ArcFlash Labs' GR-1 Anvil Portable Gauss Rifle

Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to an extremely interesting episode of forgotten weapons. I'm ian mccollum and this is far from forgotten. In fact, it is the cusp of an entirely new type of technology. This is a gr1

anvil

from Arc Flash Labs and it is the world's first commercially available

gauss

rifle

. I still have a hard time not grinning from ear to ear when I say that's cool, so this is an electromagnetic projectile firing device. I guess there are a couple different things you could call it. a coil gun, which is an accurate term, could be called a

gauss

rifle

, although it's not actually rifled, it's smoothbore, so perhaps a gauss gun could also be called a mass drive, which is also a term technically appropriate for what it does, which is in essence it takes power from a battery and uses it to charge a bank of capacitors.

There's actually one here and then seven more on the front and then it discharges that energy through a series of electromagnetic coils to accelerate a projectile down the barrel and out the muzzle. I'm going to say up front that this is absolutely an alpha development type of project, it's wildly impractical as it currently exists, but it's actually usable in the field at this point, so this thing has a muzzle energy of about maybe 22 long. It weighs about 20 pounds, so right off the bat, if you're expecting this to be like something straight out of a halo laser cannon, it's not, however, the great-great-grandchildren of this thing will be the sci-fi firearms of the future, so a couple a few days ago we did an interview with David Wirth, one of the founders of Arc Flash Labs, talking about some of the development and a little bit of background understanding of this device, so if you're interested in that, check out the video above .

What we're going to do here today is review and observe, as we normally do with unforgettable weapons, how this actually works, so let me start with some specifications. This uses a 3.3 kiloamp or 3,300 amp hour battery and will fire approximately between a 400 and 650 grain half inch diameter projectile at approximately 75 meters per second or approximately 230 feet per second, so you are getting a relatively heavy projectile at a relatively low speed. It is completely electronic. There are actually three computers built into the weapon. itself to make it work and this does all kinds of cool sci-fi things, so let's dig in and take a closer look and see how it really works.

Well, let's start from the back. This is the actual battery that powers everything. I have two, here's the spare, there's a little hook there. I'll take it out in a moment, but for now I want to leave it attached. We have a magazine here, so technically it's not just a Gauss rifle. On a bullpup gas rifle, in fact, there are three different magazine lengths because it is not chambered and can essentially fire any length of projectile that can be fed into the barrel, so these are basically our two standard projectiles, they are half an inch long. diameter steel pin is cut to about an inch long this is cut to about two inches long and basically anything in between will work the magazines are single stack, hold 18 rounds each and are literally like a firearm from a single stack magazine now the projectile is fired directly from the top of the magazine, so there is no chamber, we will show that in a moment for those of you who are curious, here is the long magazine, just slide that cartridge in there, there is a spring here. and yes, all of these parts are 3D printed.

This, as I said, is still very much an alpha-stage prototype product in development. They don't have plastic injection molding equipment for this, but everything is being 3D printed, so your magazine is inserted here. If you want to use a different length of magazine, you actually adjust the entire stock of the gun, so if I lift it up, there's a little pull ring right here, which is what locks the rear end of the gun in position if I lift it up. up, then I can slide the rear end of the gun in or out so that it's in the middle position and then here we go, which is in the short position so you can see that our magazine has now been shortened quite a bit, the large magazine is already It doesn't fit, it is now sized for the short mag, these are held in place simply by a bald retainer.

You can't really see the catch itself, but there is a notch for it, so there is no magazine release latch or lever, it's just a press fit. Looking at our ammunition in a little more detail here we have our short, medium and long projectiles, these can be solid, they can be hollow, so this, I mean, you could call this a hollow point, but frankly, there is no way for this to come close to the quantity. of velocity needed to expand when it hits, it's just a way to have a lighter projectile, and frankly, a lot of it is basically hardware store stuff.

