Ok, after reading some stuff lately, me and my brother have decided to build our own gauss gun. From what i have seen, all gauss guns so far are only single stage (meaning that the projectile is only accelerated my a single electromagnet). I want to make a 2 or 3 stage one. I know that this requires tolerances to 1 nano-second or less, so I was going to make it computer controlled. The problem I think I am going to run into is latency on the memory, and slow processing of the program I am going to build to control it. i am only profecant at Visual Basic and I know that VB has too high of an overhead to be able to process effeciantly enough to be within tolerances. BTW, i was going to use the serial port and a PBasic board. So here are a couple of things I might need help with.

1, is there anyway to sidestep or overcome the latency in memory ? I figured I could just figure out the latency and compansate in my program.

2, is the amount of time between the actuall 'fire1, fire2, fire3' commands (the commands that I am going to use to fire the magnets in the right order at the exact right time) and the time that the magnets actually fire too much for these kinds of tolerances ?

3, Is VB going to be too slow to use. I don't know C very much at all. i can barely get 'hello world' to work what should I use ?

If anyone wants in on this, PM me.