Believe what you want, but showing videos of electrical arc discharge and lens flares caused by diffraction and aberration of light in glass lens elements is not proof of DEWs. As a former electrical engineer working in the power industry, I have seen more than enough arc discharges to know what I saw in these videos is exactly that. It even has the 120 Hz sound to accompany the discharge (120 Hz not 60 Hz because of the way it makes a sound wave is at the first harmonic of the root 60 Hz signal). The Jacob's ladder discharge arc was nice to look at though. They're not that common but they are also not extremely rare. They don't even cause much damage and you can see the line breaker/interrupter didn't even kick with the fault (it kept arcing so no de-energization).
Laser weapons exist, but notice that much of this video was CGI and special effects. When they actually showed a real laser weapon in action, you could not see the beam and it took a long time to destroy the drone's stabilizer. The drone was actually destroyed by the ground and gravity not the laser. There was no spectacularly bright light emission from the area being ablated (vaporized) and it didn't cause flames. Didn't you notice how different it looked from the other examples? Also, 58KW output is impressive, but it's a lot less power than you can get out of a conventional explosive or incendiary device. Lasers aren't magic and neither are microwave signals. We have a long way to go to have death rays, if we can even scale up to that point due to the physics and chemistry limitations involved. And no, a 58KW output chemical or even solid state laser isn't going to cost only $1.00 to use against a target, especially the chemical laser variety which consumes huge volumes of reagents to do its job.
I would characterize this video as propaganda and FUD that is used to distract people and easily spot those who spread it around and whom they associate with. It's a weapon of mass distraction. But as I said, believe what you want. I will remain skeptical and continue to do my own research and work combined with my professional experience to make up my own mind on this topic.
Yep. All the arc clips were of electrical distribution system failures.
And why start wildfires with matches or a lighter when you can shoot your space weapon and do it in style?
They'd probably have better luck with a maser over a laser, it's less affected by atmospheric divergence, has deeper penetrating power and is usually cheaper to build.
They'd probably have better luck with a maser over a laser, it's less affected by atmospheric divergence, has deeper penetrating power and is usually cheaper to build.
I have had some discussion about masers and their use as directed energy weapons here on Poal and formerly Voat. Masers are great for use as electrical disruption weapons, but they have some additional challenges as fire starting weapons than lasers do. Masers output a travelling wave microwave energy that is coherent and relatively collimated. Travelling waves can do some good damage on electrical devices by inducing high voltages that are going to generally be outside the operating limits of the equipment causing failure. But, to generate heat in sufficient energy levels, a maser would need a standing wave resonant cavity such that the constructive interference nodes would cause more local heating than a travelling wave ever could.
The problem with standing waves is that the constructive interference nodes do increase in power, but at the cost of the energy decrease in the destructive interference nodes. Energy is conserved (mostly) in the system so you don't gain more output energy than you started with. Simple physics there. At ~2400 MHz, the node spacing only would be about 12 cm apart, which wouldn't be close enough to collectively amplify the localized heating. Higher frequencies with shorter wavelengths would not necessarily induce heating in the materials they pass through. This would put the effective operational frequency into a rather narrow band which has too many limitations to be used as effective incendiary devices, not to mention there is no way to setup a resonant cavity anyway.
Microwave energy also tends to be affected by atmospheric water vapor, which is how weather radar works. That would cause stray microwave energy to be directed in all directions which would be very noticeable to any ham radio operator in the are or further if the energy levels are great enough. Somebody would notice that. Additionally, the notion of "microwaves heat from the inside out" is totally wrong. That's not how high frequency EM radiation works. The higher the frequency, the greater the Skin Effect which would make the wave travel on the outside parts of the material it encounters. That's the opposite of inside-out. Not very effective as a weapon with these various issues involved.
Yeah masers could be weapons, but just not this kind of weapon.
Thanks for the great reply, would you know if masers are able to be focused more accurately than lasers? Even the very best optics will result in some pretty drastic divergence at great distance with lasers.
(post is archived)