ArcFlash Labs' GR-1 Anvil Portable Gauss Rifle
hey guys thanks for tuning in to an extremely cool episode of forgotten weapons i'm ian mccollum and this is far from forgotten this is in fact the cusp of a whole new type of technology this is an arc flash labs gr1 anvil and it is the world's first commercially available gauss rifle i still have a hard time not grinning ear to ear when i say that that's just so cool so this is an electromagnetic projectile firing device i suppose there are a couple of different things you could call it you could call it a coil gun that is an accurate term you could call it a gauss rifle although it's not actually rifled it is smoothbore so perhaps a gauss cannon you could also call it a mass driver that is also a technically appropriate term for what this does which is in essence takes power from a battery uses it to charge a bank of capacitors there's actually one here and then seven more up in the front and then dump that energy through a series of electromagnetic coils to accelerate a projectile down the barrel and out the muzzle now i'm going to say right up front this is absolutely an alpha sort of development project it is wildly impractical as it currently exists but it is actually like field usable at this point so um this thing has the muzzle energy of approximately maybe a 22 long it weighs about 20 pounds so right off the bat if you're expecting this to be like straight out of halo laser cannon it is not however this thing's great great great great grandchildren are going to be the sci-fi firearms of the future so a couple days ago we did an interview with david wirth one of the founders of arc flash labs talking about some of the development and a little bit of just background understanding of this device so if you're interested in that check out the previous video what we're going to do here today is go through and look at as we typically do unforgotten weapons how this actually works so let me start with a few specs uh this uses a 3.3 kilo amp or 3 300 amp hour battery it will fire uh approximately a between a 400 and a 650 grain half inch in diameter projectile at approximately 75 meters per second or approximately 230 feet per second so you're getting a relatively heavy projectile at a relatively low velocity it is completely electronic there are actually three computers built into the gun itself to make it work and this does all sorts of cool sci-fi stuff so let's just dig right in and look up close and see how this thing actually works all right let's start at the back this is the actual battery that powers the whole thing i have two of them here's the spare there's a little hook right there i'll pull this off in a moment but for the time being i want to leave it attached we have a magazine here so this is technically not just a gauss rifle it is a bullpup gas rifle there are in fact three different lengths of magazine because there's no chamber on this and it essentially can fire kind of any length of projectile that you could feed into the barrel and so these are basically our two standard projectiles they are half inch in diameter steel dowel pin this one cut to approximately one inch long this one cut to approximately two inches long and basically anything in between will work the magazines are single stack they hold i believe 18 rounds each and it's literally just just like a single stack firearm magazine now the projectile is fired directly from the top of the magazine so there is no chamber we'll show that in just a moment for those of you who are curious here is the long magazine just slide that cartridge in there there's a spring in here and yes all of these parts are 3d printed this is as i said still very much a prototype developmental sort of alpha stage product they don't have like plastic injection molding equipment for this yet everything is being 3d printed so your magazine gets inserted right here if you want to use a different length of magazine you actually adjust the entire butt end of the gun so if i stand this up there's a little ring pull right here that is what is locking the back end of the gun in position if i lift this up i can then slide the back end of the gun in or out so that's in the middle position and then let's there we go that is in the short position so you can see our magazine well has now gotten quite a lot shorter the large magazine will no longer fit it it is now sized for the short magazine these are held in place simply by a bald detent you can't really see the the detent itself but there's the indentation for it so there's no magazine release catch or lever it's just pressure fit looking at our ammunition in a little more detail here we have our short medium and long projectiles these can be solid they can be hollow so this one i mean you could call this a hollow point but frankly there's no way this will have anywhere near the amount of velocity necessary to expand when it hits it's just a way to have a lighter projectile and frankly a lot of this is basically just hardware store stuff half inch steel dowel pin for size comparison there's a nine millimeter cartridge there's a 308 cartridge so the long projectile is about the length of a 308 case for reference sake my short one here is 26 grams that's 400 grains the long one is 42 grams 650 grains approximately now technically you can fire anything from 10 to 12 millimeters in diameter and from 30 to 50 millimeters long the magnetic function of the gun causes the projectiles to center inside the barrel so they'll never actually touch the surface of the barrel assuming everything goes as it's supposed to and that's why you can vary the diameter there's a big old warning on the side here and for good reason there are a whole bunch of ways you could badly hurt yourself if you start digging into the internals of this thing without really knowing exactly what you're doing do not stick a fork into the gauss rifle one other important safety consideration is that in addition to being a mass accelerator this is also an electromagnetic pulse generator the dump of energy into the electromagnetic coils creates a significant magnetic field so within the gun itself it's generating a five to eight tesla magnetic field this is like for comparison mri machines generate something like one to three tesla so it's a serious magnetic charge now it's much much less powerful outside of the gun but you don't want to use this within like 50 feet of someone who has critical sensitive electronic stuff most significantly say something like a pacemaker so you have to keep that in mind you don't want to fire this thing off around very delicate electronics or frankly it could fry them when you go to fire this what it essentially is doing is taking energy from the battery and using it to charge