Dabbling amateur armsmakers mess around with potato guns. Serious amateur armsmakers 3D print their own portable railguns. This man is clearly one of the latter.

Known as NSA_Listbot on Reddit, this guy clearly takes his projects seriously, and gets into all the nitty-gritty details of his inadvisable but super awesome weapon in a long post on Imgur. Unlike a coilgun or gauss rifle which use a series of electromagnets to pull a magnetic projectile down a tube at great speeds, a railgun operates on more complicated physics, but doesn't require its projectiles to be magnetic. What NSA_Listbot's got here is the same thing the Navy is building, but on a much smaller scale.

When all wired up, the railgun's 20 lbs of capacitors—3 pairs of 300J, 350V, 5500uF units—can electrify the gun's rails to fire tiny aluminum rounds like this:

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

It may not look like much, but according to the video, that pellet was doing over 250m/s out of the barrel. For context, a standard velocity round coming out of a .22 does around 350m/s. This thing is serious.

For more pictures, stats, and science, you can check out the Imgur post on the build, or the conversation on Reddit. And it should go without saying but: Don't try this at home.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io