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Build Your Own Tesla Coil
screenbert writes "Ever wanted to keep stray dogs or neighbors from trampling your backyard, but
just couldn't find the system to really deter them? Well this
site shows how they built
a bi-polar Tesla Coil system. I've always loved the Tesla coils on C&C when
they'd zap the units as they went by.
"
I need one of those to keep my roommates off my leftovers in the fridge.
Every college student knows that to keep your roommates from your food, you just poisen some of it, after the first couple of them die, the rest learn pretty quick. It may not be high tech but it gets the job done.
And I thought watching a bug zapper was entertaining!
Make yourself a Pedestrian Electro-Bastard Array!
If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast.
How to have fun in a computer lab #14:
Two words: Tesla Coil
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Any other pyros out there really really envious right now? I'm about to turn traitor any second. Matches just do not compare
That's actually a picture of his server after this story was posted.
I can see this causing brown outs if you do this in the local small town. Complete with stories of UFOs etc.
Musn't upset the town fathers.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That having been said, Google cache
"Hey everybody! Watch this!"
Egads. I guess these are the guys who always ignored the "don't try this at home" warnings, huh?
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Much as I hate to reply to a troll, there are a few people who might read this and believe it!
While there was a harmonic device which Tesla built which could indeed shake a building apart, this was not his intent with the Tesla coil.
His plan was actually distributing energy on a large scale without wires. Take a look at his Pike's Peak project.
That picture of the "Man of Great Potential" is really giving me strange ideas.
I believe you are incorrect. You're talking about the Telsa "Earthquake machine" oscillator, which was a tunable steam- or electrically-powered weight. There's a book about it, IIRC it's called the "Tesla Earthquake Machine" or something like that, and includes plans to build your very own.
Tesla, upon inventing the oscillator, attached it to a bar of the finest steel he could get, and within a few minutes the oscillator had found (been set to?) the resonating frequency of the bar and shattered it. Tesla then attached it to a pillar that was driven into the earth at his laboratory [keep in mind that his lab, and several other New York buildings, were built on a patch of sand, IIRC] and turned it on. He took a crowbar to it when the buildings across the street started to shake.
Keep in mind this device was no bigger than a 2-liter pop bottle, if I rember correctly.
The Tesla Coil is a high-frequency, high-voltage transformer, and shares few parts or concepts with the "earthquake machine."
This
Anyone that can "walk around" with a 3000 lb power transformer, two 12 foot conducting towers, and generating 40 KW of electricity probably doesn't need the help of a tesla coil to be annoying.
The control system and power transformer together tip the scales at roughly three thousand pounds.
Makes this a little difficult on the mobility side, but hey, with one of these, the world is your playground (or you'll just be really lonely)
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
Before Slashdot posts stories like this, they should very expressly warn their readers about the dangers inherent in such projects. Although a simple Tesla Coil is not particularly dangerous, if a Tesla Coil is turned into a mobius strip and enough energy is put into it, a electrotemporal-topological disaster can result, plunging an area up to 5 kilometers around it into Dirac Space.
You can find more information about this strange and dangerous phenomenea here .
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Where did you ever hear that?
Seriously, Tesla coils really were always about arcing electricity. His original idea for Tesla coil usage was wireless transportation of electricity. Basically, if you crank the volts enough, you can arc across the atlantic ocean. At least that was the idea.
Yes, Tesla also did some studies on structural harmonics. And yes, he did the structural harmonics work long before he came up with the idea for Tesla coils, but aside from being the brainchild of the same man, the two were never linked in any other way.
Also, I must say that I more enjoyed his work on structural harmonics. Shaking bridges and collapsing condemned buildings was all well and good, but the nutball had the idea that he could crack the earth in half if he used enough dynamite and timed it correctly. Good thing he didn't have the resources to try that one out. Tesla was crazy enough try it, just to see if it would work.
does someone have a mirror of the movie they had on their site or did the just remember to remove the movie before the onslaught of slashdotters
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
I'd leave it off by default, and just flip the switch every time some kid wants to sell me cookies. Hah!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
My father found an old Popular Electronics (or something) magazine from his hobby days with some plans. We hand wound the voltage stepup coil, made condensors out of perspex plates and tinfoil, and borrowed a Ruhmkorff Induction Coil from school.
