The Mad Scientists Thread Of Things To Make And Do

[tansis]

:lol: jus my evil side surfacing
Please curious readers, feel free to add any thoughts, comments,
or requests for the less well covered topics of an electronics nature.

Coming soon... Brain Implants For Beginners

[zachtheterrible]

how bout those microwave guns?? :twisted: Ya know what would be fun (until u get caught)(or someone gets hurt)(probably don't want to do this), is take a microwave gun, point it out of the back of your car on a freeway, and watch all of the cars behind you slowly come to a stop. (I would never do that)

[tansis]

:roll: :roll: :roll:

Glad to hear that, tis always better to get one of the minions
to do the more mundane job of indiscriminate slaughter.

When I feel the urge to perform such acts I paint faces
on hens eggs and perform the LD50 test with the jolly
little things in a domestic microwave oven.
(LD50 test - the dosage required to destroy 50% of test subjects)

Microwaves may not be the best way to halt a motor vehicle
cleaning the upholstery afterwards is somewhat time consuming :twisted:

[zachtheterrible]

small pulses my friend. wouldnt do a thing to the human, but a couple hundred volts on the sensitive electronics for a second or two would wreak havoc :twisted: . no mess(es)

[tansis]

:P Your compassion does you credit

In April 1999, the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center oversaw the first military HPM weapon successfully demonstrated against electronics on a small scale. The prototype was described at the time as “elegant, safe, well built, and user friendly.” Last October, a Defense Department briefing extolled its ability to stop vehicles at hundreds of meters, and military sources hint that at least three different prototypes are available for what might be one-time use in Iraq.
http://www.arena.org.nz/scifiwps.htm

Most of the details on directed-energy weapons are classified. But there appear to be some reasons the military is focusing on the microwave band
High-power microwave devices are generally used to destroy electrical components, while UWB (Ultra-wideband )devices are more likely to only temporarily disrupt target devices.

Initial versions of directed-energy weapons in the United States and particularly in the Soviet Union also focused on chemical explosions as a potential power source
(Search - "Explosively pumped flux compression generator")
http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technol...51C0A9659C8B63

[zachtheterrible]

the obvious problem w/ microwave guns is that their directivity isn't too great. you knock out your target and the poor pedestrian's digital watch dies, his cell phone dies, and his CD player dies. have they overcome this?

[tansis]

With a narrow enough appature, fired from close range
the beam footprint should not spread to far. As for the
grumbling of bystanders as nearby equipment gets struck
and fizzes into oblivion,the cost of replacing such devices is minor compared to the damage that can result by chasing down a speeding motorist.

One safety item that springs to mind is that of heart pacemakers
some studies will have to be done in this area.

Traffic control lights/ systems may well have to be
hardend against EM radiation as a precaution as well

[zachtheterrible]

yeah, pacemakers. now THATs a problem :evil: . or the cops could just wait till they get someone out into a deserted area, but of course criminals would learn and stay in populated areas. and its impossible to down the power from what i understand in microwaves. if there's not enuf power the magnetron (did i say tha right?) will not resonate. yikes!!

I heard of a little remote control car that could be launched from a cop's car that has a huge capacitor bank and an antenna. when the antenna touches the car, ZAP. i gues that a spark would have to jump from the car to ground in order to make a complete path.

[tansis]

Such a "land torpedo" may prove to be more
of a road hazzard than the speeding criminal.
Must admit though, I like the idea

[tansis]

Brain Implants For Beginners - An Introduction

[zachtheterrible]

ya know, me being into electronics, i'd take that out of my head and put it in my parent's. :twisted:

mom, i need $1000.

yes son

[bmcculla]

One of the crazier energy weapons proposed during the years of the Stratigic Defense Initiative or "starwars" program was the X-Ray laser.

Laser require an energy source to excite the lasing medium. Diode lasers use current, and Flash lamps are fairly common for excitation in other lasers. The X ray laser takes things a little further using a nuclear weapon as the excitation source. Needless to say the thing would be a one use device. A bunch of laser rods would surround a nuclear device. The thing would be launched high in to the atmosphear and each rod would target a different incomming missile. The nuclear device would go off and shortly before the whole thing became a cloud of radioactive gas, a high intensity xray beam would be amplified and focused through each of the rods.

Thankfully the thing was never put into service - exploding several hundred nuclear devices in the upper atmosphear as a defense mechanism has numerous unfortunate drawbacks, most importantly that the resulting radiative materals released would iradiate most of the planet.

[zachtheterrible]

kind o stupid if u ask me. destruct millions of dollars 2 shoot a laser.

for that kind of money y didnt they just develop a reusable 1 powered by solar??

[bmcculla]

Its Kinda hard to beat the energy pulse coming off of a nuclear explosion. The nuclear explosion also creates super high energy radiation like Gamma and X-rays that are tough to create. With a laser you don't just need to create the energy, you also need to be able to deliver a ton of energy all at once. This is very difficult to do and is why laser weapons are so hard to make. A conventional laser that generated the same energy level (if it is posible with current technology) would be HUGE and therefore hard to get into space. There was a famous speech by someone from MIT in which he joked that by the time you had a laser of sufficient power to actually damage a target you could do significatly more damage by just dropping it on them.

[Nigel Goodwin]

I suggest you might like to read the book 'Footfall' by 'Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle' - they use the X-ray laser, and launch a space craft with nuclear bombs - both ideas based in previous military thinking on SDI.