>nothing survives hitting the atmosphere at those speeds because I feel like it
>maybe in 50+ years it will become feasible, even though I've just said it's impossible
No-one is talking about the near future you dumbass, and it's not a fucking raligun.
Are you retarded? The paper written literally by a mathematician details just how the projectile should be accelerated to those speeds.
>literally by a mathematician
So a totally-unqualified person in engineering?
and that mathematician literally has no first hand experience with this shit and is simply dabbling in the theory and is less concerned with the reality
tanks, pressure vessel, all out of composites? hmm what could possibly go wrong
The vision O'Neil had in the high Frontier is that the guns would shoot mined materials from the moon to Lagrange points for processing/construction, which does not involve the atmosphere.
In the book he says that he and a few of his other physicist buddies made a working model but once funding dried up they couldn't develop it any more.