I'm trying to draw a picture of a character firing a rail-rifle and it's just not turning out cool enough. for one reason, you don't 'fire' a rail-rifle. It's not a firearm its an electromagnetic-arm so i can't put flames and smoke at the end of the 'not-barrel' Caseless ammo is bad enough, I can't draw casings flying through the air but now not being able to draw exhaust gasses is frustrating. For such a cool sounding weapon railguns are visually anticlimactic. So some basic questions about rail-rifles. first; do they even need a barrel? my understanding is that you've got sequentially charged magnets along the acceleration path accelerating a ferrous slug, would a barrel be necessary? Would it be a detriment because you've got the friction of a ferrous slug in a ferrous barrel in the presence of a huge magnetic field? Wouldn't there be a pretty strong possibility that the slug would weld itself to the barrel? If you didn't need a barrel how do you impart spin stabilization to the slug in the way that rifling does? Would the magnets still work if they were in a helix shape? Obviously the slug could be a finned 'dart' but I can think of several technical problems with that, one being the increased size of the slug. How hot do the magnets get? Is it possible that they'd get hot enough to glow in the visual spectrum? Or would it be the case that because they'd have to be super conductors that they wouldn't get hot at all? Might there be some cross arching between magnets when the weapon is fired that would give me a reason to draw a cool lightning effect? Can you think of any realistic visual effects that would action to my rail-rifle picture? Thanks if you can help.