Could Mass Effect Weapons Work in Real Life? (Because Science w/ Kyle Hill) 

God I love those two 😁

I miss them conversations. And Wrex. #krogansarepeopletoo

Garrus: So...anyone want to talk about their people's history? Tali: K'eelah, not even a little bit! Garrus: So, I'm the only one who misses the chats we had in the elevators back on the Citadel? Tali: Yes; because you're terrible. Garrus: *So dissapointed.*

Bro Garrus tryna hit on my girl Tali I TRUSTED YOU, DEXTRO-AMINO BRO. WHY.

Redbeard357 This is 4 kilogram ferrous slug! Feel the weight!

"twenty kilo"

sycua42 Damn. Messed it up.

sometime, somewhere you will mess somebody's day up!

aahhAhhAHhaa u made my day man!!! AHaha

I love that conversation so much.

WE DO NOT EYE - BALL IT

Multiple times in Mass Effect 1 and 2 you can find planets in the Galaxy that have ancient scars from mass Accelerator weaponry.

Extranet*

ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL, WHO DIS?

New Extranet name, who dis?

vicegt: Wow, now where have I heard something similar on youtube?

Im commander shepherd. And this is my favorite comment on the internet.

i've had enough of your disingenuous assertions

Indeed. Just for fun, I actually bothered to run the math for how the player's weapons would perform. If they scale directly from the 800M long dreadnought cannon that gets 1.3%c on the 45lb projectile, when scaled down to a 12 inch rifle barrel, you get just 391 joules, which is considered too weak today for a service caliber handgun.

@@fourcrippledhorses *cold cocks you*

what about the big rail gun in mass effect 2 that you get can Kyle tell us more about that and if the nuclear power it seems to do in damage is following with the real world physics?

great video, your videos are always the ones i looked forward to watching on Thursdays. suggestion, what about the endless stamina of superhero's and players of games, is there some energy drink they drink before battle or something. again great video and i am excited about the next video, whatever that may be. one more thing, what about the regeneration powers of water, food or waiting, as some video games have.

The idea in the codex was that they use a mass effect to decrease the mass of the projectile to almost 0, wouldn't that factor into the recoil?

I would have to disagree to an extent on the aspect of recoil. let's look at a bow and arrow for example, more specifically a compact bow (the bow would represent the rail, the string would be the feild accelerating forward, and the arrow obviously the projectile) now in this example it's the mass of the arrow causing a resistance through the string into the bow that would act as recoil, but the momentum from the string traveling forward helps negate about half of this backward force as does the momentum from the bows tips snapping foward. this makes by comparison; the recoil or opposing force almost negligible compared to the impact force of the projectile. scale the mass and thus resistance of the projectile down to a grain of sand, and increase the e/m fields displacement of momentum, and I feel what you'd achieve is; negligible 'recoil' in comparison to the devastating impact. plus you can reduce its air resistance coming out of the barrel with vent slots, seeing as how it's not pressure but a feild pushing the projectile, pressure lost through the sides of the barrel during operation would not negatively effect it's performance. Because Science?

I have a question for you....5 million amps?!!! How big would the wire have to be!!!

That bothered me too, but then it also creates a violation of the laws of thermodynamics, where the projectile leaves the barrel with almost no kinetic energy , but once it regains mass, it has it again.

I suppose you could say that all of that energy is tied up in whatever reaction Element Zero causes. That way once the projectile is no longer interacting with Element Zero it "regains" the energy that it would have had, or in this case the energy it actually did have, but was being negated by some other reaction. If Element Zero can generate negative mass, it is also generating negative energy, by mass-energy equivalence, which would mean that the energy in the projectile isn't being destroyed, it's just being "negated" by the negative energy/mass field. This is somewhat similar to certain virtual particles having potentially negative energy values, which act to cancel out their positively valued "mate".

Well, remember peeps, NOTHING moves faster than light, and by all technicalities, Nothingness is still something.

Rick Hunter Nothingness is the complete lack of something, so TECHNICALLY it's not. That's a philosophical problem though. We already know that space can expand faster than light.

True, but as I always say, the lack of anything is still something! Just like Vulcans and emotions.

