Basically, my idea is to make a 'gun' of sorts that uses electromagnetism rather than gunpowder.

The barrel would consist of electromagnets all the way down and it would fire iron balls. When the trigger is pressed each of the electromagnets are turned on and off at perfect timing to propel the ball at high speed. I got the idea from some documentary on rollercoasters because they used electromagnets in the track to accelerate the rollercoasters to very high speeds along a very small piece of track.

There are 2 things i am unsure about:
1) How i would get the timing right for th electromagnets, if the weapon was fired at different angles.
2) How strong the electromagnets would have to be/ how much energy needed.

one word: railguns.

Is it not possible to build a scaled-down railgun?

'Cause at the moment all railguns are experimental and require loods of energy.

Coilgun.

Thanks, i might try to build one of those low-cost ones they give examples of in the wiki article.

One thing that stumps me is how to get each of the coils to turn off as the 'bullet' passes them. Perhaps, one could use a motion sensor but that's a bit too complicated in my opinion.

Any ideas?

P.S Using delay and timing it wouldn't work as it would change for each angle the 'gun' was held at.

Study electromagnetics, right hand rules, etc.

No, there is a big difference between the two.

This would be a gauss gun/coilgun. There are differences between a gauss gun and a coilgun too BTW.



Here are some pictures of my current coilgun

I was considering doing this and having it controlled with a microcontroller. How you would get it to sense the projectile would be to use a signal coming from a Hall effect sensor.

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In the correct dosage, violence solves anything.

I was thinking of using a light detector and painting a white line across the centre of the bullet. However, to get any real speed, the electromagnets have to switch from attracting to repelling the magnets right after it's detector detects the line, i'm not sure if this would be possible.