EMACK Railgun Firing Test Report Number 9

The test firing of the EMACK railgun test bed was successfully conducted on 20 December 1983 at a peak system current of 430 kiloamperes and 1. 6 megajoules stored inertially in the homopolar generator. Current was successfully commutated into the launcher in 800 microseconds. The D1.1 projectile in-flight shadowgraphs were taken with a 150 KV Hewlett Packard flash x-ray system and a motion picture of the muzzle arc was taken with a 5000 frame-per-second high speed camera. The projectile weighed 566 grams and reached a velocity of 506 ms in the 5 meter-long barrel. The improved armature design left the barrel intact and acceptable for EMACK shot no. 10.