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Godholio posted:They're overthinking the problem. Modern militaries are run via networks of systems. It's impossible to shield everything, and anything that gets taken down impacts the overall effectiveness of the system. I wonder why more dictators don't look at their city planners and tell them to put hospitals/orphanages/etc and air defence sites in the same place.
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Oct 26, 2012 17:31
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movax posted:I wonder why more dictators don't look at their city planners and tell them to put hospitals/orphanages/etc and air defence sites in the same place. But, yeah, dictators don't seem to care so much about this as legitimate governments do. Point taken. grover fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Oct 26, 2012 |
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Oct 26, 2012 17:41
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grover posted:I'd hope because they don't want innocent civilians to become casualties in times of war. Just because the US will hesitate pulling the trigger in 2013 for fear of hurting an innocent doesn't mean whoever else is shooting at them will have the same qualms. Russia certainly wouldn't give a gently caress. UK stopped caring about collateral damage in 1941, pretty much the time the first errant Nazi bomb fell on a residential area in London. No guarantee US will feel the same 2020 as in 2013; we might very well go back to how we felt in 1944. Great, I guess I'm just a sociopath then  Or play too much Tropico, one of the two.
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Oct 26, 2012 17:43
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grover posted:Without going into details, yep. How would you deal with power cables coming into the building, though? Even if you've got generators, how do you keep the initial pulse from entering through the power line and blowing up everything that's plugged into a wall socket? How do you protect equipment inside the building from EMP coupled into antennas outside the building while still communicating through those antennas?
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Oct 26, 2012 18:11
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Totally TWISTED posted:Paging kwantam to tell us about electricity and how it works and how he would design such a system. fiber optics and a generator inside the cage
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Oct 26, 2012 18:42
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Optical couplers and vacuum tubes everywhere!
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Oct 26, 2012 18:43
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Highly trained tier one hamsters in milspec hamster wheels.
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Oct 26, 2012 19:00
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grover posted:Still seems like collateral damage to me, though far more preferable since it won't kill anybody. Don't forget about the old people and their pacemakers.
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Oct 26, 2012 19:27
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_firehawk posted:Don't forget about the old people and their pacemakers.
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Oct 26, 2012 19:31
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grover posted:Without going into details, yep. How would you deal with power cables coming into the building, though? Even if you've got generators, how do you keep the initial pulse from entering through the power line and blowing up everything that's plugged into a wall socket? How do you protect equipment inside the building from EMP coupled into antennas outside the building while still communicating through those antennas? Keep in mind, we're not talking about a nuclear level EMP that can affect a thousand miles of power lines at a time and build up terrifying levels of energy. We're probably talking about a rapid potential change of a few hundred volts, tops, with a tiny trickle of current - this thing has to fly around on a not particularly big cruise missile and get decent battery life. That's more than enough to fry anything with a silicon CPU and no shielding, but a big radio system will be built to handle that and more (unless you're very careful about tuning your attack to their antenna), and power issues could easily be stopped by nothing more than a household surge protector. Digital signals can be easily passed in an effectively EMP-proof way with fiber optics or even just little opto-isolators.
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Oct 26, 2012 19:48
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_firehawk posted:Don't forget about the old people and their pacemakers. Or what effect it has when your strike destroys the only two modern life support systems in the country, causing their inhabitants to die. Because of US Imperialism. You murderer.
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Oct 26, 2012 19:55
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grover posted:UK stopped caring about collateral damage in 1941, pretty much the time the first errant Nazi bomb fell on a residential area in London. No guarantee US will feel the same 2020 as in 2013; we might very well go back to how we felt in 1944. Don't even pretend that the US gave two fucks about civilian casualties during any point in the WW2 bombing campaigns. We adopted general strategies that were different from britain's, but that had more to do with our belief that daylight/round the clock bombing could work than humanitarian efforts. If you want evidence for this I'll just point to Hamburg, Bremen, Dresden, and every major city in Japan.
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Oct 27, 2012 00:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:Don't even pretend that the US gave two fucks about civilian casualties during any point in the WW2 bombing campaigns. We adopted general strategies that were different from britain's, but that had more to do with our belief that daylight/round the clock bombing could work than humanitarian efforts.
