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My father was one of the zillions of arms industry people paraded past the Reagan star wars rail gun that would do 10,000 fps.
Gun powder cannot do that.
Later, ~ 1994 at an amateur lab in a warehouse, some guys had some surplus rail gun capacitors. These were high Voltage, high capacitance, low ESR [effective series resistance], and low ESL [effective series inductance].
At first they tried to make steam guns, but eventually the crowd pleaser was magnetically shrinking coins. By the time I got there, they had welded together a shroud to keep bits of flying wire from shooting holes in things. So I shrunk some coins. It sounded like dynamite. The same magnetic field lines crowding and pushing out on the conducting puck in a rail gun can be used to push in on the sides of a coin.
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