Wooooooow, nice reference there XD

*sarcastic "Noooo..."

misaka ftw

?

dengeki no hime yo or biri biri XD

I fully agree with you

Love your channel

On it. Love the franchise, and it really is filled with awesome hard sci-fi. The BioWare dudes are incredibly smart. -- KH

me too ^_^

Same lol

Surprise Omnitool > Surprise Lightsaber

Tom Morland ITS NOT THE SAME!!!!

CMON IT CANT BE IN EVERYTHING I TRIED TO FIT IT IN THIS TIME JEEZ -- KH

I second this.

That mini nuke gun is described differently in codex than what's shown in game :( In Codex it says it accelerates the ammo to a fraction of the speed of light, making it impact with the force of a "mini nuke" while in game it's quite slow :( Bioware please... Why? The Codex seems to have multiple errors like this IIRC, but I don't remember them from the top of my head, besides that one.

Tbf, the impact is quite fast, its just got a slow charge up time.

Daniel Kelly It's not nearly fast enough. It has a considerable flight time and is quite easy to miss with, especialy in the last boss battle. It's far from what's described in codex. You can even check Wiki, it also takes note of this fact. Let me quote: "Although the game claims that the slug is sped up to 5 km/s, the actual projectile in game moves very slowly compared to other weapons. This can actually make it difficult to hit enemies that move and dodge a lot, such as the final boss." It similarly has the Radioactive sign, despite not leaving radioactive fallout at all. Seems like Bioware simply went "fuck it" and done with the weapon whatever they wanted without proofreading everything and checking it with other devs. I mean it's as if the texturer made whatever he wanted to do, codex writer went "idgaf" and wrote whatever he could and the programmer went with his own idea... So yeah...

Sidewinder Every weapon can miss in the last boss battle. Normally I don't even try to use it against that boss. Its charge time is way too long to stand in one place and use it. Especially in higher difficulties. Tbf, it does seem to move slightly faster in ME3. I don't really have the problem with its speed. But that's just me.

SIR ISSAC NEWTON IS THE DEADLIEST SON OF A BITCH IN SPACE!

+Connor O'Brien Exactly

theres also the heavy weapon from ME3 that dose that using the heat from ejected thermal clips

+Ichiro Mirakuro how needs lasers if you have some good old kinetic energie

No the codex is for the rifles but yeah its talking generally about the underlying idea behind kinetic impactor weapons and that velocity is the variable that controls damage. It specifically also mentions more energy is more recoil so nuke scale handguns is stupid, but that the tiny shavings having modern or better rifle muzzle energies is feasible from a magnetic accelerator. This episode dissapointmented me greatly from some shoddy physic regarding this statement and 'having to go faster than c' and also the shoddy reading of the reference material...

He probably didn't want to get into the awkwardness of talking about a fictional effect that kind of breaks the laws of thermodynamics as we know them :P.. besides really he proved that the base concept of their weapons work its just that the eezo makes it useable in such a small rifle and probably makes the rounds even more devastating.

yea its cool stuff tho, like he daid everything in mass effect seems to be possible and feels right, not the magic bollox like other games.

I think the recoil is maintained even with the element zero, somewhere in the game (Journal) says that the energy received by the target is equal to the energy received by the kickback, that the element zero only facilitates accelerations and speeds not possible by conventional means. I think that part is what makes the mechanics of ME realistic, the balance in equations is maintained.

The omni tool stuff in Mass effect isn't hard light though to my knowledge.

Yeaaaaaaaah hard light stuff is awesome!

Holy shit. You are correct and can take my nerd card. The objects are "flash-forged silicon carbide suspended in a mass effect field" I guess glowing crystal structures suspended in holograms got me jumping to certain conclusions. MY WHOLE LIFE IS A LIE.

Hey, at least there is still hard light tech in Halo. It would be interesting if he talked about that.

Omni tools are actually just holograms that detect if your finger "presses" them. Built-in haptic feedback either on your gloves or in subdermal implants helps operation by letting you "feel" the hologram is there.

Thanks Jon! -- KH

Thank you! -- KH

Daekeyas I thought it was pretty good too.

+Nerdist I love you, I love G4 and I love everybody associated with this channel, sooooo much!!!! but I am sorry to keep it 100 by saying you dropped the ball, BIG time, on this video!

