So Ai-chan's story in Starship Supermarket involves the supermarket crew building a coilgun through ripping out speakers and assembling them and a steel pipe onto a nail gun. This then becomes a short range nailgun coilgun to fire at bugs and food. Ai-chan takes the following into consideration: 1) The battery is enough to fire several clips of nails, with Hitachi themselves claiming it can fire up to 1,100 nails per charge. 2) The nailgun used is the Hitachi-NT1865DMA cordless, brushless motor, compressed air operated. 3) The nailgun does not use gas canister or pneumatic cord 4) The nail used is 15-gauge 5) The safety stuff in front are pulled back, allowing the nails to shoot in the air. 6) This is not a solenoid powered nailgun These are related videos: Now Ai-chan's questions to those who use nailguns: 1) How ferromagnetic are the nails? Ai-chan doesn't mean how magnetic, but how good are they at responding to magnetic fields 2) How heavy are the nails? 3) How far can the nails go in the air? 4) What's the fire rate if you keep the safety off?
1 - that would mostly depend on the material that was used to make the nail. Magnetic effect doesn't work on some materials 2 - shouldn't be that much heavy. Weight should be around the similar weight of 3 mid size nails. 3 - From the video, it seems like got something like a 'mode' for different speed [in a straight line]. If you shoot it upward, air pressure would be high, so the speed would drop by at least 1/3. 4 - Only someone that used it, would know.
Are they in a spaceship? If so, do they even have wood? If not, why would they have nails? No nails means no nailgun. High tech materials would normally be metallic, plastic, ceramic, carbon fibre or some such derivation. None of these would behave like wood. To join them together, you'd probably use glue, screws, nuts & bolts, or studs. Or they may have some kind of high tech self-joining/self-locking feature.
As the name suggests, it's a supermarket turned into spaceship. It's just a normal supermarket, but some alien power turned the entire supermarket building into a spaceship for some mysterious reason. So not only do they have nails, they also have furniture, canned food, fresh food and whatever else you can find in a supermarket.
The nailhead/top would decrease the aerodynamic capabilities of ammo fired by rail- or coilguns I believe, as their ammo tends to be entirely flat from start to end(grooves running along the length doesn't stick out per se). Also, you mentioned them using the nailgun and speaker to make the coilgun ? I'm no scientist, but I do believe they would need someone very knowledgable about how to make railguns or that type of physics in general to even conceive that idea, and then I don't even think they would have an easy time lenghtening the track needed to turn it into a railgun without making aiming with it seriously difficult. Frankly, to me it feels like they would have to rebuild or improve the entire stock to turn it into being able to be pressed against a shoulder for the entire body to keep it steady to even have a chance of having stability with the length of the barrel it'll need. Just lenghtening the barrel would make it so front heavy that it would be inefficient. And even if they wanted to lengthen or extend whatever barrel you could claim it currently has, they would need a workbench with lots of tools to make it possible, and supermarkets don't necessarily have that. Basically to me, interesting concept, but it would require so many tools, so much knowledge and so many skills to even make it somehow plausible, but it would require even more to make it efficient. Whether or not those are realistic to be in a supermarket at the same time is dependant on the author, and whether the author wants to make it realistic or not.
sorry . . . i'm still on the old fashion way. . . the hammer. . . . feels like i'm Thor every time i use it. . .
Hmmm... If it's an American supermarket, they might already sell guns. For supermarkets elsewhere, they can go the flamethrower route, or the airgun route. For the airgun, they just need pipes, marbles/ball bearings, flexible hose and fire extinguisher. For flamethrowers, a modified fumigator, kerosene/methylated spirits/turpentine/alcohol/petrol/diesel and lighters/firestarters should do the trick. Mind you, I've never seen all these things present together in my local supermarket.
I think anyone with an interest in electromagnetic field can at least make an amateurish version of it. After all, the concept itself is not hard to understand, as long as you have encountered the idea somewhere. Youtube's random algorithm makes encountering ideas pretty easy. Yes, they will have to rebuild the entire stock to make it a somewhat long-ish weapon. I'm thinking of it being something like 1m-1.5m long with an effective range of about 200 meters. I justify it by although the accelerator is long, the nail itself doesn't have enough mass, therefore making it an inefficient weapon but they have to use it because they have nothing else. They have a DIY section in the supermarket, which means they will also have plywood/gypsum boards and circular electric saw as well. A workbench can be made from all the tools present in the DIY section. The front-heavy problem shouldn't be an issue, as the length of the accelerator also means the fulcrum point is not in the nail gun, but a bit further along the rail. The nailgun is already fairly heavy. Ai-chan is not sure to include the shoulder stock or not. It's not an American supermarket, so guns are out of the picture. Airgun is a possibility, but not very effective ekusucept at melee range, so that limit their usefulness since you might as well just hack at them with a machete which they do sell under agricultural section. While they do sell kerosene for oil lamps, they don't sell fumigator, so that's out. Thanks for your suggestions. Nai, zombies are fast. They jump, run, sets themselves on fire and pretty much impossible to bring down with a nail gun. Bruce Willis was wrong.
IMO, designing and building a railgun from scratch isn't practical. You'll need to use the excuse that there's someone who has that sort of hobby and successfully built one from blueprints off the internet. As for airguns, before WW1, some European explorers used them to hunt small prey in Africa. Those would be older designs using airpumps rather than modern gas canisters. Which reminds me that there are quite a lot of youtube videos on how to make homemade bows & arrows as well as crossbows. On the less flashy side, there are also useful hunting weapons like darts and spears, dart/spear throwers, rabbit/throwing sticks & boomerangs, slings & staff slings. There's also the good ole bola: just braid a fishing line, then tie the 2 ends to lead sinkers. If your supermarket has a fishing department, these things should be available. Or rather, I remember seeing fishing departments in supermarkets 20/30 years ago, though not in newer supermarkets, unfortunately.