Half inch steel pin to compare sizes, there is a nine millimeter cartridge, there is a 308 cartridge, so the long projectile is about the length of a 308 case for reference, the shortest here is 26 grams, that is , 400 grains, the long one is 42 grams, approximately 650 grains. Now technically, you can shoot anything 10 to 12 millimeters in diameter and 30 to 50 millimeters long. The magnetic feature of the gun causes the projectiles to center inside the barrel, so they will never touch the surface of the barrel, assuming everything goes as it's supposed to and that's why you can vary the diameter; there's a big warning on the side here. and for good reason, there are many ways you could seriously injure yourself if you start digging inside this thing without knowing exactly what you're doing.

Don't stick a fork in the Gauss rifle. Another important safety consideration is that in addition to being a mass accelerator, it is also an electromagnetic pulse generator, the discharge of energy in the electromagnetic coils creates a significant magnetic field, so inside the gun it generates a magnetic field of five At eight Tesla, this is about what MRI machines generate by comparison. something like one to three tesla, so it's a serious magnetic load, now it's much less powerful out of the gun, but you don't want to use this within about 50 feet of someone who has critical sensitive electronics, the most important thing is to say something like a pacemaker. so you need to keep this in mind, you don't want to shoot this near very delicate electronics or frankly it might fry them when you go to shoot, what it essentially does is it takes power from the battery and uses it for charging. these capacitors, each of these cylinders and there are seven more, there is a gigantic high voltage capacitor, so the battery is nominally 25 volts, that energy is increased to 500 volts here, which is then used to charge the capacitors and it is that.

The charging system is the most important and newly developed technology in this device, so the batteries you know, this lithium ion battery, have been developed a lot in recent years, especially for electric cars, but normally the batteries They cannot extract energy. of batteries very quickly and what you have to have for a Gauss rifle to work practically is that it has to be able to charge quickly, you don't want 60 seconds between shots and what the electric arc has done is develop the technology to be able to charge these capacitors in a whopping three seconds, which is really impressive, so you're taking a lot of energy from this battery and pouring it into these capacitors in a controlled but very fast manner, again, don't stick your tongue in it, don't stick a finger in it. fork, etc.

Treat this with serious respect or it will electrocute and potentially kill you. That said, I should point out that everything is designed so that you can't hurt yourself from the outside unless you deliberately play with things. that you have to do it, you can't accidentally mess with it and electrocute yourself, you have to deliberately go deep inside this thing to hurt yourself, so safety warning, but you also don't have to be totally paranoid now, what we have here is the first coil so the magazine stays there and when you fire the gun, the first thing that happens is a small mechanical solenoid pushes the bullet forward to get the projectile out of the magazine and the computer fires this coil that will act to pull.

The projectile enters and begins to accelerate. You can actually see the canyon right there. It is a clear plastic barrel or a polycarbonate barrel. By the way, these coils run at different speeds and different amperages as you go down the canyon, but they run between 4,000 and 16,000 amps, so a huge amount of power is dumped very quickly through those coils. Now we have a space between the capacitors here because you have to have a space for the firing mechanism, so this is basically just the initial impulse of the projectile and then this is where it actually starts to move and once you get here you have seven coils more that they will sequentially accelerate that projectile faster and faster until it finally leaves the muzzle.

There is another warning label down here because it also has a built in laser the laser is up here the laser acts as your aiming device although being smoothbore this is not particularly accurate the laser bowl is not zero basically it is on as if it were Zeroed well enough but the laser also indicates its state of charge, so let me back up for a moment. Arc Flash designed this one essentially with a progressive trigger. They compared it to say a double action mechanism, so what you do is you pull the trigger halfway and that will cause the computer to charge all eight capacitors as it goes.

