Yeah. Definitely some kind of energy weapon. Notice the batteries and cooling flanges on the turret? I thought they weren't allowed to use anything constructed after 1945. But maybe it's secret nazi technology?
FWP said: Dunno about Tesla Cannons, but the germans did develop a railgun intended for replacing 12.8cm Flak guns.
Uh... a railgun or a rail gun? The former is a gun that uses electromagnetic "rails" instead of chemical explosives to fire a project, a technology which has only entered prototyping in this decadey and simply would be outside the capability of 30's and early-40's technology.
The latter is just an artillery gun mounted on a railway train car.
psnuker said: Uh... a railgun or a rail gun? The former is a gun that uses electromagnetic "rails" instead of chemical explosives to fire a project, a technology which has only entered prototyping in this decadey and simply would be outside the capability of 30's and early-40's technology.
The latter is just an artillery gun mounted on a railway train car.
I mean the "paralel rails with electricity running over them".
FWP said: I mean the "paralel rails with electricity running over them".
So the former...
Let me get this straight: Germans in the 1930s and 40s, whose knowledge of physics and materials science was inferior too today's, were able to make a working model of a gun which today we have only just made too the prototype stage a few years ago and is still estimated as decades away from mass deployment?
That strikes me as pretty unlikely, where did you hear this?
That strikes me as pretty unlikely, where did you hear this?
Probably from the "railgun" article on Wikipedia - no idea if it's correct or not, since it cites a book source. I find it perfectly reasonable that the Germans developed a prototype railgun - relatively speaking, of course. The theory was already developed in 1918, and fundamentally, all that's needed to build one are big capacitors. In fact, there are how-to guides on building a railgun on the internet, and you can do it at home for a few bucks.
The real problem is scaling it up to weapon-level: most of those home railguns shoot little pellets of aluminum foil. I think it's a reasonable guess to say the Germans launched a bullet-sized projectile at decent speed, showed it to some Wehrmacht officials who didn't really understand the problem of scaling it, were then told to make a FlaK gun, and managed to make some drawings before the war ended. Said drawings, like the P. 1000, Amerikabomber, or pick-your-German fantasy, have since captured the imaginations of people who love to think that a military which was still flying interwar biplanes in 1945 was a century ahead of its time.
Really one thing boggles me is that people can't accept the fact that people back in history were a lot smarter than we like to believe.
Only reason a lot of people believe this is by the technology. Well really if ancient man or even few decades back Great Thinkers had the computers and technology plus the current knowledge of science. We take for granted. We most likely be exploring the Stars and very likely prove there is more than just Humans out there in this big Galaxy and such.
So the idea of German Sciencist crating a "Railgun" is not too far to believe. I mean there are a lot of strange weapons the Germans created that are in fact real. Very much real and few rather crazy and fewer still that were effective.
Though even if they did create a small working model. I can see it not being pratical as the amount of power one Railgun needs to be even enough to shoot something like a small caliber bullet would be the size of two city blocks for the powergrids at the time. Also the size won't be compact enough to make it pratical and tactically effective to move around in a battlefield sense.
The power thing was the issue, if I remember right. The principles of a railgun are pretty simple, and I think had been around for some time before the war. It's just that when the Allied designers got the plans and looked at them, they realized (probably like the Germans had before them) that yeah, it was mechanically sound and all that, and it would work just fine, but each individual gun had the same power requirements as a decent-sized city.
