The Coil Accelerator over the mantle…
While browsing the exhibitors at the NRA Annual Meeting in Houston last month on the lookout for new guns, I saw a glimpse into a potential future of projectile arms with the Coil Accelerator.
The 7-pound CA-09 isn’t a firearm according to current ATF regs, and after a one-hour charge can run single shots, five-round bursts, or full-auto out to a maximum range of about 40 feet, all without that annoying and NFA red tape.
Marketed out of the North Shore Sports Club in Illinois of all places, the CA-09 is in low-rate production. In a nutshell, the makers claim it is the first-ever commercially viable electric-powered Coil Accelerator. The basic overview is that it uses onboard electromagnetic coils– kind of like a rail gun but without a sliding armature– to quietly pull nickel-plated iron disks at an adjustable rate of fire.
It is fed from 50-round magazines and can fire about 700 times on a single charge.
When the tech matures in a couple of years to drop that price and raise that velocity, things could get super interesting, especially when you toss in concepts like 3-D printing and file sharing.
More in my column at Guns.com.
