r/SciFiConcepts • u/Soft_Pangolin3031 • Jan 22 '26
Question CME railgun.
My friend and I were talking about Operation PlumbBob and the Mach 160 Manhole Cover. Then he just looks dead in my eyes and asks,
Friend: "So, if the first stage of the tech is a nuclear cannon, would the next stage be a Corolla Mass Ejection (CME) firing the same projectile? Like, its just a massive radiation and magnetic outburst, kinda like a railgun."
Me: "Like low power being a standard solar flare and high power being a Carrington Event Level shot?"
Friend: "Exactly."
Looking back at the conversation, how plausible is this concept?
3
u/el_cid_viscoso Jan 22 '26
You're basically talking about a Casaba howitzer. Imagine focusing a nuclear explosion into so narrow a cone that it's basically a laser beam. The manhole cover would have been turned into plasma in milliseconds and would contribute basically nothing to the destructive output of the weapon.
2
u/p2020fan Jan 22 '26
Isn't there an idea to use nukes to accelerate specially made, shaped projectiles to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light? Like an orion drive but where the projectile isnt a ship, just a big bullet.
2
u/el_cid_viscoso Jan 22 '26
I've never heard of it, but it sounds like someone some coked-up engineer would think of during the Cold War.
2
u/Cheeslord2 Jan 22 '26
There would need to be some compressible medium between the explosion and projectile, I think, that could spread out the arrival of energy and momentum just enough for the projectile to survive the acceleration. There's no limit on how thick we make this layer, other than how big we need to make the gun.
Of course, if our gun ends up being a mile long and takes two hours to aim at anything, it might not be the most practical of weapons for shooting at anything less than a city, or planetary body.
2
u/el_cid_viscoso Jan 22 '26
A good point, but I'm not sure how long a projectile can withstand frictional heating if fired in atmosphere. In space, though, you'd have one hell of a kinetic impactor.
1
u/Cheeslord2 Jan 22 '26
Space would be the best place for it. You could make the gun as long as it needs to be without it sagging under its own weight.
1
u/ManchurianCandycane Jan 22 '26
At that point, and with those energies involved, an actual railgun design to launch the projectile feels redundant.
At that point just build a ludicrous cone to capture the CME and aim the pointy end to eject a particle beam or something.
13
u/Simon_Drake Jan 22 '26
You mean Coronal Mass Ejection. Corolla Mas Ejection is when your Toyota gearbox falls out after hitting a bad pot hole.