-Gets technical for the sake of getting technical because bored and waiting for Aristo.

[quote=@pugbutter]
I'd imagined the electromagnetics (both for propulsion and for vaporization) having been generated by the gas engines, but it's not a big deal anymore. "It doesn't match the tone of the RP" is still a good reason not to include something.
[/quote]

Well, to figure out how many seconds it'd take between shots, we'd just have to figure out how many spare megawatts the engine cranks out, and convert to joules per second, divide by demand from the railgun, and add a figure for whatever energy is lost through the charge/discharge cycle of the necessary capacitors. But generally, you'd get a nice 20 shots an hour from a generator hooked up to a semi-truck engine running flat-out. [i]Which makes a 57mm autocannon look [u]ridiculously OP[/u][/i].

A Tank-engine ripped off an M1 Abrams can maybe get you up to 2 rounds per minute while consuming a metric ton of fuel.
-Laser weapons are even more fun, HELEX figured it would take 2 tons of fuel and lasing-media to take down a mortar-shell.
This was deemed worthwhile compared to a similarly capable missile system.

[hider=Things get awkwardly math-like in this hider ARISTO KEEP OUT]
Lead acid batteries have proven capable to achieve the necessary rates of discharge, but I'm not sure if we have them in the near hundred of thousands of megajoule capacities in compact packages. There's a graph somewhere depicting max energy-densities to discharge-rates of various electrical storage methods I ran into back in 2007, and in summary it isn't really [i]good[/i] (it [i]is[/i] possible, [i]maybe[/i], if your frame is willing to make some pretty huge sacrifices).

The mass and volume requirements of these storage-devices is why after 2006 people started clinging to ETC guns to vastly improve burn-rates of otherwise normal shells, as it was about as close to a railgun as most fictional tank designs would get while only sacrificing a bustle-rack's worth of ammunition-capacity. Plus such high bursts of raw-energy could come in handy if you had an electric auxillary drive or some electronic countermeasures.
-So a frame with railguns or ETC would have a nifty [i]sprint[/i] feature, maybe, which is nice.
-ETC was also nicer on tanks since it could almost keep up with the demand for firing 20 rounds in under a minute

The Navy likes railguns because their nuclear boats generate enough spare power to charge a shot every 5 seconds [i]in the gigajoule-range[/i] and probably have enough spare storeroom-space to fit enough capacitors for a 5 round burst. I just kinda wish they'd opt less for "KE weapons are the future" and "muh magazine capacities" and start tackling how to lob some 'ol fashioned explosive ordnance out of those things.
-5" guns are still a thing because a large number of fire missions are simply for smoke and flares, two things railguns aren't even [i]trying[/i] to do, yet. [i]Kinda wishing they would[/i]. Or at least nuclear artillery... something...

Kinda hinting we may run into large railguns and stuff, just not in the swing-arms of the lowest common denominator of the battlefield.
-We are, after all, just scaled-up infantrymen in the scope of the RP, and is a bit much to expect the equivelent of one-manning a crew served weapon by ourselves, on foot. Even though people kinda have, for short periods of time, when running on adrenalin...
[/hider]

I'm a bit all over the place with this, and it's more of a ramble than anything important.

But in summary, since this isn't an energy-centric alt-future full of readily-available energy, energy weapons probably aren't on the menu for the theme unless pressed through with sheer determination and cold hard math and sciencing the shit out of the problem.

>Still looks for an excuse to press the issue with math and science