- PLUT0NIUM 235
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- Honorable Member
1) Magnetic Accelerator Cannons (MAC) are coil-guns, not rail-guns, there is no evidence to suggest they are anything but coil-guns, but that much is irrelevant since they both fire a projectile using magnetism, just two different sorts of effect.
2) the fastest the US Navy have made a projectile go from their rail-gun is around 2,700 metres/second, or just shy of eight times the speed of sound, which is less than 1% the speed of light, or (if the figures are correct) around 13 times slower than the muzzle velocity of a Frigate MAC.
thing about magnetic weapons is, their muzzle velocity is dependant on two real factors, one factor is the length of the barrel (applies to both rail and coil-guns) and the second factor is the amount of current dumped into the electromagnets or rails during firing, increase both of those and muzzle velocity will increase accordingly, therefore a cannon around two hundred metres long (maybe for Frigate?) should easily be able to get a round to 35,000 metres/second in a vacuum like in Halo Universe.
another thing worth noting is that 'artificial gravity' posted above, doesn't really work! the main problem is it would affect everything, not just the occupants of the ship, so for example you park your ship and things start being attracted to it, which cannot be a good thing! black holes, interesting topic, they are super compressed matter, where the 'empty space' that makes up around 99.9% of normal atoms has been squashed away, so your Hydrogen atom (with its atomic mass of 1) takes up 99.9% less space in that sort of form.
when matter is like this you can fit thousands of your Hydrogen atoms into the same space one previously occupied, same sort of principle applies to Neutron stars. apparently all of the people on Earth would fit into a sugar cube, if they were all compressed to that level, so 6+ billion humans compressed into the size of a cube of sugar! black holes are really weird!
back onto the topic, humans are more than capable of exceeding the standards set about by the Halo Universe, the only thing (and I mean only thing!) holding us back is our stupidity, nobody wants to move forward so we are stuck in the here and now, like the US constantly saying 'we will go back to the moon...' and how they haven't yet because of political rubbish, its more than possible to go to the moon, Mars, hell maybe even further but nobody wants to take that leap of faith! now I think that this is a damned shame, we are capable of so so so much yet we rarely give ourselves a worthy challenge. also the simplest way of generating an 'artificial gravity' environment is centrifugal force, spinning and we could do that here and now!