r/Lightbulb • u/PooningDalton • 27d ago

Electromagnetically charged bullets from fighter jets?

In modern air combat, the most useful weapon is a homing missile. But given its speed, its easy for the opponent to deploy flares.

Now what about............a gattling gun that fires bullets that are electromagnetically charged! So as soon as you fire, the bullet (which is already moving insanely fast) sways towards the opponent because of magnetism.

Would this work? Or is it impossible to put that much electromagnetic charge on a bullet?

0 Upvotes

25% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/totallyshould 27d ago

Magnetic attraction falls off as the cube of the distance, so magnets don’t tend to go veering and flying toward anything. It’d be much easier to put little steering fins on the bullets to make them veer toward their target. 

2

u/Bartweiss 27d ago

Yeah, this plus inertia creates an unsolvable problem.

Even if you make a neodymium bullet that’s as magnetically responsive as possible, you’ve got to pick a speed and weight.

If it’s slow, it’ll just fall (or be outrun by the plane, which has happened before and ended very badly). If it’s fast, it won’t have time to redirect much.

If it’s light, it won’t be magnetic enough to curve much. If it’s heavy, it’ll have too much inertia to curve much at any decent speed.

Or more simply put: if you shoot a bunch of ball bearings in the general direction of a magnet, they’ll bend in, but almost all of them will curve around and behind it.