can’t wait to see what other videos you’ve made.
One major relatively easy-to-account-for thing you ignored at 13:25 was the velocity difference.
Even if we assume the general efficiency of railguns are more or less constant, velocity is a *_massive_* factor here.
Kinetic energy is (1/2) mass times velocity *_squared._* If there is a more or less constant ratio between input electrical energy and output kinetic energy, the velocity difference will be magnitudes larger a factor than mass. In other words a difference of 4000 feet per second would result in a kinetic energy change of 4000 times 4000, or a 16000000 change in kinetic energy.
With all that said, what's far more likely is each cartridge has a builtin super capacitor, like how modern brass cartridges have builtin propellant to fire the bullet. (Or would it be a super super capacitor?) Batteries just cant handle the current draw of a railgun, I mean you are literally just shorting the terminals with a metal slug so hard it fucks off at mach 5.
(PS, my money is on those weird armature things being spring-loaded to adjust to either A : variances in the projectile, or B : different projectiles, or C : getting excellent contact. So less of a "rail" gun and more of a "couple dozen micro-rail" gun. This has the added benefit that the wear component of the "rails" would be easily repairable.)
Oh nooo.... On your calculation of the kinetics energy with 4000 extra fps, you committed the cardinal sin of a^2 + b^2 = (ab)^2. Cheers!
@@nixonwphoto what?
1 : Mate I literally used fucking feet per second in an energy calculation; the point was to demonstrate exponentials are big, i.e. leaving out the velocity was a massively influential component that none the less would be trivial to solve for. If you saw feet per second squared and thought any attempt at exact energy calculations was happening I want your dealer's number because god damn that shit must slap.
2 : even that correction would still be completely inapplicable even if I were making a serious energy calculation since there is only one variable in use, velocity. I literally never included mass once, precisely *_because,_* as much as I'll fight that imperial units are better for casual use, they're utter piss for any actual math. (And frankly I don't care enough to do the conversions) I literally never had a B or C, all I did was square 4000 and show how big the number gets. You might be able to say I said "16000000 change in kinetic energy" which implies an additive change rather than multiplicative, but again, we're now working in feet per second squared; is that really the issue here?
This is the most direct mathematical equivalent of saying the Monster's name wasn't Frankenstein I think I've ever seen.
@@felixjohnson3874Yesss! SI unit ftw. You actually don't have to do much conversion, since Nate's Game Box already he wants the projectile to be an one ounce slug, with 3x muzzle velocity from a normal shotgun, and @6:36, he provided the muzzle energy for a regular slug. We can just 9x that.
@@nixonwphoto I'm aware its simple to do but thats not relevant to the point I was making. The velocity is squared in the kinetic energy equation so a halving of the velocity cuts the velocity component of the kinetic energy to a quarter.
100*100=10000
50*50=2500
This also directly cuts the total kinetic energy to a quarter since mass is constant.
The large scale military railguns he's comparing against are going at absurd speeds that are unlikely to be representative of the handheld railgun ingame. The calculations are being based on a standard slug, going at mach fuck.
An IRL handheld weapon like this would either
A : use reactive projectiles, so a projectile designed to explode immediately AFTER hitting/penetrating a hard surface
B : A heavy slow moving slug, potentially even subsonic for stealth operations
C : a tiiiiiiiny but absurdly high velocity projectile designed to be used to strategically hit vital organs. Alternatively; an unfolding skeletonized projectile that is still incredibly light but, like option A, expands on-contact via either compliant expansion, fragmentation, etc. to do a similar job as A without the rails themselves needing to be reactive. (This would likely be cost prohibitive for us today, but metal SLS 3D printing is already getting pretty bloody cheap)
What might be interesting is to give the railgun in game 3 ammo pools of 3 cartridge types, (selectable in the weapon menu) so one "Administered EMS Nanites" cartridge to stun single units, one "HPHE - High Penetration High Explosive" and "Subsonic Slugs", only having 1-3 of the first two and 10 or so of the last one. The first two are fairly self explanatory, they'd penetrate heavy armor and either stun problematic units or blow their inner bits to paste via a tiny hole in their face. Then the last one would be a fall back that'd have it's damage be highly charge dependent but make no noise and only pierce upto medium armor. (Maaaaybe also keeping the weird piercing the railgun has to punch through automaton shields and such, but not sure on that) Then its a jack of all trades weapon that can save your ass in a variety of pinches, but only has a handful of rounds to do it. (With the slugs primarily being a fall back so it's not entirely useless if you run out.) This means that, if we count the EMS and HPHEs as a single one shot kill, (a stunned charger *_should_* be as good as dead) it could kill a total of 6 chargers, much like something like the recoilless, but it has the initial charge up penalty of the Quasar. The benefit of course is that unlike the Recoilless you keep the backpack slot and have a bit more situational utility. So it has comparable ammo to the Recoilless (again, the slugs would be more of a fall back than a weapon definer for most people) with a faster follow up time, but it has the delayed firing of the Quasar with the benefit if not needing the backpack for the recoilless. That'd also fit a bit more with those weird grabby armature things it has; the rail contacts are literally designed to accommodate different projectiles going through the same barrel.
ahhh, you can dig another grave for the eruptor now 😭
Cool, time to show my pterodactyl wife what I learned. Thanks internet
What about a capacitor inside the mag the we change, i don know if a 67kw capacitor is even possible but the idea wold be that you discard the casing plus the expended capacitor and load the new one with the new slug, in game the part that act as a mag lights up suggesting this idea (idk im not an engineer or anything)
Can't you drop a marker 100m away from your position in-game, then shoot the point and work the projectile velocity out from there?
Did you even look up if there is a better battery than a car battery currently used? I would think nasa or some other government agency would have made something better than a car batty by now
no
Can i get pinned pls
no