The unit was powered by a car battery and could spark about an inch and a half.
We put two bent copper rods for the spark to jump between. The spark would run up and down between these rods like old mad-scientist movies.
It felt pretty cool to put a finger in the spark and watch it jump straight through, with only a weird tingling sensation.
Aaah the electric shocks, the smell of ozone, the burns and blisters - God I miss science fairs.
Was it just me or were prism tanks ridiculously powerful? Once I had 20 or so grouped together, there wasn't a thing my soviet enemies could do to stop them. Infantry just died, buildings went even faster, and their range is so great that Apocalypse Tanks just got beaten like drums before they ever got close enough to fire. Yuri stuff was the only thing that ever came close, but even then it couldn't cut it. Anyone care to enlighten me as to what defense my compatriots and I were overlooking?
Dyolf Knip
Did anyone else notice that if you click on one of the three pictures at the bottom of the pages, it brings up a new page with that image? Try clicking on segments of that image... Interesting way to have an online photo-album. Seriously, has anyone else determined what relevence the colors have to the pictures, and where you click versus what type of image you get?
.noitacidem deen uoy siht daer nac uoy fI
Nothing says "a mad scientist lives here" quite like having one of these running.
~Philly
If you like liked this artice, you'll love :
;-)
http://www.lod.org
http://www.lod.org/electrum.html
http://www.lod.org/electrum/electrumpics.html
You could avoid being hurt by the (insert really big number here) volt potential difference by wearing a coad of chicken wire. The charge collects on the outside, keeping you safe on the inside. (No, it doesn't need to be grounded, and I know it's called SHIELDING.) Just be sure to ground it before you step out though, or you could get a very *shocking* experience.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
it's a site map. Ingenious!p .html
http://www.edm.net/~jwilliams/Site_Ma
.noitacidem deen uoy siht daer nac uoy fI
that's what it looks like when i beat off in front of my computer for two hours at internet pr0n.......... :)
These devices aern't as cool as I had heard of. I was half-way through building one of these things when I realized it wouldn't skeletonize anybody that came within 10 meters.
Whoever modded that post redundant does not understand the difference between what a tesla coil does to a person and what it would do in a computer lap. 3 letters-- EMP...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Look here, and at the links within:
http://www.hills2.u-net.com/tesla.htm
So when given enough time to have 2 dozen of them clanging around, they really and truly are unstoppable? Good job on the beta testing, Westwood.
Dyolf Knip
Duh, that's why you build the nuclear power plants.
So, this is a great idea, and a cute trial.. but you're never going to get a tesla coil that can really injure people
Yeah, but I bet it will keep the neighbor's cat from pissing in my flowerbed.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
C&C Music Factory? What?
and theres a damn good reason its 100ma,
... assuming you DONT want to kill stuff :)
(from Electrical Saftey Engineering 2nd Edition)
Physioligcial Reaction to Current
3-5 mA Barely Perceptible
35-50 mA Extreme Pain
50-70 mA Muscle Paralysis
500mA Heart Stoppage (books word not mine)
Besides, dialectric strength is like voltage*thickness right? So a high current would be a waste of electricity
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
So if we can't actually hurt someone it's useless?
Hmmm, Somebody has issues...
I stole this Sig
Comment removed based on user account deletion
#2 Video tape it and sell it to a Japanese game show so they can place bets how long it will take you to die.
Tournament Management Online &
Good thing he didn't have the resources to try that one out. Tesla was crazy enough try it, just to see if it would work.
And brilliant enough that it just might have...