these capacitors each one of these cylinders and there's seven more of them out there is a gigantic high voltage capacitor so the battery is uh nominally 25 volts that energy is stepped up to 500 volts in here which is then used to charge the capacitors and it's that charging system that is the most fundamentally important and newly developed technology in this device so the batteries you know this lithium lithium ion battery those have have gotten a lot of development in recent years especially for electric cars but normally batteries you can't pull energy out of batteries very quickly and what you have to have to make a gauss rifle work in a practical manner is it has to be able to charge quickly you don't want 60 seconds in between shots and what arc flash has done is developed the technology to be able to charge these capacitors in a whopping three seconds which is really impressive so you're taking a lot of energy from this battery and dumping it into these capacitors in a controlled but very rapid manner again don't stick your tongue in it don't stick a fork in it etc treat this thing with serious respect or it will electrocute you and potentially kill you that said i should point out everything is designed so that you can't hurt yourself from the outside unless you deliberately go messing with things that you have to you can't accidentally mess with it and electrocute yourself you have to go deliberately delving into the insides of this thing to hurt yourself so safety warning but also you don't have to be totally paranoid now what we have here is the first coil so the magazine sits right there and when you fire the gun the first thing that happens is a little mechanical solenoid actually taps the round the projectile forward out of the magazine and the computer fires up this coil which is going to act to pull the projectile in and start to accelerate it you can actually see the barrel right there it's a transparent plastic uh barrel or polycarbonate barrel these coils by the way operate at different velocity different amperages as you go down the barrel but they're operating between 4 000 and 16 000 amps so there is a tremendous amount of energy being dumped very quickly through those coils now we have a gap between capacitors here because you have to have a space for the firing mechanism so this is basically just the initial boost to the projectile and then this is where it really starts moving and once you get to here you have seven more coils that are going to sequentially accelerate that projectile faster and faster and faster until it ultimately leaves the muzzle there is another warning label down here because this also has a laser built into it the laser is up here the laser acts as your aiming device although being smoothbore this isn't particularly accurate the laser's not zero bowl it's basically pretty much on like good enough zeroed but the laser also indicates your state of charge so let me go back a moment arc flash has designed this one with essentially a progressive trigger they compared it to say a double action mechanism and so what you do is pull the trigger part way back and that will cause the computer to charge all eight capacitors as the capacitors are charging the laser the aiming laser will start flashing it will flash faster and faster until when it's fully charged the laser is solid on that tells you that you're ready to fire you then pull the trigger the rest of the way back and the gun will fire you can actually set the computer to a couple of different modes you can limit the amount of power that the gun uses instead of running it at full power for every shot that speeds up your shot to shot time it reduces the recharge time also allows you to get more shots from a single charge of the battery now let's dig into the specific controls and the computer because of course it's an electronic mass accelerator of course it has a computer in it so first off the on switch is back here true to an alpha level of development the switch is not actually marked however all of the switches on the gr1 are backward for on and forward for off so what i will do is go ahead and flip this on when i do that a red indicator light is going to illuminate that tells you that the gun is live and it will turn on the computer there it goes so what we have here is a couple basic pieces of data the line at the top is the battery voltage that green bar tells you basically how much of the main battery charge you still have the middle bar is the amount of power that is currently charged in the capacitors so right now it's sitting at zero joules because i have not charged it the bottom bar is barrel temperature with every shot those coils because of the amount of energy going through them get quite hot and it can be very dangerous to fire this thing with the barrel overheated so the bottom bar is is a temperature bar yellow is sort of the danger zone the yellow bar right now it's nice and cool at 19.1 degrees celsius the red bar is the absolute critical danger zone do not under any circumstances fire it with the heat over the red bar and frankly don't fire it with the heat over the yellow bar either because why would you want to risk it also of course we have the arc flash logo and the gr1 designation we have two switches here this back one is the aiming laser and this front one is a flashlight the flashlight honestly struck me as kind of an odd um odd thing to include but what the heck a lot of people put flashlights on guns it's not like it really adds much to the overall weight of this so if i turn on the flashlight i get a nice beam of light there it's actually as we joked about in the interview with uh with david the designer it's kind of a remarkably wimpy flashlight given the amount of energy storage on the gun but go ahead and turn that off we then also have this multi-purpose controller this is a wheel and also a clickable button if i go ahead and click that button and hold i can bring up a menu where i can i have restricted energy mode right now and let's see i want to set the target energy so i'll click there maximum energy per shot is 100 joules but i can crank it to whatever power level i would like let's say 75 joules there we go click it again and exit now you can see we have a little vertical line in our charged power bar that indicates the maximum amount of charge that the gun will get that being 75 joules or 75 percent of its maximum potential power now i'm not going to dry fire it here because there are actually like it's not good to dry fire this uh because when you dry fire it what you're essentially doing is charging all of those capacitors and then you have to let them discharge like the energy is going to come out of those capacitors somehow if you just let off the trigger