The Remarkable CSS555

Might be useful for one of my high-voltage blinkers. I've been using diacs.

Energy storage goes in steps

inductors caps supercaps batteries burnable chemicals nukes

an order of magnitude per step roughly, except that last one.

Mechanical stuff, weights and springs and compressed gas, fit in there somewhere.

Rotating machines?

Reversible hydroelectric?

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Joe

Gravity?

People keep reinventing flywheel storage systems, but few survive.

The best use is probably for extreme pulse power, rail guns and megagauss electromagnets and such. Some of those go from huge rpm's to dead stop in less than one rotation.

Precisely. The competition is big capacitor banks. Superconducting toroids are often considered, but they are not good for immense pulses.

What are also used are Gyrotrons powered by an explosive-driven pulse generator. This is a droppable round or maybe a missile, so the launch craft can get far far away from the pulse.

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Joe

Dinorwig.

There were rumors of airplanes paved with some sort of EMP radiation tiles that could fling terawatts at another nearby plane or missile.

Australian is working on the Snowy 2.0 system, which was initiated around 2017 to take advantage of daytime generation from solar cells.

Sounds like recycled star wars nonsense from Reagan's time. That included nuclear-bomb driven X-ray lasers.

The issue with a HV blinker is that we don't want to waste many microamps to make a visible flash. UJTs need milliamps. Remember PUTs?

Depletion fets, constant-current sinks, charging a cap, with a diac firing at 30 volts or so, are nice there.

Higher power efficiency would help. 2KV driving a 2 volt LED is fundamentally inefficient.

I'm sure it has been investigated by DARPA as a defense against incoming anti-aircraft missiles, but a terawatt pulse next to the host airplane would likely cripple it as well.

Joe

Yes, and our plane is a lot closer.

The story mentioned some sort of diamond-based material that arced or something to make gigantic impulses. It was in Aviation Week magazine.

A self-destructive drone could make some nasty EMP shrapnel.

Can you provide a link to this?

Oh, yes. Wonder if the flux compressor can also act as a shaped charge to form a hypersonic slug.

Joe

Am 03.09.25 um 00:28 schrieb Joe Gwinn:

Was't that used already in "Back To The Future"?

Gerhard

Putin gets nuked a few minutes later.

It's called mutually assured destruction. Even somebody as stupid as Putin can understand it, even if you can't.

They would have let him have it, without bothering to make any preliminary noses.

The game - as we currently play it - would be over. Precisely how much of modern civilisation would survive isn't obvious. It wouldn't blast us back to the stone age, and we might even be able to work out how to make solar cells again, but there would be a drastic population crash.

Seems unlikely. He wasn't president when it started

Even more unlikely.

Idiots love gold. You can't eat it.

Along with lots of other irrational fantasies.

He hasn't been jailed yet.

A step-down transformer could help.

Post a schematic.