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Army Creates a Directed Lightning Bolt Weapon
Sparticus789 writes "Army researchers at Picatinny Labs in New Jersey have developed a prototype weapon which uses a directed lightning bolt to destroy vehicles and unexploded ordinance. The weapon works on the premise that 'A target, an enemy vehicle or even some types of unexploded ordnance, would be a better conductor than the ground it sits on.' Are we one step closer to C&C:Red Alert Tesla coils?"
Does NOT work. the car would not be affected enough by that.
This is what I got into science for.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Ordinance = A piece of legislation enacted by a municipal authority; An authoritative order; a decree.
Ordnance = Military weapons, ammunition, and equipment used with them.
What a terrible fucking summary. Also, this has been all over the web for nearly a week.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser
It works by ionizing the air with a UV laser to create a path of lowered resistance for the arc to follow.
This is my dream device. I have sat on my bike, in my car and had someone do something so stupid. Now I can fry the snot outa something and nothing left to say it was me!
With all apologies to Nikola and his 'Death Ray', wouldn't the skin effect of ultra high voltage used for these kind of arcs make this totally useless as a weapon? The bits you want to zap are inside the external metal casing. They are not the easiest path to ground, therefore they are not getting any significant juice.
I'm wondering who will be first to aim the laser at a storm cloud :-P
I remember seeing stories about the anti-vehicle/IED lightning gun back in 2007, maybe earlier. Every single time it comes up, it gets shot down as being utterly impractical. It can't stop vehicles reliably enough to warrant use in a life-or-death situation, and it's a laughably inefficient means of IED detonation (they need to be within arms reach of the bomb to do anything).
And yet the story keeps coming back. I suspect some congressmen just feel that, like the laser plane, this weapon is too cool to give up on.
Lightning normally consists of two pulses, one up and one down. The latter usually contains most of the current, but as it is a pulse with a rapidly rising leading edge, the EM field is considerable. The terms "AC" and "DC" do not really apply in this case.
The significant thing is not so much the frequency spectrum of the pulse, but the actual cross section of the ionised region through which the current is passing. If this is relatively large, the current density is low and a Faraday cage is effective. If it is small, the current density may be so high that the actual resistance of the target becomes important; the heat generated may melt a hole in the target resulting in the penetration of ionised gas into the target and current flowing down it. This explains rare cases where a lightning rod has not sufficiently reduced the potential gradient over a building, and the first strike has blown a hole in one of the conductors and then perhaps jumped into the building and started a fire. (I have seen photos of this effect but not seen them anywhere on the net.)
The idea of a target surrounded by a "dense gold shield" is just plain silly, by the way. All gold is dense...and a thick gold shield would be impracticably expensive. Copper is fine (higher melting point and greater thermal capacity than aluminum) but reinforced concrete with the rebar internally welded together would be much cheaper, more generally effective, and should easily be able to cope with the very limited power available from any human-built weapon.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Years ago a few of us playing with a 500W magnetron did manage to light a small bulb connected to a dipole a few meters away, and deflect the needle of an Avometer with a loop aerial at about 10M. But focussing is a pig, and your claims of knocking out wifi over a mile away with a poxy little 200W is nonsense. There is this thing called the inverse square law. You would be better off with a maser, but even so to do any damage you would need to keep the beam in the same place for quite some time, and with two moving vehicles this will be difficult. Vehicle electronics are rather well protected nowadays, and there are few points you could hit where the beam would transmit significant energy into the ECU. The ECU connections are protected with transient suppressors, and can normally withstand 28V for a while.
You'd do much better with a high intensity cobalt-60 pulse source, but again getting the range without either killing yourself with radiation or having to transport the ass end of a nuclear sub around with you might prove difficult.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
As Max Hastings (UK military historian) observes, the problem with the US military is that they imagine that a sufficiently large and advanced weapon will bring a war to an end quickly. The Manhattan project reinforced this mindset, although the conventional bombing of Japan was more lethal than the atom bombing, and it may merely have provided a pretext for the Emperor to rule that the war should end. Since WW2, the approach hasn't worked. But generals and military bureaucrats are always trying to fight the last big war over again.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The surrender was already under negotiation.
Not by anyone who had authority to surrender. Which makes it a pretty useless observation.