The accelerators themselves would be ring magnets, ether really strong natural magnets or powered ones, with the north (Blue) and south (Red) on each face.
The key to getting this to work is the projectile. It has to have an outer surface that is all one polarity, thus making it possible to accelerate it without 'pulsing' the magnets on the barrel.
As it is (as far as I know) impossible to have the entire projectile be of one polarity, the projectile would need to consist of bar magnets held in place by nonmetallic materials.
This would allow the outer magnetic fields (the south polarity) to come within attraction and repletion range of the fields generated by the ring magnets.
This is by no means a perpetual motion machine, if powered magnets are used it has to be constantly feed energy. If natural magnets are strong enough to be used it would last longer but even natural magnets lose their power eventually.
This is also not a means of accelerating a projectile up to near light speed.
Lets say that the magnetic projectile weighs about 3000lbs and is fairly sturdy, its given an initial kickstart from a 16inch naval gun accelerating it up to 2800fps/1909mph. lets also say that each ring magnet gives it just a 5% boost.
Even after passing 34 ring segments its speed is only 10028.64 mph, extremely fast but not Ls (I think, what's light speed in mph?).
Even if you were to loop the tube into a circle, so that it could pass the rings an infinite amount of time it would be going too fast for any kind of mechanism to release it.
I remember asking my highschool science teacher about it, he said that the ring magnets would have to be powered and/or the nonmetal used to hold the projectile together would not be strong enough and that its connected magnets would push apart from each other at speed.
What do you think?
Is it confirmed, posible, or busted? (i've been wacthing too much mythbusters
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