The capacitors are charging the laser. The pointing laser will start flashing. It will flash faster and faster until it is fully charged. The laser is steady, letting you know it is ready to fire. Then pull the trigger the rest of the way back and the gun will fire, you can actually set the computer in a couple of different modes, you can limit the amount of power the gun uses instead of running it at full power for each shot, which speeds up shot-to-shot time and also reduces reload time. Allows you to get more shots on a single battery charge.

Now let's dive into the specific controls and the computer because of course it's an electronic mass accelerator, of course it has a computer, so first, the power switch is here again true to At an alpha level of development, The switch isn't actually marked, however, all the switches on the GR1 are backwards for on and forwards for off, so what I'll do is go ahead and turn it on. When it does, a red indicator light will come on. it lights up which tells you that the gun is active and it will turn on the computer, there you go, so what we have here is a couple of basic data, the line at the top is the battery voltage, the green bar tells you basically how much of the main battery charge, you still have the middle bar, is the amount of energy that is currently loaded into the capacitors, so right now it's at zero joules because I haven't charged it.

The bottom bar is the temperature of the barrel with each shot of those coils due to quantity. The energy that goes through them gets pretty hot and it can be very dangerous to shoot this thing with the barrel overheated, so the bottom bar is a yellow temperature bar, it's kind of a danger zone. The yellow bar right now is nice and cool at 19.1 degrees. Celsius, the red bar is the absolutely critical danger zone, under no circumstances do you heat fire it over the red bar and frankly don't heat fire it over the yellow bar either because why would you want to risk it too of course. we have the electric arc logo and the gr1 designation we have two switches here this one in the back is the aiming laser and this one in the front is a flashlight the flashlight honestly seemed kind of strange to me, kind of strange to include, but what the hell, a lot. of people put flashlights on guns, not that it really adds much to the overall weight of this, so if I turn the flashlight on I get a nice beam of light, actually that's how we joked in the interview with David, the designer.

It's kind of a remarkably weak flashlight given the amount of energy storage in the weapon, but go ahead and turn it off, then we also have this multipurpose controller, this is a wheel and also a clickable button if I go ahead, do I click on that button and hold it down. I can open a menu where I can. I have restricted power mode right now and let's see, I want to set the target power, so I'll click on that. The maximum energy per shot is 100 joules, but I can increase it to whatever power level I want. like let's say 75 joules, we click again and exit.

Now you can see we have a little linevertical on our charged energy bar indicating the maximum amount of charge the weapon will gain, which is 75 joules or 75 percent of its maximum. potential power now I'm not going to dry fire here because it's actually not good to dry fire this, uh, because when you dry fire it, what you're essentially doing is charging up all those capacitors and then you have to let them discharge as if energy was going to come out of those capacitors somehow if you just let go of the trigger, uh, if you don't fire anything, that energy will be discharged as heat and that's what will increase the temperature of our barrel. and frankly, this is a prototype and I'm afraid to break it, so instead, let's take it to the range and shoot it a little so I can show you what this computer really does when you shoot. muzzle for reference, that's the cannon, these two are flashlights and that's the laser emitter.

Now, to bring it within reach, of course, I need to download it and it's interesting that these mass accelerators are going to generate their own safety protocols over time in the same way that we already have with firearms, so the first thing is to make sure you remove the magazine, this is like an open bolt firearm in that once the magazine is removed there is no chance of a round in the chamber because there is no chamber so the magazine is out. The next thing I'm going to do is, of course, make sure that it's off so that the advance is off. and then I can remove the battery.

By the way, it is very important to turn off the gun before removing the battery and even more important to have the gun turned off when you plug in the battery, so this is just a pull down latch. and it comes off and then the battery is held in place by a small screw, essentially it's this metal bar that is held on with a small C clamp, so it requires a little bit of movement, there we turn off the battery and then I can disconnect it this way. has made the gun completely safe. I have my best sci-fi wraparound glasses for this.