I would like to politely remind you that resistance causes a voltage drop but no change in current :) You could concievably suck up all 100ma and be in ALOT of pain :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Now This guy seems to understand Tesla coils nicely, in fact he is trying to build a 100kva Tesla coil for his next show (he does his thing at Burning Man festivals) , check out the movies
i swear he's mad,
cool
but mad
Apply Insanity Sauce generously and even the local mongrel will steer clear.
As somebody who has built several tesla coils, I though I might be able to provide some information on this topic. A tesla coil is basically a high frequency transformer. They come in two varieties, traditional and solid state. A schematic for a traditional tesla coil can be found here. The main for a traditional tesla coil is usually a neon sign transformer, or NST as we call them. The capacitor is often a milspec jet engine ignition capacitor or a leyden jar made out of beer bottles. Solid state tesla coils are similar, except they use a less powerfull main transformer and use a flyback transformer (found on most tv's, although flyback's from the 50's and 60's work best, as they don't have as many safety devices) as the resonator. Just be forewarned, the information on the site I linked to is about 5 years out of date.
There's no sig like SIGSEG
>10,000 volts is the right sort of voltage to be
>able to shoot a beam of tesla lightning about 20
>metres.
Uh... not quite. It takes about 2,000 volts per centimeter of air that you want the current to flow through. I have a 15,000 volt transformer and it can create arcs around 3 inches or 7 1/2 centimeters. To get 20 meters you'd need about 4 million volts. (20m * 2000 V/cm = 4E6 V)
----- "I'm still sane on three planets and two moons."
i take no credit for this, this is from UPL18, written by Jolly Spamhead, http://phonelosers.net In this article I'll show you how to make a very effective modem killer weapon, especially on crossbar phone systems (CPS). I take no responsiblity whatsoever if you kill yourself or get hurt in an attempt at trying to do this fucked up trick or for some reason it just doesn't work anymore as I haven't performed it since early 1998. A great person once said it is never too late to pass infomation on...so on wit the show bitch! What the fuck is this strange device? It's a Tesla Coil! Concentrated static electricity you f00l! The Tesla coil when properly used will generate litrally thousands of volts at very low amps. That just happens to be the right current to bake silicon chip cookies over a open camp fire strumming Bodycount songs! Construction: 1. Disconnect all phones from your line. Disconnect answering machines and any data-transmission devices. 2. Run a test on the coil and disconnect nearby grounded objects. (Lamps, stereos, TV's, Sex Vibrators...) 3. Connect one phone that you would'nt mind maybe having to sacrifice for the act of revenge.(It usually doesn't destroy phones, but people have told me they have seen them melt off walls!). =) 4. Connect iron or steel balls to the green and red wires of your connected phone (aka the biege box wires that go on the clips.) It and 12 terminals of your phone. 5. Put on a pair of thick rubber gloves (EXTREMELY IMPORTANT STEP HERE!) 6. Charge the coil to at least 10,000 volts. An ideal setting is around 18 to 19 thousand, but 10,000 will jump Ma-Bells line surge protectors and that's what we are trying to do here. 7. Hold metal balls in your left hand. In your right hand hold your cock and proceed to stroke firmly until climax is reached, then lick up the mess! Just fucking around here again! =) Just Make sure the balls don't touch each other ok? Great! When the coil is fully charged, clip the steel ball connected to the red wire to the base of the Tesla coil and hold the other metal ball as far away from the coil as you can. 8. Dial the offending modems phone number (OCI's fax # would be nice). 9. When you are connected, move the metal object connected to the green wire within 2 feet of the coils top. Don't be afraid of the little bolts of electricity shooting from the top of the coil...its only the stuff that hits poor hopeless saps like Amit Grover AKA Foreskin boy every once and awhile. 10. Within 3-5 seconds a huge bolt of lightning will shoot forth at the phone from the hand you are holding the balls in. Hold on tight cause it will feel like a load of ants! You will immediatly hear many strange occilations to the carrier on the phone. The last noise you will hear from the phone is a pop! That is the last cry of agony as the modem shuts down This is guaranteed to fry the modem, the computer and any peripherals connected to it like Scanners, printers, 8-ball porn cams.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I would be polite to point out that you are building a voltage divider. with zero volts at ground. 10,000 volts at the terminal. There are two resisters, the person (R_p) and the air (R_a). So the current I=10,000/(R_p+R_a). If we model R_a as linear with distance, then for some proportionality constant (c), R_a=c*x.
