The new EM6 looks stupid

Interesting! But if the armature vaporizes, what's to stop these vapors from simply escaping out the end of the barrel?
Like this:


Crazy plasma railguns aside, judging by the fact that NC guns can fire off hundreds of rounds per minute and seemingly never (or at least rarely) need rails replaced, I think it's safe to assume that there is a negligible amount of material being stripped away from the rails with each shot.
Even with 1% material vaporization (which would create a very small amount of vapor each shot), the rails would be completely gone (let alone unusable) in less than a minute of use.

I really like the new models, great work on all 3 of them!

The vapors do escape from the end of the barrel, and given the option they do so forward and sideways through a hole in the barrel.

Nice image. Should help visualize some of the problems with different railguns or railguns in general.
Your image seems to depict a projectile railgun where the armature completely vaporizes. So actually a sizeable chunk of material that needs to be ejected. A crazy plasma railgun is its own thing where both the projectile and armature itself are plasma. The NC clearly use a projectile railgun, but it is possible the armature does completely vaporize based on the look of the NC weapons - the gun ends in a more typical gun muzzle and the rails don't go the full length of the gun barrel which would require the armature to completely disintegrate inside the gun barrel or the projectiles itself would have to be tiny to account for discarding Sabot type armature.

Hmm, that creates a thought - We know NC also use gas cartridge, but what if the cartridge itself is a plasma armature?
Would be nice if someone can point to the lore on how the NC guns exactly work. But think about it. What if the gun initially fires like typical firearm but the reaction turns the gunpowder cartridge into plasma and the rails accelerate the "gunpowder plasma" which pushes the projectile forward, with the projectile itself being non-conductive.

But back to your picture and something you said earlier. Your image has the muzzle brake on the rails of the railgun ? I can see that causing some issues, unless the circuit is broken before reaching that point. You essentially have a big explosion inside the gun and not outside the muzzle as you said. I accept it may simply be oversimplified because of 2D, but cutting the circuit inside the gun is not necessarily a bad thing as you can harness the explosive energy and redirect it backwards to reload the weapon like regular automatic rifles do. The NC gun designs would suggest they use this form of reloading, but might just be design oversight by SOE* and Daybreak.

*But SOE did manage to create a TR chaingun that actually looks like a chaingun with no obvious gas operated reload barrel which there shouldn't be because CHAINguns are chain-reloaded, not gas-reloaded. So maybe they are aware of that because they know how guns work and should look.

Also I note your picture has plasma armature and a flechette projectile but afaik NC use a more common bullet and cartridge. A railgun could also use a partially disintegrating or hybrid armature. The US Navy uses a metal sliding discarding Sabot type which leaves the gun barrel along with the projectile and then disintegrates in an explosive fashion, followed by an explosion of hot gas including aluminium gas from some disintegrated components. But honestly I am not sure for the exact source of the aluminium. Interesting thing about the Navy gun is that it has to fire a blank round before live round. The blank round leaves molten aluminium inside the weapon which also acts as lubrication when firing live rounds. It also heats up and expands the rails of the gun to the right size.

Finally, the NC guns fire automatically and there just might not be enough time to clear the gun barrel of all the debris that is left behind. Plasma railguns and plasma armature railguns can actually have issues with a thing called "blow-by" where the current overtakes the armature and projectile. This can have obvious issues with an automatic railgun when the weapon fires before the gunbarrel is cleared. A muzzle break or compensator may simply function as an additonal way to release gas and cartridge/armature debris before or while the gun refires to avoid the pressure inside the gun becoming too high or weapon barrel becoming clogged up.

Yes, I presumed you were talking about plasma-armature, solid-projectile railguns, rather than 'plasma railguns' in the typical sense, since it's pretty clear that NC weapons don't actually fire plasma.

Hmm, interesting, but what would the benefit of this method be? Is the plasma intended to be released out of a brake before the end of the barrel? I suppose that might theoretically be possible, but the forward velocity of the plasma, combined with the forward magnetic force seems like it would 'persuade' most of the plasma to follow the bullet straight out the end of the barrel anyway.

Haha, no, no, that was just to make it easier to illustrate in 2D.
But you are correct in that the explosion occurring at break of circuit could theoretically be harnessed to compensate for recoil or load the next round, etc, if it occurred inside the weapon. Presuming you can safely contain that energy without damaging the rails or the rest of the gun, it's a very interesting idea...

The Navy's current railgun designs are very hard on the rails, and would not be suitable for sustained fire like you see in an assault rifle or LMG. I imagine that present-day railguns are to NC railguns what the flintlock pistol is to modern ARs: crude, primitive, and quite inefficient. We also don't see any sabot being ejected from NC weapons, which I suppose indicates that either the armature completely disintegrates, the armature is a plasma behind the bullet, or the bullet is the armature (which perhaps seems the most practical for a small, 'cheap', high RoF infantry weapon).

In the end, all we can do is speculate until the devs say otherwise. And even then, this is a video game; there's a good chance that it just doesn't make scientific sense, lol. Which is okay.

I'm going to go ahead and disagree with you, I think the new models are better than the old ones. They all sort of look like an NC Assault Rifle bred with three faction's MGs, but it doesn't inherently make them bad, strictly speaking.

I have to question the practicality of having a rail on a rail on a rail, however, but this part isn't even noticeable in a fight


EDIT: On second thought, this part of EM6 looks kinda miserable, because it looks like two different models were just mashed together for lulzies (although you could excuse it by saying that their weaponry is supposed to look makeshift-ish, it just looks meh IMHO)

I imagine it would be less damaging to the rails because of less friction. Hybrid armatures actually use plasma contacts between the rails and the rest of the armature for this reason.
Or simply to make it "sci-fi" even though it makes no sense.

The forces involved are possibly an order of magnitude different. The EM6 muzzle velocity is less than that of modern LMGs, but I imagine rail erosion wouldn't be much higher than what modern gas operated LMGs suffer.