Railgun Shot

How it's made

Source

a magnetic railgun discharging a slug. A capacitor bank dumps into the rails, giving an electric arc snap (a 1–3 ms broadband spark burst plus a 35 ms band-passed zap sweeping down from 9 kHz) while the slug leaves the muzzle with a supersonic crack and a low magnetic thump (sine falling 90 → 38 Hz in 0.2 s).

Body

the steel rails and barrel ring as inharmonic metal modes (≈ 1 : 2.76 : 5.4 : 8.9 : 13.3, 0.15–0.7 s); a hollow barrel adds a short cavity resonance (150–900 Hz) that colours the crack.

Whine

the discharged coil and rails keep singing as the stored charge bleeds off: two slightly detuned sines (a fundamental and a 1.5x fifth) glide down about an octave and a half over the tail, with a slow 5 Hz shimmer and a faint octave partial, fading out over the tail time.

Envelope

the snap and thump are over in under 0.1 s, the crack in 0.5 s, the whine decays exponentially and is gated to zero at the end of the tail so the file ends cleanly.

Variation

`rng` jitters the metal mode tuning (±1.5 %), whine start pitch (±2 %) and the spark texture; `power` scales thump and snap, `whine` sets the starting pitch, `tail` the ring time, `metal` the crack colour.

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.