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Russia Builds Microwave Weapon To Take Down Enemy Drones (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Russian government is backing a military research project to develop a powerful microwave-based weapon designed to take out unmanned enemy drones from up to half a mile away. The country's United Instrument Manufacturing Corporation (UIMC) created the microwave gun specifically to disrupt the electronics of enemy missiles. Using the ultra-high frequency waves the weapon can completely disable aircraft communications, resulting in loss of control. The destructive rays, which belong to a group of warfare technologies known as directed-energy weapons (DEW), will be emitted from surface-to-air Buk missile systems. Military analyst Alexander Perendzhiyev noted that the new weapon would be particularly effective against systems carrying microelectronic equipment. He also suggested that the impact of the radio-electronic waves could even be deadly to humans -- and referred to potential use against terrorists.
I own a "microwave weapon" too. Man, have you tried eating a burrito straight out of the microwave? That'll kill anything!
This Blighter/Evenlode combo is much more interesting: http://www.blighter.com/news/p...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Meanwhile, in Poland, they are developing a charcoal powered weapon. It's not as effective as Russia's microwave weapon, but the drones taste better afterwards.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Buddy, you okay?
For Russia these days, "force projection" literally does mean the Black Sea and Syria.
And in the west democracy mean to let the globalist elite decide your destiny. .. or did the Europeans and Swedes actually wanted it this way? Really? Have anyone asked?
riiiight, or you know they could be getting their consumer drones (that's what they are using, not military) from the same source as their Toyota trucks. Ordered direct from the manufacturer or some middle man.
Part of the reason they are a power despite having a GDP smaller thant the United Kingdom is also part of the reason their GDP is smaller than the United Kingdom in the first place:
They spend a disproportionate amount on military, $98 billion annually. (more than any other European nation)
This combined with the fact that a lot of their neighbours are military light-weights, they have more nuclear weapons than anyone else, and they have an aggressive dictator (posing as elected) who has already invaded two sovereign neighbours and annexed their territory does indeed make them a threat to world peace.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Thanks to the incompetence of the US not being able to figure out the right group to back in Syria, you have drones ending up w/ ISIS, and now the Russians have to figure out a way to get them downed.
A nuke here or there on Raqqa, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, would fix things for good
What do you mean "not being able to figure out the right group to back in Syria"? We (I mean the US) back ISIS and their cannibal associates. Meanwhile, we tell the public we are fighting them. The public isn't sophisticated enough to understand complicated monetary relationships. They don't understand us being allied with the ones who supported the hijackers either. The public is so dumb.
(||) Nehmo (||)
Using "gun director" fire control radar on Navy ships as much as fifty years ago this was possible, the beams from those radars were able to kill birds in flight and easily fry electronics within a certain range. This is nothing new, at all.
I dunno. The Russian have a different approach to these things than we do. If Russian engineering firms were baseball teams, they'd be small ball players and our guys would be sluggers. We tend to swing to swing for the fences and they concentrate on getting base hits.
If the Russians think they're on to something they tend to keep tinkering with it, making it incrementally better. The question isn't whether something is necessarily the most impressive thing in the world now, but whether it is practical and useful now.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
a similar weapon built for use against humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sig ?
does indeed make them a threat to world peace.
You make it sound like "World Peace" is something we've already achieved.
It's not.... if there is no war now, there will be one soon; ISIS and various players all over the world have aligned everything to make sure of that.
$98 billion annually is not very much to spend on military at all. Hell, the US spends more than $600 billion.
Also, if you don't have an advanced highly-thorough military force when war does break out, then being caught unprepared has a high
probability of meaning you become an occupied or subservient country.
"who has already invaded two sovereign neighbours and annexed their territory does indeed make them a threat to world peace."
Are we perhaps forgetting what the US government has been up to the past decade or so (invading 2 countries, black bagging people from Europe, extrajudicial killing via drone, global spying, etc)? Also the US spends more on the military I believe than the next 10 nations on the entire planet combined. I'm all for calling out Russia on their failings, but that conversation is going to get really uncomfortable really quick when someone asks who/what/where the major causes of civilian casualties (directly & indirectly) over the past 15 years have been.
GPS and Radar are both types of communications. If your drone relies on only GPS and/or Radar for navigation, then sending an EMP down your antenna will destroy your GPS radio, your Radar transceiver, and your drone won't be able to find the current position, let-alone navigate to takeoff location.
Also, microwave won't just take out radio receivers and transmitters..... it will also blow out at least any integrated circuits attached to electromagnetic sensors without extreme protections including completely separate circuits and optical isolation (So you blow up the opto-isolators instead), even if the electronics themselves are shielded.
Sensors such as distance/location measurement by definition cannot be shielded, since you need them unshielded to be able to reach the outside world and sense things.
I foresee a big market in ablative popcorn armor.
the japanese worked on a microwave beam weapon in WW2, from gizmondo:
"According to documents confiscated by the U.S. military after the war, work on a Japanese death ray began as early as 1939 at laboratories in Noborito. To that end, the researchers developed a high-powered magnetron that could generate a beam of radiation. Physicist Sinitiro Tomonaga's team developed a magnetron measuring 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter with an output rated at 100kW. It's doubtful, however, that this technology could have worked like the death rays of science fiction. Calculations suggested that the beam, if properly focused, could have killed a rabbit over a distance of 1,000 yards, but only if the rabbit stayed perfectly still for at least 5 minutes."
Umm, the DJI phantom is a modern consumer level drone and makes extensive use of machine vision to avoid obstacles and receive gesture commands from the "pilot". Some claim that Iran spoofed US drone GPS a few years ago. I imagine current military drones are making extensive use of on-board optical sensors for things like horizon detection and target acquisition. Hell, with an accurate on-board clock, the aircraft could determine good-enough position using celestial bodies!
This tech is dirt-cheap by military standards. You can buy pitot-tube speed sensor for your hobby aircraft along with very accurate barometer for altitude. This microwave thing sounds pretty pathetic. Communication of any kind will be a "Nice to have" feature in military drones but, completely unnecessary thanks to modern machine vision.
How did Russia suddenly become enemy #1? The build up propaganda is incredible. They hacked the DNC? Lets stop this war that has been laid out in advanced. PLEASE REMEMBER: US, EU, and Russian military corporations think human life is expendable, this is all marketing.
Do you have to work hard to maintain this level of cognitive dissonance or do you find that it comes easily?
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