Low Voltage EM FI?

Hello, I want to investigate using a low voltage circuit to induce faults in target… things. In my mind, the schematic for this boils down to having something which can supply power (say, a battery) and a transistor to short out the battery across a coil of some manner.

I know this is doable using something similar to a camera flash capacitor + charging circuit, but I want to be able to do this without relying on charging a capacitor (is there some other way to supply the current quickly enough? surely!). So far, I’m having success generating tiny, tiny pulses, but nothing significant enough to disrupt say, a counting program. I feel that there are many variables in this exercise (power supply, transistor choice, coil design, etc) which all balance against one another, and I’ve simply not implemented correctly.

Does the above sound theoretically correct?
Does anyone have a working example of such a capacitor-less contraption?