garfangle wrote:
(George William Herbert) wrote:
The condition of the human body exposed to nearly 5,300 Gs for
a seventh of a second is "red goo on back wall of space capsule".

My bad...though couldn't we develop some anti-G shield?

Sure, I'll just hop in my X-wing and fly out to the Titan base
where we're working on anti-G shielding and hyperdrives
and report back when we're done... ;-)

There are things that can be done to increase human G-tolerance.
Lying flat gets you to 20+ transient Gs without serious problems,
and immersion in water roughly doubles that. But if you take a 40G
limit, that's 400 m/s^2 of accelleration roughly, which gets you
to 8 km/s in 20 seconds, at an average velocity of 4 km/s,
for a gun barrel or accellerator length of 80 km. 50 miles.

As others have pointed out, anything mechanical that you can
harden a lot (artillery shells take tens of thousands or 100,000 Gs)
and bulk materials and propellants and stuff can take gun launch,
though you do have to spend the time and effort to harden them
to survive the accelleration. People... should ride gentler things.


-george william herbert