That's interesting, I wonder if you could have a hybrid weapon that uses the first stage gas from gunpowder like a normal gun, but uses the rest to drive a cylinder that rakes a magnet down a coiled cylinder to supply the jolt to boost the projectile using EM force?
The advantage would be better efficiency, similar to how hybrids are more efficient than ICE, which are only 35% efficient on a good day.
Hybrids and trains don't get their efficience from the conversion. They both lose a lot in the conversion itself.
They get their efficiency from smoothing out upscs & downs and letting the power source run more steadily and spend more time in it's own sweet spot. IE the ice engine is less efficient when changing and when running at any rpm other than the peak of it's curve. The battery lets the the ice run steady at it's one best rpm and the battery does all the stop & go.
There is very very little opportunity for "flattening out peaks & valleys" in a single pulse, and no chance at all to do it enough times to regain so much energy that way that it more than pays for the conversion loss.
And in any event, coils are just super super fundamentally inefficient at bursts. The term is literally called impedance, because it litetally impedes energy flow. It's similar to resistance and is even measured in ohms. It's like a spring. You put the energy in and it doesn't immediately come back out, it eventually comes back out, slower and a bit less of it than went in. Converted to mechanical energy instead of picked up by another coil or bounced right back out the same wires where it went in and you you almost none of the energy back out.
The advantage would be better efficiency, similar to how hybrids are more efficient than ICE, which are only 35% efficient on a good day.