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Oct 27, 2012 01:46
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The other way to defend against this microwave directed energy weapon is to put up some tall fences / barrage balloons. The inverse square law is implacable and cruel. As the microwave frequency goes up, high power is harder to achieve and the shielding is easier. As the microwave frequency goes down, the diffraction-limited beam size goes up and the power density at a given range goes down. Further, defence against this involves the exact same measures that an air-defence installation would need to not get blown off the air by its own radar. I do see this having a great future against civilian infrastructure (I give it 3 years before the technology is disseminated enough to be public knowledge, 3 years after that for there to be a very bad day for at least one major stock exchange/trading firm's datacentre). I am also dubious of its harmlessness to people, specifically in the form of cataracts from corneal heating at the power densities needed to affect electronics.
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Oct 27, 2012 04:24
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Depending on the extent to which their systems are hardened, that directed energy weapon could be devastating against warships.
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Oct 27, 2012 11:23
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Fearless posted:Depending on the extent to which their systems are hardened, that directed energy weapon could be devastating against warships.
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Oct 27, 2012 11:29
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I heard that the Russians have EMP warheads for their tactical cruise missiles; I'm guessing those are explosively driven pump generators. Would this be the same technology, like say a series of generators packed together?
Forums Terrorist fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Oct 27, 2012 |
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Oct 27, 2012 11:46
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Forums Terrorist posted:I heard that the Russians have EMP warheads for their tactical cruise missiles; I'm guessing those are explosively driven pump generators. Would this be the same technology, like say a series of generators packed together?
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Oct 27, 2012 11:56
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Cyrano4747 posted:Don't even pretend that the US gave two fucks about civilian casualties during any point in the WW2 bombing campaigns. We adopted general strategies that were different from britain's, but that had more to do with our belief that daylight/round the clock bombing could work than humanitarian efforts. Well Stimson did have the mad on for Koyoto. I also agrue with Japan, the Japanese did themselves no favors with dispersal of industry to residential areas as factories degraded.
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Oct 27, 2012 13:00
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Frozen Horse posted:I do see this having a great future against civilian infrastructure (I give it 3 years before the technology is disseminated enough to be public knowledge, 3 years after that for there to be a very bad day for at least one major stock exchange/trading firm's datacentre). I am also dubious of its harmlessness to people, specifically in the form of cataracts from corneal heating at the power densities needed to affect electronics. People have been using the basic technology behind this thing to reheat frozen burritos for decades. There's probably some classified secret sauce in there to boost power and range, but you can build a simple computer-fryin' gun out of a ten dollar goodwill microwave oven. Datacenters tend to be well-secured places, they're designed with redundant equipment in place, and there's a good chance major financial centers are hardened against electronic attack beyond the natural protection you get from wrapping the building in miles and miles of surge-protected copper power and data wiring. "Terrorists fry the NYSE with a magic microwave beam gun" might make a fun movie, but it's not a realistic threat.
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Oct 27, 2012 19:34
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Good thing you don't have to attack datacenters to shut things down. Relay stations, power substations, cell towers...all you need is enough power.
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Oct 27, 2012 19:52
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I reckon we have just about enough diesel in our underground tanks on our main site to last us for a couple of weeks if we shut down all the non-essential stuff like personal webpages and concentrate on keeping up essential stuff. But from what I gather a lot of datacenter operators have a very superficial attitude towards redundancy, i.e. "if it's plugged in two places it's redundant".
Force de Fappe fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Oct 27, 2012 |
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Oct 27, 2012 20:04
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grover posted:The old style EMP weapons used an explosive charge to compress a coil of wire carrying a high-current, and cause a pulse that way. Was a 1-shot weapon with very limited range. Sounds like the new Boeing weapon is something different. This design was thought up by physicists after the Starfish 1(?) test. (The nuke test in the south pacific when scientists detonated a bomb in the upper atmosphere 'to see what would happen' and the resulting EMP pulse damaged Hawaii.) I assumed the Boeing weapon was just a parabolic reflector broadcasting microwaves.
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Oct 27, 2012 20:07
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Space Gopher posted:People have been using the basic technology behind this thing to reheat frozen burritos for decades. There's probably some classified secret sauce in there to boost power and range, but you can build a simple computer-fryin' gun out of a ten dollar goodwill microwave oven.
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Oct 27, 2012 20:49
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Sjurygg posted:But from what I gather a lot of datacenter operators have a very superficial attitude towards redundancy, i.e. "if it's plugged in two places it's redundant". This really depends on who and what scale you're talking about. Big boys like Google/Amazon have hardened and redundant networks that would make most governments jealous (complete with on-site black-start power) and while they're quieter about it I'd expect most of the banks do too. The question with this stuff then becomes really not how much it can knock down but how long it can keep it down for. If your critical first strike is 10 seconds behind your microwave missile, it's probably not an issue. But taking stuff out the old fashioned way with high explosive requires rubble removal and physical part replacement / wire running that can keep stuff down a good while.