+Nerdist as you know since I trust you did research on this....a handheld railgun I unfortunately cannot be made with the technology that we have now you should have gone into detail about how they need more powerful smaller denser magnets because the only real guns that exist as of today that can do the damage you're talking of are huge cannon that you find in Resident Evil 3

No, you're right, I forgot to consider special relativity here. Sorry for the f*** up. -- KH

***** Nah, it's all cool ^^ As a physicist myself, I do know that mistakes happen xD

No seriously, I appreciate it. I'm only as good as I am accurate, so this helps. -- KH

The Mass Effect guns would actually be failures. The games are very evasive about precise details, so I had to make a number of assumptions. I had to assume size of projectile (no codex or dialogue anywhere actually specifies "grain of sand" (which is also highly varriable) size), barrel lengths (12" rifle, 5" pistol), material of projectile (I assumed iron/steel due to their magnetic properties, cheapness, and abundance). Then I used numbers derived from the only hard figures they give on any gun in the games, the Asari dreadnought railgun that accellerates a 45 pound slug to 1.3%c along an 800M track. It really does hit with nuclear weapon levels of energy. So it works at that scale. However, when you scale down the equations for a much shorter gun as used by the player, the results are very disappointing. I did the assault rifle for the sake of it being the mainstay military weapon, and I estimated a barrel length of about 12 inches. That gives a power of 391 joules.That is about the power of a 9x18 Makarov shot, which is not at all spectacular. And when scaled down for a handgun, you get a pathetic 163 joules from the 5 inch barrel of a service size pistol. That's less than you get from 22LR, which is the weakest caliber widely commercially available. As for muzzle velocity, from the rifle, you get just barely over 5000 feet per second, which is very fast, but it is also not far beyond something we can already do with certain calibers that are commercially available, they just are not ones that are used in military small arms. For comparison, a 9x19 pistol gets 450J 1100FPS, a 5.56x45 carbine gets 1700J 3100FPS, and a 7.62x51 rifle gets 3000J 2600FPS. Our current guns are indisputably better.

you gonna say u aint gonna play Andromeda?

Vasja Majer no i never mentioned Andromeda. If im correct Andromeda will have very little to do with Shepards story.

If i remember correctly Andromeda will have little to no connection to the original team that created the trilogy... so yeah not putting too much hope in it yet.

Flying Spaghetti Monster Bioware has never really let me down. Ever since Kotor, I have loved them. I worship Bioware for the great story they manage to put in games! Only thing i dont like about the big developer companies is how they over simplified things, so that the smallest child can play it. I want a more simulated feel to what im doing.

+Flying Spaghetti Monster The fact that it has no connection to the trilogy is what makes me hopeful. There's a whole new galaxy to explore, full of possibilities without being tied down to the previous stories. Also it makes it easier to pretend the ending to 3 never happened.

Nope. ME 1 is my fav. I loved the little conversations your companions in the elevator. The elevators were painfully slow on the Xbox 360 I had at the time. The pc version was much better (but no game pad support, wtf)

The gunplay was more interesting in the sequels but just about everything else I like more in ME1. It was far more like the kind of rpg I was used to playing than a shooter.

There is a mod for using xbox controller on the PC version of the game, tested and working just fine. You can find it on the Nexus website if you want to give it a go! :D

I've tried it but it isn't as good. it doesn't control the same as ME on a 360, even with a 360 controller on the pc.

I never tried the game on xbox, so i can't compare, sorry it didn't worked fine for you, but keyboard and mouse are maybe the best choice for aiming if, like me, one mostly play games on PC.

You mean like a sentient pizza slice? -- KH

Thank you so much! -- KH

star wars is better its fact

That’s fair.

That’s your opinion and it sucks

Again, can't really compare a fairy-tale like space-fantasy to hardcore science fiction. In most things ME is obviously better than StarWars but you don't compare Grimm's Fairy Tales to... the Godfather. Just... really not the same genre. Both are cool.

Lmao those SW fans. so fucking funny.