uh if you don't fire anything that energy is going to get dumped in the form of heat and that's what will bring our barrel temperature up and frankly this is a prototype and i'm scared of breaking it so instead let's go ahead and take it out to the range and do a little bit of shooting so i can show you what this computer actually does when you're firing there's the muzzle for reference sake that's the barrel these two are both flashlights and that is the laser emitter now to get it out to the range of course i need to unload it and it's interesting that these uh well mass accelerators are kind of going to generate over time their own safety protocols in the way that we already have with firearms so first thing is make sure that the magazine is removed from it this is kind of like an open bolt firearm in that once the magazine is removed there is no potential for a projectile to be in the chamber because there is no chamber so magazine is out the next thing i'm going to do is of course make sure that this is switched off so forward is off and then i can actually take the battery off it is by the way very important to have the gun off before you remove the battery and even more important to have the gun off when you plug the battery in so this is just a latch pull that down and it comes off and then the battery is held in place by a little screw essentially it's this metal bar being held in with a little c clamp so this takes a little bit of wiggling there we go the battery's off and then i can unplug it this has rendered the gun completely safe i've got my cooler sci-fi wrap-around glasses for this now to start with i figured let's do a quick accuracy test i've got five rounds of the long ammunition this is about 650 grains per armature slug whatever you want to call them i'm going to go ahead and just rest on the stool here so that i can get so i'm not wobbling anything around and i'm hoping that i can see the laser in the morning sunlight out here so uh gun is on we're gonna fire at full power there it is all right so as you hold the trigger that middle bar is going to charge up like that when it gets to the very end it's fully charged and that one was clean we have a misfire all right let's see what's going on i had five rounds i now have two so there is a round in the barrel should mean nope there it is not sure exactly what went on there everything seems normal i mean there's nothing to go wrong it's literally a solid lump of steel um we have 22.1 volts still in the gun
barrel temperature has increased with two shots and essentially a dry fire to 32.8 degrees celsius all right let's try this again there we go that one also was tumbling and one last shot all right well let's go take a look at our accuracy based on four shots in order to make this safe i have pulled the magazine although there's still around floating in there because it didn't discharge i'm going to go ahead and turn it off so the gun is now powered down and then since i know there's a slug in there take that out so with the gun turned off and the magazine removed it has been rendered safe let's go take a look at our target so we got two rounds that impacted nice and square two rounds that were tumbling i think we should also try a few of the short rounds and see if they perform differently um remember this is smooth bore and in fact there's no contact between the bore and the projectile itself that's honestly that's better than i was anticipating and it does bode well for the match so but for reference i was aiming right here in the middle all right let's try some short rounds ready there we go we got 70.5 meters per second on that one let's do one more 71.5 meters per second one more this is fun all right 70.5 again it's pretty cool
the way this works it uses optical gates to turn the coils on and off and so because it's a computer and it's already tracking the projectile it knows exactly how fast each shot was going so it only displays the velocity for a brief period so it's not on there anymore but this tells me a couple important things well let's go take a look at the target first so my four impacts here were this one that one that one and that one i am still getting it's a little hard to tell this one was definitely tumbling so we're getting tumbling projectiles uh but our group is actually raised up a bit and is more or less on target um again this bodes well for the match excuse me um i will make sure to always have fully loaded magazines for the match to make sure that i don't have feed issues like we saw there but that's pretty cool now i want to try turning down the power to get the rate of fire up to reduce the charge time let's try that all right i have restricted the energy output to 51 joules which is 51 percent of maximum power capacity so i should be able to load to charge in something like a one and a half second interval instead of about three [Laughter] all right so uh the round hit the wooden uh stand and uh totally killed my target that's also kind of cool all right you guys heard that thunk when this thing hit the wooden stand this is a serious weapon like yes in terms of energy numbers the muzzle energy is wimpy compared to a firearm but this is absolutely potentially lethal so it does need to be treated with the respect that one accords a proper firearm that being said it is also super fun so ready for some dynamic gauss rifle shooting okay this is really cool so by reducing the power per shot to 50 joules instead of 100 joules i have definitely upped the rate of fire and i've also reduced the amount of heat that i'm putting into the gun with each shot so i'm currently at 45.7 celsius i don't know if you can see that but the full power shots especially with the long the 50 millimeter projectiles were we're heating this thing up a lot faster i love living in the future is consistently hitting to the left all right all right jordan you ready to have some fun with this now i'm ready to have some fun all right medium sized rounds go for it what kind of velocity are you getting on those about 70 meters per second okay so even though those are lighter projectiles we're getting basically the same velocity as we do with the the short solid ones yeah what do you think how is it living in the future with a freaking rail or a coil gun it's pretty awesome until you run out of ammo damn the future can't solve all of our problems can it not yet all right guys this has been a very fun very cool day at the range a big thanks to arc flash for loaning me their prototype gr1 anvil i've still got a few slugs here to play with so uh hopefully you guys enjoyed the video stay tuned for tomorrow when we take this out to the bug match and see how it does thanks for watching i'm breaking it again oh that's awesome
2022-02-16 20:49
