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[Hyndis]

While doing science to attempt to build the most efficient railgun assembly, I ran into an absolutely terrible problem!

My railguns barely do any damage at all!

I currently have them on a level surface, with 30 tiles of powered rollers launching iron minecarts. I've filled the minecarts with lead coins and with stones, but in both cases they do nearly no damage at all.

The target is 10 tiles away from the end of the railgun assembly. The target is an ordinary elephant trapped in the target range.

After 5 rounds from my railgun, using coins or rocks as payload, all I've managed to do is break a single leg on the elephant.



Any advice on giving my railguns more of a kinetic punch?

[acetech09]

Lead blocks. Try those. Or weapons.

[Adrian]

I've filled the minecarts with lead coins

Aren't coins intangible?

[Hyndis]

I was hoping for lots of shrapnel with coins, but I got absolutely no shrapnel at all. The coins plus minecart weighed around 800 urists.

Then I tried filling it with metal ore, and that caused the cart plus stone to weight in at around 1800 urists.

In neither case did the minecarts do any significant damage, and in neither case did I get any grapeshot effect.

[Di]

Try somewhere around 3000 urists of weight, several ramps for acceleration and smaller targets.
Same about shotgun, rollers aren't enough.

[HmH]

Rollers only accelerate you to a certain velocity threshold, which is rather low compared to the minimal speeds required for derailment and shotgunning.
Said velocity threshold applies only to rollers; gravity-assisted acceleration will let you reach much higher speeds. To make shrapnel fly out of the minecart, you need it to descend at least three Z-levels under the force of gravity.

[Person]

Stacked items travel as one item when propelled from a minecart. This is probably either a bug or a measure to save framerate by preventing thousands of coins lying around. Try loading it with arrows/bolts if you can decrease the stack size somehow. Generally, for grapeshot effect, you need many, many items. Try upwards of 1000 and see what happens. Hint: Clothing is op right now.

[Hyndis]

Ahh, alright, didn't use any ramps. I was doing flat testing prior to mounting the railguns on my castle tower, and my castle tower is a very tall tower indeed.

The idea behind coins is that each stack individually is very tiny, so a single cart can hold a vast number of coins for a cloud of grapeshot.

I'll give it another try, but this time with far higher speeds.

[Urist McSpike]

I've found the Dwarven Auto-Shotgun thread to be a great resource.  Also, I remember reading somewhere that a stack of coins will be treated as a single item.

[peskyninja]

Try using bigger and heavier objects, gold bars and logs usually have a 65% lethality on my 8 Z-lvls railgun. Also, don't use rollers, they suck.

[blue sam3]

Having the minecarts hit something before the target and eject their contents is generally more effective than just plain old ramming, though ramps can get ramming fairly lethal.

[Hyndis]

I built a much improved railgun.

It launched into a corridor 5 tiles wide. The carts go down 10Z levels of ramps. Right at the bottom level are fortifications. The fortifications stop the minecarts entirely, so they can be recovered and reloaded right away. However once the minecarts hit the fortifications all of the contents of the minecarts are ejected, and so the contents go flying around and murder things.

Even loaded with stone, so only 5 stones per cart, or a total of 25 stones flung down the hallway, I had 10 fatalities. And this was against adult elephants which are very large.

Altering the payload will likely significantly improve the lethality of the railguns. I do like keeping the fortifications there to prevent anyone from the hallway of doom from being able to escape up the rail ramps, as well as allowing the guns to be reloaded automatically. Presumably if I just use the carts to directly impact the target while fully loaded it will do more damage, but that makes reloading more difficult.

[Torrasque666]

Most perfect railgun ammo, figure out a way to load it with lead bins filled with lead blocks. Or just use candy spears if possible.

[Ultimuh]

Why not use the corpses/bones of the previous victims?

[Helgoland]

If you've got a silk farm, you can make huge amounts of silk thread. HUGE amounts.

(I made a post about a good setup once; you let the spider shoot webs at a creature and have the webs land on a retracting drawbridge that is operated by a repeater. On the lower level, the webs stack, and your weavers can work 24/7.