The Mass Effect guns would actually be failures. The games are very evasive about precise details, so I had to make a number of assumptions. I had to assume size of projectile (no codex or dialogue anywhere actually specifies "grain of sand" (which is also highly varriable) size), barrel lengths (12" rifle, 5" pistol), material of projectile (I assumed iron/steel due to their magnetic properties, cheapness, and abundance). Then I used numbers derived from the only hard figures they give on any gun in the games, the Asari dreadnought railgun that accellerates a 45 pound slug to 1.3%c along an 800M track. It really does hit with nuclear weapon levels of energy. So it works at that scale. However, when you scale down the equations for a much shorter gun as used by the player, the results are very disappointing. I did the assault rifle for the sake of it being the mainstay military weapon, and I estimated a barrel length of about 12 inches. That gives a power of 391 joules.That is about the power of a 9x18 Makarov shot, which is not at all spectacular. And when scaled down for a handgun, you get a pathetic 163 joules from the 5 inch barrel of a service size pistol. That's less than you get from 22LR, which is the weakest caliber widely commercially available. As for muzzle velocity, from the rifle, you get just barely over 5000 feet per second, which is very fast, but it is also not far beyond something we can already do with certain calibers that are commercially available, they just are not ones that are used in military small arms. For comparison, a 9x19 pistol gets 450J 1100FPS, a 5.56x45 carbine gets 1700J 3100FPS, and a 7.62x51 rifle gets 3000J 2600FPS. Our current guns are indisputably better.

well the elevators are so slow that they will never be a surprise ^_^

Damn do you remember waiting on those elevators in ME1, like in Noveria? Momentum assassins. -- KH

* looks down * Oh, I see I'm not the first person who noticed this. :P

The Mass Effect guns would actually be failures. The games are very evasive about precise details, so I had to make a number of assumptions. I had to assume size of projectile (no codex or dialogue anywhere actually specifies "grain of sand" (which is also highly varriable) size), barrel lengths (12" rifle, 5" pistol), material of projectile (I assumed iron/steel due to their magnetic properties, cheapness, and abundance). Then I used numbers derived from the only hard figures they give on any gun in the games, the Asari dreadnought railgun that accellerates a 45 pound slug to 1.3%c along an 800M track. It really does hit with nuclear weapon levels of energy. So it works at that scale. However, when you scale down the equations for a much shorter gun as used by the player, the results are very disappointing. I did the assault rifle for the sake of it being the mainstay military weapon, and I estimated a barrel length of about 12 inches. That gives a power of 391 joules.That is about the power of a 9x18 Makarov shot, which is not at all spectacular. And when scaled down for a handgun, you get a pathetic 163 joules from the 5 inch barrel of a service size pistol. That's less than you get from 22LR, which is the weakest caliber widely commercially available. As for muzzle velocity, from the rifle, you get just barely over 5000 feet per second, which is very fast, but it is also not far beyond something we can already do with certain calibers that are commercially available, they just are not ones that are used in military small arms. For comparison, a 9x19 pistol gets 450J 1100FPS, a 5.56x45 carbine gets 1700J 3100FPS, and a 7.62x51 rifle gets 3000J 2600FPS. Our current guns are indisputably better.

The Flash can outrun teleportation across the galaxy. I think it's safe to say yes.

can the flash move in space though? he has to actually run and theres no surface for him in space

he could launch himself off a ramp as fast as possible and shoot into space it rediculous speeds

of course he can ... because plot armor!

He can and has, all he needs is somewhere to leap from, and will keep his speed by jumping from space debris to space debris. There is a certain Transformer that can do the same. Interesting theory: Blur (the Blue Transformer from Gen 1 and Animated with superspeed) taps into the speed force.

The Mass Effect guns would actually be failures. The games are very evasive about precise details, so I had to make a number of assumptions. I had to assume size of projectile (no codex or dialogue anywhere actually specifies "grain of sand" (which is also highly varriable) size), barrel lengths (12" rifle, 5" pistol), material of projectile (I assumed iron/steel due to their magnetic properties, cheapness, and abundance). Then I used numbers derived from the only hard figures they give on any gun in the games, the Asari dreadnought railgun that accellerates a 45 pound slug to 1.3%c along an 800M track. It really does hit with nuclear weapon levels of energy. So it works at that scale. However, when you scale down the equations for a much shorter gun as used by the player, the results are very disappointing. I did the assault rifle for the sake of it being the mainstay military weapon, and I estimated a barrel length of about 12 inches. That gives a power of 391 joules.That is about the power of a 9x18 Makarov shot, which is not at all spectacular. And when scaled down for a handgun, you get a pathetic 163 joules from the 5 inch barrel of a service size pistol. That's less than you get from 22LR, which is the weakest caliber widely commercially available. As for muzzle velocity, from the rifle, you get just barely over 5000 feet per second, which is very fast, but it is also not far beyond something we can already do with certain calibers that are commercially available, they just are not ones that are used in military small arms. For comparison, a 9x19 pistol gets 450J 1100FPS, a 5.56x45 carbine gets 1700J 3100FPS, and a 7.62x51 rifle gets 3000J 2600FPS. Our current guns are indisputably better.

