HPM weapons

Dang! You beat me to it! I was about 1/3 of the way down the thread before it hit me - at least I'm glad I'm not the only one who bit! ;-D

Cheers! Rich

Not enough women to go around. ;-)

Tim

-- "Librarians are hid> > On Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:34:05 GMT, D from BC

The best the F-22 can do so far is shown here:

"It also has a radar that could be used to concentrate its transmission power strongly enough to jam air defense radars and communications links. With the addition of other equipment in 2010, it should be possible to focus enough energy into a beam strong enough to damage the electronics of enemy sensors."

Damaging the sensors is one thing. Focusing the radar beam enough to fry the electronics of a enemy fighter or missile 100km away is not possible.

However, claims it can do so are spread around the web hopefully to reduce the chance the program will be terminated at a low number of planes.

Regards,

Mike Monett

Power, not energy. The pulses last nanoseconds, extracted from modest sized capacitors.

John

Aviation Week and Space Technology, Jan 22 issue, starting on page 42. The pic of the BAE switch is on page 44.

John

HPM sources have been in development for decades. HPM hardening, also called NEMP hardeneing has also gone on for decades. HPM has been evaluted for mine clearing as well as frying front end communcations systems. The pulsed power supply is the core of either the rf HPM or laser "HPM" as you trickle charge a "marx BanK", then you breakdown the "switch" and you get a surge of prime power.

Very interesting physics and control electronics in these beasts.

Marc

Jamie wrote in news:d6ZPh.119$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe12.lga:

an RF "beam" is not going to be a tight spot like a laser beam.any reflector that can reflect the RF "beam" is going to be so big that it would not fit on an aircraft,and would be similarly inappropriate for other vehicles.Also,unlike light,RF energy will have "edge" effects,and thus leak around your reflector.RF cannot be treated exactly like light.

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

the metal shielding is also going to act like an antenna,absorbing some energy,conducting MW energy to any crack or opening. There always has to be some openings and ports.

"Rich Grise, Plainclothes Hippie" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@doubleclick.net:

well,there ARE those pesky laws of physics.

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

PEAK power,short duration.

Tight is a relative term. The 1mm circle from your red laser pointer is a good 1500 wavelengths across. It can get much tighter. (Even sloppy CO2 cutting lasers, at 10um wavelength, get a kerf of 0.004" (100um), or 10 wavelengths. Admittedly, not necessarily at a few hundred meters distance from the nearest optics.)

There's no reason, then, that microwaves at perhaps 10GHz can't be focused into a beam (or at least a spot) of perhaps 300mm, which easily covers the surface of any general aviation or fighter or bomber aircraft several times.

Sure it can. Light is just RF that thinks it's really fast (high frequency). The only difference is what model (particle/optical or wave) you use to illustrate it on any arbitrary scale.

Tim

-- "Librarians are hiding something." - Steven Colbert Website @

Antennas are reciprocal. So why don't we have radio astronomy antennas that can give as good resolution as the Hubble telescope?

Regards,

Mike Monett

Limit of diffraction.

John

I'd mention the snappy new superlenses, but they're still at the "lab curiosity" stage.

Mark L. Fergerson

Nows we are getting somewhere. Beamwidth is inversely proportional to antenna size.

How do you fit that on the nose of a F-22? Regards,

Mike Monett

It doesn't take .05 arcseconds to disable an incoming missile, especially when you have 10's of gigawatts to invest.

John

They do, and maybe even better, given the wavelength of the incident radiation. :-)

BTW, this is another reason to put bases on the moon and stations at LL4 and/or LL5 - Very Long-Base Interferometry. :-)

And imagine the accuracy we could get with a Mars parsec! ;-)

Cheers! Rich

If we got rid of the idiotic space station, and dumped the Shuttle program and its replacement, we could afford to do a lot of serious science.

John