So then, I=10,000/(R_p+c*x).
I->10,000/(c*x) for large x,
and I-> 10,000/R_p for small x.
This is neither an exponential drop off nor a constant current.
The Allies do admitedly have the upper hand in the late game, but the idea is that if you just sat around and let the Allies build up like that without having an adequate defense planed, you deserve to lose anyway. In all likelyhood you already effectively lost the game earlier on, and the Allies are just toying with you by building up a huge army.
As for Yuri, the Flying Disks will slaughter Prism tanks. In sufficient numbers they'll take out rocketeers too. The Flying disks are probably the most unbalanced units in Yuri's Revenge, contested only by Boomers, which can also probably deal with Prisms on a water map. If you can take advantage of terrain then a Magnetron at the top of a cliff can grab a Prism tank before it gets in range I think. And again, by the time the Allies have built that many Prism tanks Yuri should have a Mind Control ready.
The moral of the story is if you go all defensive, the enemy will build a huge army and crush you. Of course if you don't build any defenses the enemy will do a rush with a small force and wipe you out at the begining. The best games i've ever played involved medium sized groups of 8 - 10 units, and would often be decided when a single tank survived to get inside the enemies perimeters and start reaking havoc.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I've wanted to build a Tesla coil for years.
:).
The reason I still haven't is that they're about as good for electronics and magnetically sensitive media as a lightning strike. The intermittent arc gives off *vast* amounts of RF crud, which will induce currents in just about anything electronic and degauss anything magnetic nearby.
Your computer case will not save you if your machine has drive bays. All connected wires (modem, network, power) will also act perfectly well as antennas penetrating the case's shielding.
Credit cards and bank cards generally aren't shielded at all
Set up those Faraday cages before building anything like this.
Finnaly someone showed this to the public. It really is an old idea, but in the world we live now, it has some interesting effects. I was tracing the development of such toys based on Nikola Tesla's ideas for a while now and found a lot of impresive stuff. Just do a quick search on "telsa weapon" and read some of the articles that pop up. One of the most scary is located at http://www.peg.apc.org/~nexus/bskies1[2345].html (yeah thats five parts of it). Hints about causing earthquakes with similiar technology as described in the story above. Other interesting sites are Gravity gate http://www.starwon.com.au/~rayd/index.htm, Kelly BBS www.kellynet.com, Tesla web ring and similiar. If you like to search a lot, you may even find hints about top secret super high tech weapons developed in Russia for knocking out satelites, which are also based on one of the Tesla's ideas and are powered by also originaly Tesla's work, improved by dr. H. Moray, the so called Moray generator. Basicaly you just set up an antenna and some electronic wizardry and you have electricity. Sounds too good to be true, but there's a story on the kellynet about how Tesla made an electric car powered by such a device.
:) And the next thing would be to cover my house entirely in somekind of conductive mesh, to make more or less effective faradey cage. I feel like protecting computers and other electronic equipment will be big bussiness in the next decades.
Back to the EMP stuff...does anyone have some nice information about project HAARP and similiar "experiments" all around the world? I heard somewhere that US military already developed their small EMP "bomb" for knocking out "e-criminals". I would like to take a look at one of those toys
Does it go on forever?
A voltage divider consists of a single resistor in series with one resistor or two resistors (in paralell) ... definatley not the situation here.
...
What I think you are thinking of is a current divider, which is two paralell resistors, in which case (H1= resistance of human, A1=resistance of air) the equation for the current in the HUMAN would be Ih=A1/(A1+H1). Nope you didnt read that wrong, the current thru you is a function of the resistance of the AIR.
Which could be quite dangerous if you offer less resistance then the air
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
One hopes that the above poster is intentionally posting pseudoscientific nonsense... but a few people seem to have taken it seriously... so...