Thank you for stating the obvious.

Joe Gush Don't be rude

he looks like one of my teachers I had last year, cool guy.

no shit sherlock!Jk we all know it and love it!

Yeah, if Thor skipped leg day. and arm day. and chest day...

The recoil can be solved by few things like muzzle break which helps a bit, but not completely, but if you'd scale it down enough to have manageble recoil, the effective range would be complete garbage(if the bullet is the size of grain of sand, and it has such great speed, it would have to be extremely light for soldier to handle the recoil, and that would make firearm completely useless on at least medium to long range combat).

The Mass Effect guns would actually be failures. The games are very evasive about precise details, so I had to make a number of assumptions. I had to assume size of projectile (no codex or dialogue anywhere actually specifies "grain of sand" (which is also highly varriable) size), barrel lengths (12" rifle, 5" pistol), material of projectile (I assumed iron/steel due to their magnetic properties, cheapness, and abundance). Then I used numbers derived from the only hard figures they give on any gun in the games, the Asari dreadnought railgun that accellerates a 45 pound slug to 1.3%c along an 800M track. It really does hit with nuclear weapon levels of energy. So it works at that scale. However, when you scale down the equations for a much shorter gun as used by the player, the results are very disappointing. I did the assault rifle for the sake of it being the mainstay military weapon, and I estimated a barrel length of about 12 inches. That gives a power of 391 joules.That is about the power of a 9x18 Makarov shot, which is not at all spectacular. And when scaled down for a handgun, you get a pathetic 163 joules from the 5 inch barrel of a service size pistol. That's less than you get from 22LR, which is the weakest caliber widely commercially available. As for muzzle velocity, from the rifle, you get just barely over 5000 feet per second, which is very fast, but it is also not far beyond something we can already do with certain calibers that are commercially available, they just are not ones that are used in military small arms. For comparison, a 9x19 pistol gets 450J 1100FPS, a 5.56x45 carbine gets 1700J 3100FPS, and a 7.62x51 rifle gets 3000J 2600FPS. Our current guns are indisputably better.

Just wrote it down. I'll get to it sooner or later! -- KH

I love you. -- KH

I love you too. Hopefully things aren't getting too hard for you with writing the show and all your other work. If it does please don't give up, and just overall do what you love doing.

As far as I know, it would be relatively recoiless. Austin did a video on laser guns, and he mentioned this.

they came into the game with ME2. I'm assuming he was covering ME1 weaponry.

DefactoOverlord where heat sinks are used to cool the weapon.

Not enough time. But the cool thing is that thermal clips make total sense! Railguns produce a monstrous amount of heat, so many designs have liquid nitrogen cooling and the like. If a thermal clip design could provide the same kind of thermal dissipation they would work just fine! -- KH

***** Sounds pretty cool. Thanks for the response by the way, love your vids.

At least someone got it! -- KH

Sure, but the physics is the mass regardless of the mass. -- KH

***** yeah but it negates the energy requirements and is essentially very different technology from a railgun Kyle.

he's right you know. each grain of sand could way nothing. they wouldn't be nuke level, but you wouldn't need a butt tone of energy

Alex is right here. While the weapons operate in principle like a railgun, the element zero core creates a field where mass is increased or decreased depending on the voltage applied and the size of the field. As I recall, according to the codex, the bullets aren't uniform in size either. There's actually a computer in the gun that checks the range, and it shaves off an appropriate mass from the clip to be sure the projectile can deliver enough energy to the target (This is how it would be possible to deliver nuclear weapon equivalent force, a larger normal-mass projectile would be chosen to deliver that amount of energy to the target). The computer then charges the element zero core to reduce the projectile's mass to around that of a grain of sand (or possibly less) Once the projectile exits the barrel, it leaves the mass effect field, and regains it's original mass, but it maintains its velocity. (Which essentially creates energy by the standards of conventional closed-system physics)

How does the weapon's computer check the range to target? If you're firing on a moving target, you have to aim in front of it, so for example a laser range finder wouldn't work. At least it wouldn't in any way that would be practical in combat. You would somehow have to pre-designate a target to be able to aim in front of the target and the computer to still know what you want to hit.

