What if you took the principle of magnetic acceleration, created a bunch of acceleration gateways in space, and then shot space trains through it? Have catching gates on the opposite end for the deceleration part.
What's the maximum speed that magnetic acceleration can accelerate an object to in a vacuum before the object is travelling so fast that the magnetic effect can no longer impact upon it as it passes the gates?
I wanna build some fucking space trains. What can I read that's explored this?
the problem would never be the projectile becoming too fast to impart motion onto, just make the gun barrel longer. the real problem is your space gun will be absorbing all those changes in velocity, if it is launching things and adding speed to them, that speed will be taken from the gun, if it is catching things and slowing them down that speed will be added to the gun. eventually your expensive space gun is slowed to falling back into the atmosphere or sped up to leaving earths sphere of influence.
What if you had A LOT of separate small stations and they all only exert a very small acceleration force. This acceleration force is negligible upon each acceleration station but upon the accelerating object they all cumulatively add up. So each station is really only moved a very small amount in the other direction but the object itself is accelerated a lot cumulatively.
good luck getting all the orbits to line up, the path spacecraft take through space is not a straight line, and a spacecraft cannot sit in one place unmoving (bar a select few places which small amounts of force will dislodge them from)