On a sunny day (10 Feb 2012 19:56:32 GMT) it happened Jasen Betts wrote in :
You are confusing 2 things: inductance only is important for very short pulses. A say silicon switch will be destroyed within 1 uS due to hot spots at a much lower current then you refer to, and then will become a very good conductor. (usually those go short). Then the rest of the time, much longer than that 1 us, the copper melting process takes place. Here a low current demo:
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the switch was over loaded, and faulted to the 'on' state. After that the wiring caught flames. This was about 10 A from a small 12 Ah battery. Now imagine a bigger setup. In this case the high resistance of the wiring limited the current. I once did a 2 thyristor tuned 50 Hz (balanced) sinewave converter, in such a setup the reverse voltage swing turns of the other thyristor, and then one thyristor did not switch off... This was powered from the biggest nicad you have ever seen, IIRC 64 V room size, Thyristors are beasts. :-)
And yes, rat-head sucks, and yes, video4linux is a disaster. Linux is heading the mirobug way.