.1 Amp. That will stop someone's heart.
While these Tesla coils are probably harmless, to do damage to a human you need not 100 amps, but less than
Furthermore, let us say that you want to put 100 amps into something from 20 meters. First of all, 10,000 volts isn't anywhere close (you calculations are way off - in fact, they are sheer nonsense!) A few megavolts at a minimum would be required.
But... as far as power delivered to the load... the resistance of the air is uninteresting. Once the arc starts, the resistance drops dramatically in the plasma. Thus one could deliver 100 amps at 20 meters with a lot less power than you calculate.
The statement that electricity naturally flows to the nearest earth is likewise fallacious. Electricity flows (or tries to flow) across potential differences. If you hook one end of a potential difference to the earth, electricity from the other end will certainly try to flow there. But if the Tesla coil is insulated from the earth, the electricity will have no particular interest in flowing to the earth!
All in all... very cleverly stated nonsense.
Naughty of you (or ignorant of you).
The only good weather is bad weather.
As much as I'd love to have plans for one of these HERF guns, I think that it would probably make it too easy for "hardware script kiddies" to then go out and wreak havoc. What I'd really like is a reading list (preferably with difficulty ratings) on what to study to be able to design your own.
Does it go on forever?
You can easily make a Tesla coil if you have an old busted TV to rip apart. In general, the older and bigger the TV is, the better. And color TVs are better than black and white. This won't be a *great* Tesla coil, but it will throw a spark a few inches long and you can do all the standard Tesla coil tricks with it (St. Elmo's fire, etc.) without investing too much time or money.
Yank the flyback transformer out of the TV, and discard all its primary windings. Keep the big high voltage secondary winding (the one with the zillions of turns). It's usually encased in rubber and may look like a big rubber wheel. Its main lead has really thick insulation and connects to the side of the picture tube (where it looks like a stethoscope). The other lead (the ground) won't be as heavily insulated.
The only other parts you need are two NPN power transistors (2N3055), two 5W power resistors (20 ohm and 200 ohm), some wire, and a good supply of DC current (12-24 V). The circuit is a piece of cake. The first time I did it, I put the whole thing together with alligator clips.
This circuit has two primary windings around the flyback transformer core. The power winding is 8 turns, with a tap in the middle. The feedback winding is smaller (4 turns), also with a tap in the middle. The power winding leads connect to the collector leads on the transistors, with the center tap going to the +24 V DC power source. The feedback winding leads connect to the gate leads, with the center tap there going to +2-3 V DC (connect the resistors in series across the DC power to get the lower voltage in between). The emitter leads are grounded.
As current flows through one transistor, the changing field in the core induces a voltage in the feedback windings that turns that transistor off and the other one on. Then current flows the other way, and the same thing happens in reverse. So the circuit tunes itself to the proper frequency. But it also means that the first time you power it up you run a 50-50 chance of connecting the leads to the wrong transistor gates, in which case you get a stable DC circuit. So if it doesn't work the first time, try exchanging the gate leads.
This circuit is fairly well known, and doing a Google search for "flyback" and "Tesla" I found a schematic for it right away. The guy mentions on that page that the transistors get really hot and he is not kidding- they do. Don't leave it running for more than a minute without a heat sink. The RF noise generated by Tesla coils is incredible so expect to generate some interference. They make lots of smelly ozone. And if you let a spark go through paper, you can start a fire so be careful.
If you're lucky you can get 20-30 kV, which throws a purple spark a couple inches. (I only got about 4 kV out of mine- the spark was about a half inch long.) Pick up a neon bulb when you're at Radio Shack- these light up if they're around. The effect on a candle flame is interesting. Don't stick your bare finger near it because the spark does hurt if it hits unprotected skin. But if you hold a metal object and use that to touch it, you don't feel a thing (it's high frequency AC). Cool tricks include having sparks jump from the coil to a metal object in your hand, having sparks jump from a metal object in your other hand to ground (even a lousy ground), and having fluorescent tubes glow softly if you hold them in your other hand. If you touch one terminal of a fluorescent to ground then it will glow brightly between that end and the place you are holding it, like there are Orcs nearby.
