But again, there is also zero actual danger in the way it was handled.
Leaving rifles “cold” on the bench during a cease fire is a common practice at both formal and informal ranges.
In this case it was just Ian at a range by himself, it looked like. But if you have an actual firing line, then you may have several people going to go check their targets. Which means if you have it angled 10 degrees, now it may be point at someone else checking their target.
Which is why in a formal range the range is called cold, you make safe, add a chamber flag, and the range officer calls the line safe before anyone goes down range to check targets. And while down there, no one is allowed to touch anything on the bench.
I wondered about a lot of things that seemed to be very simplistic and inefficient. It’s not clear to me that they magnetize the slug at all. I’d magnetize the hell out of it to make it get a lot more kick from the coils. Maybe even use a rare-earth magnet embedded in it.
They mention in their manual that the efficiency is below 3% on their design. It would be fun to make one that’s 20% efficient and achieves a handgun-comparable muzzle velocity at the expense of slug mass.
Oh, damn, this could be rolling about in my head for days. The only cure is to design something, then deduce it can’t work. I suspect you may be in the same boat.
The plan I had was to add a gauss accelerator to a conventional rifled handgun . This would need special magnetic bullets, so it is not as easy as it first appeared. Bang goes my usual favourite approach of trying to find more than half the bits in some pre-made object. Or not-Bang in this case.
Someone who had worked on them described a railgun to me as ‘something that throws its breech ten feet into the ground when anyone over the rank of Major is watching’. It seems high efficiencies need precise fits, and these can lead to jamming, and all the other excitements. The conventional solution with a soft bullet in a harder barrel is a good one. Which leads to…
How about a light-gas gun? We can have our rare-earth armature fly down a barrel, and compress hydrogen, which in turn fires a conventional bullet at higher speeds. I learned about these when wondering whether you could fire a gun from Mars to return samples to Earth (answer: just about, but a rocket is better).
This probably loses out to a neater idea, where you would dump the electrical energy into the propelling gas (or whatever - low-Z is probably best, and it will be gas soon enough). Wikipedia seem to be a bit down on this because of the weight, but that’s what ArcFlash Labs seem good at.
There we go. A practical solution that I feel no compulsion to build because it is already known about, and other people can do the sparky stuff. I feel better already.