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Oct 27, 2012 21:01
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What would something like this do to power infrastructure? Would something like this blow the gently caress out of transformers and the like? I imagine popping every transformer in a big swath of city would be a pretty major headache as far as getting things up and running again.
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Oct 27, 2012 21:11
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Cyrano4747 posted:What would something like this do to power infrastructure? Would something like this blow the gently caress out of transformers and the like? You can actually buy $100 EMP testing kits that can blow up transformers  I'm guessing you could do the same with thing, but it has been designed so you can target computers and power in a specific area.
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Oct 27, 2012 21:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:What would something like this do to power infrastructure? Would something like this blow the gently caress out of transformers and the like? The power grid acts as a massive antenna and can induce millions of volts into the line; virtually every insulator will be compromised with resultant transformer explosions. The entire grid would need to be replaced.
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Oct 27, 2012 21:53
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Ok, but how does that work with something on the scale of the weapon we're talking about here? Assuming this thing works the way everyone thinks it does (which is a pretty big assumption, but whatever) would it be feasible to target the power infrastructure in a city like that? The missile thing in that Boeing video would be several orders of magnitude smaller than a EMP burst that's targeting poo poo on a regional or even continental scale. Basically, when the boing video shows that thing zipping over a city blacking out cartoon apartment blocks, should there be transformers popping left right and center in its wake as well? edit: Didn't see this: Nebakenezzer posted:You can actually buy $100 EMP testing kits that can blow up transformers Based on that I'm guessing yes?
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Oct 27, 2012 22:09
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Cyrano4747 posted:Ok, but how does that work with something on the scale of the weapon we're talking about here? Assuming this thing works the way everyone thinks it does (which is a pretty big assumption, but whatever) would it be feasible to target the power infrastructure in a city like that? The missile thing in that Boeing video would be several orders of magnitude smaller than a EMP burst that's targeting poo poo on a regional or even continental scale.
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Oct 27, 2012 22:28
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Nebakenezzer posted:You can actually buy $100 EMP testing kits that can blow up transformers I am picturing Walter White, a magnatized crane, a van and a ton of deep cycle batteries.
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Oct 28, 2012 00:38
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priznat posted:Optical couplers and vacuum tubes everywhere! Please. Fluidics.
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Oct 29, 2012 16:36
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Snowdens Secret posted:This really depends on who and what scale you're talking about. Big boys like Google/Amazon have hardened and redundant networks that would make most governments jealous (complete with on-site black-start power) and while they're quieter about it I'd expect most of the banks do too. Do you work for google or amazon? Or just drinking the kool aid?
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Oct 29, 2012 20:50
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Google's systems will become self-aware and destroy us all for the insipid, banal searches it constantly has to process.
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Oct 29, 2012 20:53
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priznat posted:Google's systems will become self-aware and destroy us all for the insipid, banal searches it constantly has to process.
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Oct 30, 2012 01:34
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Snowdens Secret posted:This really depends on who and what scale you're talking about. Big boys like Google/Amazon have hardened and redundant networks that would make most governments jealous (complete with on-site black-start power) and while they're quieter about it I'd expect most of the banks do too. Can you be more specific in what you mean by when you use the word hardened?
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Oct 30, 2012 03:39
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daskrolator posted:Can you be more specific in what you mean by when you use the word hardened? Just as atherosclerosis hardens the arteries of a morbidly obese man who lives off of cheeseburgers, so have we hardened the tubes of the internet with our unclean googling.
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Oct 30, 2012 07:47
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daskrolator posted:Can you be more specific in what you mean by when you use the word hardened? I assume he means protected against EM interference, probably up to EMP devices. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1997/harden.pdf short article describing how hardening works.
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Oct 30, 2012 14:44
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The first documented emp attack against a financial target that I know of was back in the '80s. They've taken steps. I'd hope so anyway.
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Oct 30, 2012 15:34
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Smiling Jack posted:The first documented emp attack against a financial target that I know of was back in the '80s. They've taken steps. The steps taken probably equate to an entry in the risk register and gently caress all more than that.
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Oct 30, 2012 15:50
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