4 ms·

I'm sure someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I think countering EMPs wouldn't be that difficult of a task. Commercial electronics designers have been des

I'm sure someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I think countering EMPs wouldn't be that difficult of a task. Commercial electronics designers have been designing around EMI for decades now. Is it that hard to imagine that actors would put in the effort to shield their devices? A Faraday cage around the electronics would go a long way towards eliminating the effects of an EMP. Even if you couldn't stop the EMP from knocking systems out, you could design them to come back online very quickly, making the EMP a rather expensive temporary measure. For home-made drones it might be effective, but those drones are cheap, and the attackers could always launch more. I just don't see EMPs as posing a real threat to any military. Am I off in my estimation?

CamperBob2 9y ago
No, you're not wrong at all. Most equipment that's designed to hold up under CE immunity testing is not going to be affected by EMP from any source short of a nuke.
- analognoise 9y ago
  I'm not sure where you're getting this info, but it is wicked wrong. Ever seen a carrier's radar hit a drone? And that's nothing compared to NEMP waveforms.
  - CamperBob2 9y ago
    That's not a traditional "EMP" attack, it's a brute-force assault with massive, expensive, and power-hungry microwave transmitting equipment that is never going to be feasible to deploy against drones. It will be effective for maybe 50-100 yards. I can afford more drones than you can afford Aegis platforms.
    - ralfd 9y ago
      Fun Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XbLz0L6UdI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XbLz0L6UdI (Change it to english subtitles)
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    A carrier's radar has a vastly different power budget than basically anything else which is mobile, though. I mean, the AN/SPY-1 puts out a full megawatt of RF power. Even the gas turbine on an M1 Abrams tank, if it was coupled directly to a generator and powering nothing else, can't provide enough electricity to run that. Hell, even if you put two of them together, they'd struggle.
    - madengr 9y ago
      That’s 1 MW pulsed power at a low duty cycle. The average power is probably a few kW.
    - Nexxxeh 9y ago
      Making one-off pulses, could you use EPFCG's? With some sort of directional dish or something? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_comp...
  - arca_vorago 9y ago
    Fun story, according to some whistle-blowers, after we started testing nukes and UFOs started showing up around test sites and and bases, it was our radars that fucked up their nav systems and caused the Roswell and other few crashes that happened in the late 40s until they adjusted somehow and the crashes stopped.
amelius 9y ago
> A Faraday cage around the electronics would go a long way towards eliminating the effects of an EMP. Perhaps if you made the Faraday cage out of superconducting material. But that would currently require huge cooling equipment, so that's not really an option.
- bonesss 9y ago
  Couldn't you make more drones to carry the Faraday cage? ;)
phkahler 9y ago
A faraday cage will block your GPS and any RF communications on the drone. A fully autonomous drone using vision may have some chance but not much. EMI protection in devices is meant for normal interference, not high powered EM stuff.
hengheng 9y ago
Being certified for 10V/m does not mean the device will withstand 11V/m. Shielding for almost arbitrary field strengths is still hard. At 100V/m any short cable will pick up high voltages.
nextlevelwizard 9y ago
EMP in a Whitehouse? OK you get rid of the drones, but you just broke every computer, telephone, camera, and radio on the premises. Hope no one needs a pace maker. What about the next wave of drones coming in 5 minutes later? Now you are in an arms race against amount of drones/waves and speed of your EMP generators to generate deadly enough pulses. I am not at all familiar of what kind of equipment you need to generate EMP that would fry electronics in a building wide scale, but would that make financial sense to include in every building? Would they be fast enough to produce and install before attacks become too prevelant?

CamperBob2 9y ago

No, you're not wrong at all. Most equipment that's designed to hold up under CE immunity testing is not going to be affected by EMP from any source short of a nuke.

analognoise 9y ago
I'm not sure where you're getting this info, but it is wicked wrong. Ever seen a carrier's radar hit a drone? And that's nothing compared to NEMP waveforms.
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  That's not a traditional "EMP" attack, it's a brute-force assault with massive, expensive, and power-hungry microwave transmitting equipment that is never going to be feasible to deploy against drones. It will be effective for maybe 50-100 yards. I can afford more drones than you can afford Aegis platforms.
  - ralfd 9y ago
    Fun Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XbLz0L6UdI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XbLz0L6UdI (Change it to english subtitles)
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  A carrier's radar has a vastly different power budget than basically anything else which is mobile, though. I mean, the AN/SPY-1 puts out a full megawatt of RF power. Even the gas turbine on an M1 Abrams tank, if it was coupled directly to a generator and powering nothing else, can't provide enough electricity to run that. Hell, even if you put two of them together, they'd struggle.
  - madengr 9y ago
    That’s 1 MW pulsed power at a low duty cycle. The average power is probably a few kW.
  - Nexxxeh 9y ago
    Making one-off pulses, could you use EPFCG's? With some sort of directional dish or something? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_comp...
- arca_vorago 9y ago
  Fun story, according to some whistle-blowers, after we started testing nukes and UFOs started showing up around test sites and and bases, it was our radars that fucked up their nav systems and caused the Roswell and other few crashes that happened in the late 40s until they adjusted somehow and the crashes stopped.

amelius 9y ago

> A Faraday cage around the electronics would go a long way towards eliminating the effects of an EMP. Perhaps if you made the Faraday cage out of superconducting material. But that would currently require huge cooling equipment, so that's not really an option.

bonesss 9y ago
Couldn't you make more drones to carry the Faraday cage? ;)

phkahler 9y ago

A faraday cage will block your GPS and any RF communications on the drone. A fully autonomous drone using vision may have some chance but not much. EMI protection in devices is meant for normal interference, not high powered EM stuff.

hengheng 9y ago

Being certified for 10V/m does not mean the device will withstand 11V/m. Shielding for almost arbitrary field strengths is still hard. At 100V/m any short cable will pick up high voltages.

nextlevelwizard 9y ago

EMP in a Whitehouse? OK you get rid of the drones, but you just broke every computer, telephone, camera, and radio on the premises. Hope no one needs a pace maker. What about the next wave of drones coming in 5 minutes later? Now you are in an arms race against amount of drones/waves and speed of your EMP generators to generate deadly enough pulses. I am not at all familiar of what kind of equipment you need to generate EMP that would fry electronics in a building wide scale, but would that make financial sense to include in every building? Would they be fast enough to produce and install before attacks become too prevelant?