Lunar Hammer, Part 2 - Lunar Hammer is...

...a heavily modified Galilean Cannon. Disappointed? Give it a chance, it can be extraordinarily useful. It may be a simple beast but it can be powerful, and it isn't limited to the vertical:

This configuration occurred to me thanks to an erroneous comment from a member of the BIS technical committee. With the revelations of the last post, I can have cake and eat it. It can work an angle, and is actually better suited to take this approach given the variation in size of each object in the stack that need to be accommodated by the rails. This can be seen in the concept diagram below:

The Hammer design shown here is at the top end of the size scale, based on launching a projectile 1kg in mass. If it's half a kilo, everything is halved. I will describe the relevant features in my next post, and why it looks the way it does.

The independence of Escape Velocity from angle of projection means that we can cap the velocity at 2.4km/s. The least known aspect of my research is the speed of force transmission up the stack. What will be the instantaneous velocity between the Carrier (the second element in the Stack) and the Projectile? It will be a fraction of the outgoing velocity, and it may or may not exceed the speed of sound in the rubber. If the superball rubber (by which I mean Wham-O's proprietary Superball formula from the 60's) has a typical s.o.s similar to a figure for a butadiene I found on the web, it could be around 1200m/s. This, at a guess, is already close to what we need, and I would think it possible to find a substitute material or a stiffer rubber formulation that is well in excess of this number.