Now, to start, I thought I'd do a quick accuracy test. I have five rounds of long ammo. This equates to approximately 650 grains per armor. slug, whatever you want to call them, I'm going to go ahead and just rest on the stool here so I can move around and not move anything and hopefully I can see the laser in the morning sunlight. here, so the gun is on, we're going to shoot at full power, that's right there, so as you pull the trigger, the middle bar will be charged like this, when it reaches the end, it will be fully charged and that one was clean.

We have a misfire, okay, let's see what's happening. It had five rounds. Now I have two. So there's a round in the barrel. It should mean no. I'm not sure what exactly happened. Everything seems normal. I mean, there's nothing wrong. It is literally a solid piece of steel. We still have 22.1 volts in the barrel of the gun. The temperature has risen with two shots and essentially a dry fire to 32.8 degrees Celsius. Okay, let's try this again. There we go, one was also walking around and one last shot. Alright, let's take a look at our accuracy based on four shots to make this safe.

I took out the magazine, although there is still something floating in there because it didn't fire. I'm going to go ahead and turn it off. so the gun is now off and then since I know there's a bullet in there take it out so with the gun off and the magazine removed it's become safe let's take a look at our target so we have two bullets that hit. two nice square rounds that were floating around, I think we should also try some of the short rounds and see if they work differently. Remember that this is a smooth bore and in fact there is no contact between the bore and the projectile itself.

Honestly, that's better than I was anticipating and it bodes well for the match, so for reference, I was aiming right here in the middle, okay, let's try some short rounds, ready, come on, we have 70.5 meters per second on that one, let's do one more 71.5 meters per second. the second more, this is fun, okay, 70.5 again, it's great the way it works. It uses optical gates to turn the coils on and off, and because it's a computer and is already tracking the projectile, it knows exactly how fast each shot was going. It only shows the speed for a short period, so it's not there anymore, but this tells me a couple of important things.

Well, let's look at the target first, so my four hits here were this, that, that and that. Still, it's a little hard to tell that this one was definitely falling, so we're getting shells falling, uh, but our group is actually elevated a bit and is sort of on target, again, this bodes well. for the match, excuse me, I will. Make sure you always have fully loaded magazines for the match to make sure you don't have feeding issues like we saw there, but that's great, now I want to try to reduce the power to increase the rate of fire and reduce the load.

Now let's try that, okay, I've restricted the power output to 51 joules, which is 51 percent of the maximum power capacity, so you should be able to charge to charge in a one and a half second interval instead of about three, so, huh. the bullet hit the wooden support and totally killed my target, that's cool too, well you guys heard that bang when this thing hit the wooden support, this is a serious weapon, yes, in terms of energy numbers, the cannon energy is weak in comparison. to a firearm, but this is absolutely potentially lethal, so it should be treated with the respect one accords a proper firearm.

That said, it's also super fun, so you're ready to shoot dynamically with a Gauss rifle. Well, this is really cool, so by reducing the power per shot to 50 joules instead of 100 joules. I have definitely increased the rate of fire and have also reduced the amount of heat I put into the gun with each shot, so I am currently at 45.7 degrees Celsius. I don't know if you can see that, but full power shooting, especially with the long 50 millimeter projectiles, we're heating this up a lot faster. I love living in the future, constantly knocking to the left, okay, okay, Jordan, are you ready? to have some fun with this now I'm ready to have some fun okay medium sized rounds go ahead what kind of velocity are you getting with that about 70 meters per second?

Well, even though those are lighter projectiles, we're basically getting the same velocity as we do with the short solids, yeah, what do you think? What will it be like to live in the future with a damn rail or a coil gun? It's pretty impressive until you run out of ammo. Damn, the future can't solve everything. our problems are still not right guys, this has been a very fun and great day in the field. Many thanks to Arc Flash for lending me their gr1

anvil

prototype. I still have some slugs here to play with, so I hope so.

Guys you enjoyed the video, stay tuned for tomorrow when we take this to error matching and see how it works. Thanks for seeing it. I'm breaking it again. Oh, that's amazing.