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Everything wrong with amateur railguns and how to make them better
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Psi:
One thing i do wonder about.  Material strength doesn't scale, so you would think a smaller rail gun would be easier to make than a huge one.
But you never really see small ones with any real power.

Anyone know where my reasoning is flawed?

excitedbox:
I think there are economies of scale that make it easier to build a certain size. There is also more interest in building powerful rail guns so for military applications.

My thinking with the supercap was basically that you can produce them for incredibly cheap and even if you are only getting a small amount of current you could mass produce them to scale up. A bottle of activated carbon costs about $3 and can make hundreds of caps. I think if you got a 10lb bag of graphite and 50lb of activated carbon you will be under $1k and have enough material to make 10s of thousands of caps. Then you just need to get a shit ton of foil and steel airport toilet paper rolls (thin as hell) for the separator.

Maxwell makes 3000F caps with a 9,300 Amp short circuit current and 1500 Amp operating current. So we know it is possible to get high current out of them

So if you build a machine to dunk or paint foil tape in a activated carbon and graphene mixture and stacks small strips with separators etc. A small team of people should be able to stuff that into some PVC pipes, add the contacts and fill with electrolyte on a few thousand of them in a week or 2. You will kill the life of the caps short circuiting them but how many shots do you really plan on fireing?

The discharge speed is not as important if you make up for it with quantity.

If you have time then building caps is the way to go. Even if you build electrolytic caps using scrapped cans from a bunch of frat parties. I bet you could collect a ton per week at a good sized university. Then you cut them length wise, dip in miuriatic acid for a quick etch and stack with sheets of the cheapest toilet paper you can steal. Stuff these sandwiches in some container or dip in resin and inject with electrolyte solution.
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