EMP Weapons

Skyfall said:
EMP could be useful, but not really as a large scale weapon of attack in cities, best case scenario in a war you want to eliminate the enemy but leave their infrastructure intact, EMP does the opposite, it eliminates the infrastructure and leaves the enemy intact.
Click to expand...

This is completely true and why cehmical and biological weapons, especially refined ebola style viruses that swiftly burn out make sure good weapons.
Oddly some signed treatys and convensions seem to prohibit their manufacture, so we'll talk nothing more about them.

Are their working examples of large scale EMP weapons? or are we talking about detonating nukes in the upper atmostphere for the side effect?
 
firstborn said:
I guess my point is that an already week signal may be adequately attenuated by bricks and mortar, but for the purposes of the fictional EMP weapon of this thread bricks and mortar aren't likely to be much of a barrier.
Click to expand...

I think you might have mis-understood. An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse (Im sure you kow this but bear with me). This electromagnetic wave has to be of a certain frequency so that it will couple with the target you are aiming to hit.

The reason that a lot of equipment will die is that if the pulse is of a certain frequency it will couple into the mains, as electric cables tend to be really long and therefore cause a huge mains spike and kill stuff.

To generally kill more than just mains connected stuff, you would have to generate a pulse which is a broadband frequency pulse (ie as wide frequency spectrum as you can) so the higher frequency stuff can couple into the smaller portable stuff. EM radiation transmits (resonates) and couples most efficiently at a 1/4 wavelength hence the need to be broadband, the further away it is from 1/4 wave then the less efficient it is at transmitting/coupling to the point it wont do it at all..

As the things you are aiming to damage would be frequency dependant, the bricks and mortar you were talking about is completely relevant.

As an example, if you created an EMP at 1800MHz it would blow the crap out of the 1800MHz GSM mobiles and the base stations near by but your computer at home plugged into the mains would be ok. Given enough distance your phone inside your house might also survive.
 
Bear said:
......
Click to expand...

The only point I'm arguing against is that "Bricks and mortar provide more than enough attenuation to any EM pulse". They may attenuate a significantly weak signal to render its purpose useless, but a significant component of a broadband high power (at the wall) signal may have more than enough of an effect.
 
Last edited:
firstborn said:
The only point I'm arguing against is that "Bricks and mortar provide more than enough attenuation to any EM pulse". They may attenuate a significantly weak signal to render its purpose useless, but a significant component of a broadband high power (at the wall) signal may have more than enough of an effect.
Click to expand...

How are you going to do that without a nuke as a power source?
 
You totally can protect against data loss through EMP attack.

Step 1 - Buy IBM SAN Volume Controller.
Step 2 - Set-up Global or Metro mirror to your remote cluster a long way away for rapid data recovery, or site failover (possible in a just few minutes including booting the backup servers). Or maybe consider a split cluster for High Availability.
Step 3 - Set-up your Tape backups.
Step 4 - Profit.
 
Meaker said:
-30dB, let me put that into perspective for you....
Click to expand...

Is that in relation to brick/mortar? Attenuation is more in the range of -5dB to -8dB @ around 1GHz through 10" brick. Reinforced concrete would be another matter due to rebars etc.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom