The super high power wedge shaped power transfer switch reminded me of my dad (high energy PhD) explaining how the super-colliders were experimenting with laser switched solid state relays capable of transferring enormous amounts of current with very little transition resistance. Unfortunately my father passed away so I can't get details from him. Maybe someone knows more about that technology. Or it never saw the light of day.
The site is obviously a labor of love by a dedicated & clever experimenter. However it is frustrating for the casual visitor because (as far as I could see in 10 minutes browsing) there's no way to tell if any of these coilguns are ever fired. No videos, no photos of projectiles smushed into powder or annihilated targets.
I wonder if this could be fixed with better projectile design. A lot of modern tanks have smoothbore barrels because they use rounds with sabots; once the sabot comes apart the actual projectile is self stabilizing.
I guess the other obvious flaw is that getting a coil gun to produce usable velocity takes a hell of a lot of power.
The average hobby coilgun is unlikely to annihilate targets. The ones we had lying around the physics department at my university could pretty much just fling a metal ring ten feet in the air, and could only fire once per minute to avoid overheating.
