HPM weapons

What..shielded electronics don't work??? If that screen on my microwave oven door doesn't cook me at 1kW..., I'm wondering how a microwave burst (from a distant) is going to fry shielded electronics.. D from BC

Ok, how about reflectors on enemy craft, vehicles?

New Intel processor announced, the Triodium series, backward compatible with the Turing Bombe

martin

A recent issue of Aviation Week had some articles on high-power-microwave weapons. There's a blurred photo of a BAE-developed switching gadget that looks like a coffee-stirrer-sized slab of white ceramic with some dark strips deposited on top. The strips may be something like GaAs or possibly amorphous diamond. It's the heart of a 4x4 inch "tile" emitter.

Each tile apparently has a dc/dc converter and a storage capacitor. The cap is charged to 9KV and the strip thing is blasted by a diode-pumped yag laser. It switches on in picoseconds, dumping 30,000 amps (270 megawatts) into a wideband antenna built into the surface of the tile. A plane can be covered with these to form an electronically-steered transmit antenna capable of beam-forming something like 10 GW of impulse RF, with much higher powers expected in a few years. This will illuminate a stealth aircraft 100 miles away, or fry the electronics of an enemy plane or incoming missile. Navy versions could hit terawatts, enough to shut down everything on an enemy ship. There's talk of using these against roadside munitions, too.

google has a lot of hits.

John

Yep, won't knock out a diesel engine

martin

On a sunny day (Sun, 01 Apr 2007 15:27:16 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Not easy to stop the old diesel engine. Low budget low tech guerillas will not even notice. And their cell phones can no longer be tracked. Looks like shooting yourself in the foot if you are a high tech war maker. ;-) LOL

It's pretty hard to get hundreds of db of attenuation in shielding.

So how do you protect your own on-board electronics?

Regards,

Mike Monett

John, a good first of Aprils. There are persistent plans of whatever forces to apply microwave and laser weapons to no avail yet. Never mind if they do not work, at least they are good to get some government money.

Rene

Sure, but whole generations of planes and missiles and avionics would be neutralized by this. That includes all those surplus shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles. And roadside, cell-phone or RF-triggered bombs would be hard to make. Wanna capture a remote terrorist camp? First pass over and zap all the communications and all the vehicles.

Imagine the next step: put these gadgets into cruise missiles or remote-piloted drones; fly them over enemy territory and take out command centers, communications, airfields, power plants, almost anything. The sheer volume of shielding and testing for defense would be impossible to do any time soon. Such a drone could defend itself with the same system, so basically shuts things down until it runs out of fuel.

John

Jamie wrote in news:iAUPh.36$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe02.lga:

what do you expect a reflector to do? HPM is not a laser beam,it's an RF pulse.

D from BC wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

"shielding" is measured in DB of attenuation,it's not a total block of the pulse.If the pulse is powerful enough,it will generate levels of energy high enough to harm the "shielded" electronics.

Mike Monett wrote in news:Xns9905B70182268Noemailadr@208.49.80.251:

didn't he say it was a beam of HPM? then the side lobes would be very far down in power.

Vircator

I have no idea as to the attenuation of say 2Ghz trying to get through some thin ferrous (of better) shielding. Also, isn't a good portion of microwave radiation reflected off metal shielding?

D from BC

yeah, I didn't specify RF or Light did I ? So how do you arrive at light since we are talking RF ? Last time I knew, RF can be reflected .

The F-22 is already flying with some of this technology.

google it, today or tomorrow.

John

Well, yeah, I guess zap guns (or whatever you want to call them - Blasters? ;-) ) have been pretty much inevitable since they discovered radio. :-)

And I'm kinda disappointed - when you started with "...looks like a coffee-stirrer-sized slab of white ceramic with some dark strips deposited on top. The strips may be something like GaAs or possibly amorphous diamond. ..." I was thinking "hand-phaser sized!", but it turns out it has to be bigger than a Howitzer. Sigh. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Wouldn't it be a lot less bloody if somebody came up with something that works like "phasers on stun" - you fire your weapon at the foe, and he goes to sleep for some convenient time, usually until right after the next commercial. ;-)

Then, you take your captives, who are now prisoners of war - they were combatants, right? Anyway, you take these guys and put them in a bed in a nice hotel room and surround him with hookers, and convince him that he's in heaven with the 72 virgins.

Next thing you know, World Peace I! ;-)

And it'd be cheaper than what we're spending now!

Cheers! Rich

It just hit me - the amount of power this thing would need would be astronomical - you might as well use a little nuke, not that there's anything right with that. =:-O

Cheers! Rich