And Tesla, himself, was nothing more than a floating head with squid tenticles, IIRC.
If you don't get the joke, just move on.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
In those pics where the arcs are coming off of his fingers, he looks like a sith lord! Lucas could use this and save a lot in special effects! Plus it's REAL, well, excep the pain....
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
The statement that electricity naturally flows to the nearest earth is likewise fallacious.
Yes, as is the assertion that electricity somehow âoechooses a path of least resistance.â This is also an example of the anthropomorphic fallacy â" attributing human-like qualities to something inanimate.
In an electrical circuit, given an electric potental (i.e., a voltage), current will flow through all available paths. The magnitude of the current in each branch is inversely proportional to the resistance (or impedance if we consider more than simple DC) so it can often seem as if somehow those lazy electrons survey their options and decide to take the easiest path.
The problem in understanding usually is emphasized when you deal with paths of conduction through air or other materials that are normally insulators. The issue here is that the breakdown voltage of air and most nonconductors is very large. Unless the electric field strength exceeds this threshold then the material is an insulatore. In these cases there are no alternate paths, except for the unwitting human who happens to come too close, and gets a shock. So it's no so much that his body formed the path of least resistance; more like he formed a path period where before there were none.
I give up, I dont think arguing is going to get us anywhere :) I propose you test your theroy its not dangerous. If you live, shoot me a line :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Hm.
I'm always wary of these sites. They show all this electricity zapping round, and guys with electrofingers.
Only problem is this: Unless a tesla coil is specifically built for this purpose, the skin effect does not work on telsa coils. You actually cook your organs.
I think it's highly irresponsible to blaze things like tesla coils.
I've built one, I've used one, and had an enjoyable time, but safety must be the first priority, not pretty pictures.
For more information about the dangers of tesla coils, Here[Chip Atkinson's Safety sheets]
I always thought getting Peter Cushing for that role was a masterstroke. Too bad he barely spoke two lines in the whole movie.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I built a medium sized Tesla coil for a school project. I put it in my car the night before and someone moron my complex parked next to me and thought it was a bomb.
I was awoken by a phone call from the police at 1AM with no less than 4 police cars and 3 firetrucks in my condo development. They actually were trying to shield nearby condos from an explosion with the firetrucks. The bomb squad was being dispached.
I had to leave my condo in only my boxer shorts and give an oral report on how a Tesla coil works.
I cover it with a blanket now when I move it.
See powerlabs, http://www.powerlabs.org/. Amazing hi-power electrical and other interesting stuff.
Ever wanted to keep stray dogs or neighbors from trampling your backyard, but just couldn't find the system to really deter them? Well this site shows how they built a bi-polar Tesla Coil system
Ofcourse it depends on how the Tesla Coil is feeling at that moment. It might see the dog and think "oh, i won't bother zapping it, life sucks!". On the other hand, it may have a manic episode and send out little zaps to make the dog dance! (Dance Doggie! Do the Hustle!)
Just for reference:
I was working on building a power supply for a vacuum tube amplifier. This one needed a 300V, 50mA supply. I stupidly got a pinky finger in there and touched the high voltage rail off the last 100uF power supply capacitor. *ZAP* It hurt like a bitch when it happened. Then my wrist was stiff. The next day my pinky finger was numb, and stayed numb of a week.
That's not a Tesla coil, he just living inside one of those Van De Graaff generator-globes
If you are interested in the picture on the website, here is an additional photograph of Tesla himself in the same pose, only his coil is giant-sized, and the arcs fill a warehouse. He is sitting reading a book under the giant coil with the million-volt sparks fly overhead.
Note that for this photo to work, it had to be reexposed several times for all the lightning forks to be catptured (and he sat at the end).
Picture of Tesla under his giant active coil
The noise genereated from the coil in the photo could be heard 10 miles away.
