Stuff that has happened in the last couple of days:

Dimitri and I have almost finished reviving his old photohydrodynamics code. John's new code is also progressing in leaps, bounds, and various assorted other synonyms for jumping.

This highschool kid Ben came out of nowhere and emailed me with pictures and a description of his own railgun project, which apparently got a muzzle velocity of 4 km/s with tiny capacitors and 5" rails. I am infinitely impressed. He took the exact opposite approach we did and its clear to me that he did it right. He made small, simple railguns quickly with no attempt at working out the theory and then when they didn't work, he started making new versions with changes to see what parameters had big effects.

Now he has made six different guns and had 20 successful shots in the time it has taken us to almost finish our one gun, which it turns out isn't designed very effectively. Our gun is so big, complex, and expensive that we cannot afford to just scrap it and start on the next one; we're going to finish it and fire it just to see what it can do, but based on what we know now from discussions on railgunners and from literature, we're not expecting much.

We'll probably switch gears after we get this one firing (hopefully this term!) and start with small quick projects like ben's until we can get some of the engineering details worked out.