Paragon not high enough. -- KH

The Mass Effect guns would actually be failures. The games are very evasive about precise details, so I had to make a number of assumptions. I had to assume size of projectile (no codex or dialogue anywhere actually specifies "grain of sand" (which is also highly varriable) size), barrel lengths (12" rifle, 5" pistol), material of projectile (I assumed iron/steel due to their magnetic properties, cheapness, and abundance). Then I used numbers derived from the only hard figures they give on any gun in the games, the Asari dreadnought railgun that accellerates a 45 pound slug to 1.3%c along an 800M track. It really does hit with nuclear weapon levels of energy. So it works at that scale. However, when you scale down the equations for a much shorter gun as used by the player, the results are very disappointing. I did the assault rifle for the sake of it being the mainstay military weapon, and I estimated a barrel length of about 12 inches. That gives a power of 391 joules.That is about the power of a 9x18 Makarov shot, which is not at all spectacular. And when scaled down for a handgun, you get a pathetic 163 joules from the 5 inch barrel of a service size pistol. That's less than you get from 22LR, which is the weakest caliber widely commercially available. For comparison, a 9x19 pistol gets 450J, a 5.56x45 carbine gets 1700J, and a 7.62x51 rifle gets 3000J. Our current guns are indisputably better.

@@Mortablunt The problem with that logic is the simple fact that the system you'd use for a ship mounted gun and the one handheld weaponry diverge farther and farther as technology increases. In this particular instance, you KNOW you wouldn't want nuke levels of destruction in the palm of people's hands, military or not. So the chances that the handheld guns are built in the same fashion as a ship's main gun are effectively nil. Moreover, as some of the in game NPC dialogue indicates, ship weaponry is INTENTIONALLY weaker than it could be, in case you miss. After all, there's nothing slowing a missed shot down in space, and you could easily end up hitting an inhabited world. So the railgun specs you're calling from may not even be the theoretical maximum for a gun of that size. Add to that, of course, the nature of military secrecy, and you then realize that, of course, no military would want their enemies to know EXACTLY what their weapons are capable of if they could help it, lest their enemies develop shielding that they know cannot be stopped by said weaponry.... The math might be good, but the thoughts behind aren't.

@@nssheepster The equations work exactly the same way regardless of scale. The main factor dictating how powerful a railgun's power is its track length. For fun, I decided to torture the equations. Even if you are extremely generous to what the accelerators could do, and even up projectile weights far beyond what the lore suggests, you have to get some impossible performance to get halfway respectable performance, or at least something that offers a worthwhile improvement over chemical propellants. There's no reason to think the weapons are kept intentionally weaker than their designs permit, that would be extremely stupid, as any force to do that would be roflstomped by all the forces that didn't. They could probably build much more powerful weapons, or modify existing ones to be more powerful, but that runs into limiting factors of arms design beyond technologicaly capability. On ships, it's power supply, cost, and ammunition capacity -- it's absolutely stupid to make a ship cannon that can throw around gigaton yield blasts but only comes with like 3 rounds total and has to bleed the ship dry and fry the wiring to fire. For infantry weapons, size, weight, recoil, and cost are the big concerns. There is a reason no military issues a powerful handgun, even though handguns capable of taking big game have been around for centuries, and nobody issues a 50 cal rifle standard, even though it would give unbeatable range and power advantages. All arms design is specialization and compromise. The Mass Effect gun designers chose to optimize for rapidity and control, which are good choices to make in general. You can't make a handheld nuke rifle, it's physically impossible. There is every chance I am wrong about railguns. However, without some fundamental revisions to what we know about physics, they aren't going to work handheld. The ship mount ones would work, but not the infantry weapons. Not even mass effect technology would change it; the barrier isn't making things light enough, the barrier is applying enough power to get a worthy performance. Science fiction writers inadvertently make writing decisions like this all the time that don't stand up to detailed scrutiny, even if they do look good and are relatively plausible. Truly hard scifi is extremely boring. And even more issues emerge with ME guns when you think about them from a user standpoint. For one, the extremely light projectiles would have horrible ballistic coefficients and just bleed energy like crazy, assuming that they don't disitegrate the second they start flying; range would be a horrible issue. This is an issue with some small caliber magnum rounds in real life; they get very high speeds, but then they just bleed velocity extremely quickly because they're so light. I'll just leave you with this: The efficiency of railgun models is 1% from battery power to what goes flying. Gunpowder has a 55% efficiency. Unless something can fundamentally rewrite reality, that isn't going to change.