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
Actually, they both share a very important concept-- the idea of resonance.
It's just that the Telsa Coil uses electrical resonance while the earthquake machine sought to take advantage of mechanical resonance.
It has always fascinated me how similar the math is for LCR electrical circuits and spring damped oscillating masses. (I guess we could throw heat loss equations in there as well.) I dont have a strong enough math background to speculate, but I have always wondered if it is because these things are fundamentally the same or if we have just developed a generic differential equation that can be wrapped around almost any process.
Ooops. So you don't want to enter my cube and run your narcware on my computer?
Have a nice day.
should read MILK EXPERIMENT, 15 JAN 2002!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
wouldn't this be really similar to the "zapper" personal protection devices?
A friend of a friend had one of these. Turns out, he didn't have it for self defense. Rather, he wanted to see if it would hurt when turned on his own skin.
His piece of advice? "Don't light a cigarette with it. It sometimes zaps your lips."
Karnal
N. Tesla and T.Edison had quite a rivalry going in their day; Edison of course was the more popular both with the press and the people. This increased the rivalry. Edison prefered direct current electicity, it's a lot easier on incandensent light bulb filliments, reducing mechanical stress (I run my photo enlarger's bulb on rectified current for stedier output and longer life), and wire Henery Ford's home Fairlane Manor for DC. Tesla favored alternating current because it's easier to transport tranformers to increase voltage and reducing I x R losses. If memory serves me correctly Telsa claimed Edison had infringed on several of his patents conserning electrical power transmission.
Actualy T Edison grew up about a block from where I had lived in Port Huron MI (He hated Port Huron), the Train Station where he boarded the train to sell newspapers has been turned into a museum.
I not sure I would classify Edison as a scientist, he seemed more like an experimental engineer or even a hardware hackers than a scientist. Tesla was more of a scientist
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Not necessarily. It depends on all sorts of factors, such as how fast the voltage builds up, the relative leakage of the devices, the capacitance of the devices, etc. You get the idea.
There are ways to help equalize them... for example, put a large resistor in parallel with each gap (same value on each one). This would help to equalize the voltage across them before they flash over - assuming the rise time of the pulse isn't too fast (a *dangerous* assumption).
The only good weather is bad weather.
Good point. It is typically in hundreds of kHz and will cause a *lot* of interference when it is arcing. However, any small amount of nonlinearity in the "circuit" would rectify some of the current, so it might penetrate.
BTW... RF burns are wierd. I once got my finger too close to the output of a mere 75 watt transmitter at a point where the impedance was very high (antenna mismatch), and a small arc burned a tiny spot on my finger - all the way to the bone (a little cylinder of burned flesh eventually fell out)! Ouch! This was at 7 MHZ.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Sorry but arcs are ionized air, there presence indicates that the un-avoidable dissociation of air atoms and one or two of their electrons has became structured such as giong from point A to point B. Air Ionization always happens when the charge density is enough to strip the electrons. the charge density is dependent on the amount of charge and the shape of the charge. that's why point things arc more than smooth things. just becuase the dischrge isn't great enough to be visible doen't mean it isn't there. Power is the product of the charge and the current, voltage alone dosn't make power, it's voltage times current.
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well let's see house current is 117 V rms x 15 A giving a max of 1755 watts, assuming 100% effeiciency to be safe and a voltage of 250,000 volts give a current of .00702 amperes input or 70 mA, and 10mA can be lethal so that seven times the lethal current. So limit the thing to 2 amps input or 230 watts and it'll only hurt like hell and you might wish you were dead. watch out for the ball on top it's a capacitor and will store charge greater than the input if big enough.
If you keep the freq high say in the 30K - 100KHz range, most of the current would skin effect around your body increasing the saftey factor and just burn skin rather than stop your heart.
in actual practice you'll probably only get about 125,000 volts. get out your physics book and crunch the numbers.
It's probably safe to play arround with an ignition coil, I've seen schmatics for real tesla coils in magazines, Popular Electronics I think late 70's.
