Re: Arindam Banerjee's peer-reviewed 2013 paper

David Canzi <dmcanzi@uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

Recently Arin... er... Bertie Taylor posted the following:
 
| Concluding lines from a peer-reviewed 2013 paper by Arindam Banerjee
| (related to his PhD work)
|
| The current literature does not  satisfactorily resolve theoretical and
| experimental results as regards the recoil in rail guns.  This is an
| important issue to resolve as there are new and valuable applications
| possible if recoil does not occur.
| In the past, rail gun research was used for military purposes, and this
| trend continues. The stress was on making very high velocity
| projectiles, for such purposes as knocking out incoming enemy missiles.
| The lack of recoil in rail guns, as opposed to coil guns, has long been
| noted.
 
I did a Google search for "lack of recoil in rail guns" and found
three hits.  One in groups.google.com, one in archive.org, and one
in alixus.wordpress.com.  None of these sites appear to require
peer review before they publish.  I tried the same search in Google
Scholar and got nothing.
 
If the lack of recoil in rail guns has long been noted, it has long
been noted by very few people.  Some people are just chronically
wrong, and their persistence is not evidence that they're right.

The US Army has spent over $150 million and the US Navy has spent over
$500 million on railguns and all of them had LOTS of recoil.