Man, this is cool, and something I’d never even heard of. This builder uses a powerful induction coil to launch a model rocket.
In the early ’80s, when I was a member of the L5 Socieity and went to all the conferences of the time on commercial space dev, everybody talked about mass drivers, the electromagnetic catapaults that could be used to hurl moon material into space to be processed for colony building. This desktop induction launcher works on the same principle. When you watch the videos of the launch, you’ll get an idea for just how powerful one of these coils can be.
[Via DIY:happy]