Gauss Pistol Redeux


Remember this? We hit it last year. [William] has been working hard, and made plenty of improvements. Aside from building it in black, he’s built a new model. He’s even hoping to release it as a kit in 2007. The latest version uses a PIC to fire the coils and manages the batteries, uses a pair of IR sensors to time the projectile, laser sighting and improved charging. It’s still only slightly more powerful than a CO2 BB gun, but one hell of an engineering challenge. Theoretically, these could be more powerful than traditional firearms, but power limitations keep them repressed like mid-evil peasants.

21 thoughts on “Gauss Pistol Redeux

  1. Very cool :) I wonder how it scales? The space constraints in the handgun form mean there can’t be that many capacitors, but with a rifle-sized enclosure and a small NiMH or lead-acid (maybe a motorbike battery) you could probably store 10x the energy.. but does that translate to 10x the projectile energy? Now we just need handgun-sized IR lasers…

    Ditto daniel’s post, it’s mediaeval (or medieval, depending on whose dictionary you read)

  2. Daniel V Klein – You pointed out he mis-pelt “mid-evil”, but your correction “mediaeval” is just as incorrect :-).

    It’s “medieval”.

    Although technically the archiac spelling once used was “mediæval”

Leave a Reply to PocketBrainCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.