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there is a why around the problem, given that it takes considerable voltage to throw an arc say 10 M as you said, we don't have to conduct the current through the air because the air has broken down into a conductive plasma so the current can be carried at a much lower voltage. My electric arc weld outputs 12 volts. use the tesla coil to start the arc and once conduction begins the voltage can drop.
Florecent lights work that way, the ballast puts out about 50KV to start the light then drops down to maintain the light
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I have to agree with you, steel wire is a resistor and so is your body, so let them urinate on an electric fence to prove us wrong.
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1-2 sniper- or SEAL-IFVs;
pack of robot tanks backed up by rocketeers;
Desolators backed up by terror drones (Iraq only - deploy one so that he is out of range of the miner's (miners') guns yet covers the resources or exit ramp(s) with the radiation field... if you have to, use flak tracks - 2 TDs and a Desolator each - to rush them past the guns and into position)
infiltrate them (make Yuri's economy work for you) As for boomers... or floating discs, should these take to the air... Groups of deployed GGIs or (against discs)GGI-IFVs do wonders for defense; the robot tank/rocketeer combo mentioned above also helps nicely in pounding them once they're spotted. If you have no destroyers or dolphins, and a sub is pumping torpedoes into your naval yard, just force-fire on the point of origin until the offender comes up.
It's been about a year since i've played the game seriously, so i'm a little rusty, but the counter to the counters:
Although Yuri has a lot of other units that are much more powerfull, the Gattling tank is the most versatile defensive unit he's got. The first thing you should build is a gattling, and then after you've got a miner or two out the dor, another gattling or two. Gattling tanks eat TDs for breakfast. The Desolators can be neutralized by sending the miners after them (once any TDs are taken care of by the Gattlings.) Either the Desoaltor sits there and gets toasted by the miner, or he undeploys and the Gattling goes after him once the radiation clears. And of course gattling tanks can take care of SEAL IFVs all by themselves.
By the time robot tanks show up Yuri should have a force of gattling tanks and magnetrons ready. The magnetrons grab robot tanks. The gattlings (which ate the roceteers in no time at all =) can then chew up the robot tanks while they're in the air, and the gattling tanks plus the few light tanks that are probably around can finish them off pretty easily when they land.
As for the Guardian GIs. They were even more overpowered in the first version, they got toned down with the patches, but they still kick ass. (For awhile though they had the weakness that they couldn't hurt Rocketeers are all, is that still the case or did it get fixed in a patch?)
However in the case of boomers, Yuri shouldn't let the enemy know that he's building them till he has several available. That way one or two can attack the navel yard while the rest stay back and missile anything that stands still long enough to shoot at the first two boomers. If they've got a lot of rocketeers create a diversion elsewhere first, it doesn't take long for some boomers to wreak havoc on a base, especially if the conyard is within range of the sea.
Yuri actually used to be a lot more powerful, but he got toned down a little in the patches. And in the begining he totally dominated tournaments becuase the first two player torunament map was pretty much designed (completly by accident) to be perfect for Yuri. Cliffs in the center overlooking the enemy's base, perfect for positioning groups of gattlings and magnetrons on. An island map with pretty much the entire enemy side in range of boomers. Gem patches that Yuri could plop a miner down next to.
All in all everything has a counter, the secret is to have a wide variety of resources at your disposal and be able to quickly respond to anything the enemy does with the appropriate counter. If done well and you can react faster than them, it results in the enemy feeling like there isn't anything they can do. I _used_ to be a master at that, but i'm probably way out of practice now. Meanwhile while you're occupying the enemy's attention with this, you quietly build up a strike force to suprise them with. Sure there are counters to boomers and disks, but if six of them suddenly show up and start raining death down on your base, some significant damage will usually be done before they can mount a counter-offensive, which is normally enough to tip the game permenatly in your favor.
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http://www.amazing1.com/tesla2.htm
"Tesla Earthquake Machine"
that's the book I meant.
This