@@Mortablunt "Unless something can fundamentally rewrite reality, that isn't going to change." You mean... Like a nonexistent thing called the Mass Effect? Something that would never actually be possible in reality? The Mass Effect is a macguffin that violates the laws of physics as the writers please. It's consistent to itself and the story, but not to reality. Relying solely on physics that exist in reality simply doesn't make any sense when you know from the start that you're going to be ignoring real physics. At some point, common sense has to come in. As for 'They'd never make it weaker'.... By that logic, because we have nukes, we should never use any lesser bomb. Doesn't matter that using a nuke would be massive overkill, and possibly cause the loss of innocent lives... Just do it anyways, NOBODY would EVER have a reason to use less power than they could bring to bear. That's just not how real military forces work. They use what is needed, and what they're allowed to by their government. We didn't stop using things like chemical weapons because they stopped being effective, we stopped using them because the governments of the world said to, because of the collatteral damage. That's how it goes, in the military. Well, that, AND you need to consider cost. Given that Element Zero is treated as a fairly rare and expensive material, that could also be part of why the dreadnought wouldn't be using the maximum power possible for such a gun. Of course, since handguns are much smaller, and thus would need far less of the stuff... Could easily be that it can be more efficient without being prohibitively expensive.

I'll allow it. -- KH

No way :D

Cool. -- KH

A gauss gun or gauss rifle is just a different name for a rifle sized railgun

CanoFudge Oh right thanks. Then I guess we have those already

no it is not they are actually distinct from rail-guns

skarjj1 How so?

In the way they generate the forward propelling force, somewhat. In a general sense they both accelerate a projectile by creating a moving magnetic field, which is generated by electromagnets.

It means a lot to me that you think that Brandon, thank you. -- KH

he's only the host of the competition show to find the new mythbuster

I find your ideas interesting and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. :)

#shepardrule63incarnate

placating the masses, never turns out well.

i see your #FemShepiscanonShep and raise you #LiaraxFemShepOTP

i raise you a #femshepisunrealisticshep

The Mass Effect guns would actually be failures. The games are very evasive about precise details, so I had to make a number of assumptions. I had to assume size of projectile (no codex or dialogue anywhere actually specifies "grain of sand" (which is also highly varriable) size), barrel lengths (12" rifle, 5" pistol), material of projectile (I assumed iron/steel due to their magnetic properties, cheapness, and abundance). Then I used numbers derived from the only hard figures they give on any gun in the games, the Asari dreadnought railgun that accellerates a 45 pound slug to 1.3%c along an 800M track. It really does hit with nuclear weapon levels of energy. So it works at that scale. However, when you scale down the equations for a much shorter gun as used by the player, the results are very disappointing. I did the assault rifle for the sake of it being the mainstay military weapon, and I estimated a barrel length of about 12 inches. That gives a power of 391 joules.That is about the power of a 9x18 Makarov shot, which is not at all spectacular. And when scaled down for a handgun, you get a pathetic 163 joules from the 5 inch barrel of a service size pistol. That's less than you get from 22LR, which is the weakest caliber widely commercially available. As for muzzle velocity, from the rifle, you get just barely over 5000 feet per second, which is very fast, but it is also not far beyond something we can already do with certain calibers that are commercially available, they just are not ones that are used in military small arms. For comparison, a 9x19 pistol gets 450J 1100FPS, a 5.56x45 carbine gets 1700J 3100FPS, and a 7.62x51 rifle gets 3000J 2600FPS. Our current guns are indisputably better.