How Do You Make A Simple Railgun?
Yeah, go for the Gauss gun. The railgun is going to need heavy duty capacitors with at least a few hundred volts potential difference to ramp up quickly enough and something on the order of several thousand microfarads to a farad to provide enough current, and those are expensive and unsafe to have around curious children. The caps I used for my amateur railgun (second sweetest project I have been allowed to attempt for a college course) were lethal when charged, and made me nervous. I managed to get some sweet pulse capacitors on ebay, but eventually had to give up as my railgun project got too expensive. After about two months of work in my scant free time, I achieved a device that would jump metal or graphite projectiles a few centimeters along the rails before they fused to the rails. The projectiles (I think mass around 30g) moved too quickly for me to see them, which was great, but they didn’t move far. I needed some sort of injection system so that the projectiles wouldn’t fuse;
