Tutorial: Building a Buckygun

This tutorial leads the user through building a "buckygun", which vaguely resembles an atomic-scale gun. The projectile is a buckyball, the barrel is a buckytube, and the propellant is high-pressure hydrogen. The following animated GIF shows the final result; click on it to see a larger (280KB) version:

Several things need to be said immediately about this animation:

The hydrogen leaks between the projectile and the barrel because of a poor fit between them. I have not yet determined whether this is due to inaccurate physics or simply the barrel being the wrong number of atoms in circumference.
This animation shows a cross-section of the actual design. The actual design has a closed barrel to keep the hydrogen in. Half of the barrel is invisible in this animation, and the operation that caused half the barrel to be invisible also caused some of the hydrogen to be invisible as well.

The tutorial has the following sections:

Basic Scene Editing (83KB)
Editing Molecules (43KB)
Building the Projectile the Easy Way (20KB) or the Hard Way (41KB)
Building the Barrel (127KB)
Loading the Gun (114KB)
Generating the Animation (288KB)