Railguns!

[S'task]

coil guns have an issue with their maximum muzzle velocity being limited by your ability to switch the electromagnets on and off. You need a really fast quench for high velocities, which is not an insignificant task when you want significant force out of the magnet. Inductors, like capacitors, store electromagnetic energy and the force of the magnetic field is the direct result of how much energy is stored in the inductor.

Man portable coilguns are likely not feasible; however, what they do work for is proof of concept. One of the big things for coilguns is that the longer the barrel, the more time for acceleration you have, thus larger scale coilguns might actually be viable weapons with just a little bit more work.

 

[Flintsteel]

Man portable coilguns are likely not feasible;

Define "feasible". As a man-portable weapon? Maybe. As a less-than-lethal personal defense tool?

Literally something you can buy. (If expensive)

 

[Aaron Fox]

It should be noted that they're not feasible with our current material and power tech, especially in a handheld combat (i.e. killing people) system. We'll likely be curbing off settings like Battletech, Traveller, Ghost in the Shell, Transhuman Space, among others, as time goes on, given history (or shall I remind everyone that the 2000s had Carbon act like literal magic for a while).

Also, it should be noted that lasers -after you hit the double-digit megawatts range- tend to do better in atmo the more power you can put into them... leading to 'fun' of the 'lol, anything that flies, dies' kind. This is especially true as the US is working on turning every laser array into a dual-purpose 'offensive/scanning' system (basically, it can act as a LIDAR unit when not shooting at things).

 

[Sailor.X]

Man portable coilguns are likely not feasible; however, what they do work for is proof of concept. One of the big things for coilguns is that the longer the barrel, the more time for acceleration you have, thus larger scale coilguns might actually be viable weapons with just a little bit more work.

So maybe future Battleship Guns. Ala 10 or 12 inch range?

 

[Doomsought]

So maybe future Battleship Guns. Ala 10 or 12 inch range?

A coil gun will have huge copper coils, say at least 6 times as large as the projectile, at this size you'd probably also need to pump coolant through them to also deal with the heat. The best use case for coil guns is for mortars.

The advantage of railguns is that there are more solutions for creating a low friction conductive surface than there are for fighting thermodynamics. You could install spray nozzels to apply a conductive fluid between shots, or put incendiary devices at the front of your sabot- fire is a plasma and with the right chemystry you could create a high presume zone full of conductive flame ans smoke between the rails and the projectile.

 

[Scottty]

The right oopsie here would have to be somebody building an actual atomic bomb and claiming it was a powerplant, and nobody noticing it wasn't during installation. It's literally physically impossible for most modern reactors to explode, they simply don't have the conditions where it's possible.

Or alternately some guy "accidentally" bypassing several dozen different safeties simultaneously on an old-school reactor while nobody else noticed what was going on for half an hour or more. That basically only happened at Chernobyl because the guy doing it was a party official and nobody could override him. Even then we didn't get a ka-boom, just a really nasty fire.

The closest you could get to a nuclear powerplant "blowing up" would be a steam explosion, due to the cooling system not working and the containment system that's supposed to be able to, well.. contain that steam... not working.
But that's not a nuclear bomb, or anything close.

Now a meltdown, on the other hand... but we are talking about a ship. So even if everything goes wrong, you get a load of super-hot uranium sending itself down to Davy Jone's locker.
What's that going to do? Make deep sea lifeforms look strange and monstrous?
They already do.