What you need to know about EMP weapons • Hacker News Board

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#201

Post by testing22321 » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 8:15 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #135

mopsi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact is there is going to be no one coming to help replace burned up hoes and shovels. Why? Why would it be happening everywhere - in South America, Africa, Asia, and many other places - at the same time?

Asia, because there are a lot of targets there. South America and Africa would probably get off pretty lightly. And then they'd experience the worst economic depression that has ever been seen due to the complete collapse of global trade. They're not going to be up for the job of rescuing entire continents.

No, but they’ll go on living as they have for 300,000 years.

I spent time in 35 African countries getting as remote as possible. The vast major Of remote peoples lives would not change at all if entire continents were completely destroyed (unless they cop the fallout, or the ash causes crops to fail).

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#202

Post by olelele » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 8:44 PM UTC

I heard from a pretty crazy audio engineer in Berlin that there are miniature vacuum tubes from Soviet jet fighters that function as replacement in microphones bc they are vibration resistant. The jets were designed to survive emp.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#203

Post by schiffern » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 10:05 PM UTC

Shame to see such (otherwise excellent) writing fraught with mistaken SI usage, as defined by the authoritative SI Brochure.[0] It's a small thing that makes any writing feel less credible.

Hopefully the author sees this post and can correct it. The author is using British English so I have preferred that convention. I include a second option which at least corrects any mistaken abbreviations, but the first option is always the correct version.

  >tens or hundreds of Km

"tens or hundreds of kilometres" or "tens or hundreds of km"

  >30Km

"30 kilometres" or "30 km"

  >10nS

"10 nanoseconds" or "10 ns"

  >Khz to low Mhz

"kilohertz to low megahertz" or "kHz to low MHz"

  >hundreds of mS

"hundreds of milliseconds" or "hundreds of ms"

  >a few Khz

"a few kilohertz" or "a few kHz"

[0] https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#204

Post by wat10000 » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

testing22321 wrote: post #201

wat10000 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asia, because there are a lot of targets there. South America and Africa would probably get off pretty lightly. And then they'd experience the worst economic depression that has ever been seen due to the complete collapse of global trade. They're not going to be up for the job of rescuing entire continents.

No, but they’ll go on living as they have for 300,000 years. I spent time in 35 African countries getting as remote as possible. The vast major Of remote peoples lives would not change at all if entire continents were completely destroyed (unless they cop the fallout, or the ash causes crops to fail).

The discussion here isn’t about whether the lives of remote people would be upended, but whether those countries would help to rebuild the ones hit by the war, the way devastated cities were rebuilt after WWII.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#205

Post by grapesodaaaaa » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 2:31 AM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #117

Calwestjobs wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. google how many lightning strikes are there per day 2. google how many millions of miles/kilometers of electric wires is hanging in air all over the world providing people with electricity 3. do not google how many of those millions of lightning strikes PER DAY disabled those billions of miles of wires per day, by applying energy bigger than nuclear EMP. do not google that.

Starfish Prime blew streetlight fuses 900 miles away. I don't think lighting can do that.

As mentioned elsewhere, streetlights were a very different design back then.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#206

Post by palmotea » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 4:00 AM UTC

saltcured wrote: post #141

palmotea wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, what I've learned from films like "Threads" and "The Day After" is that you very much want to die in the first 20ms of a nuclear war. Don't dig a hole to hide in, put your lawn chair on the roof and hope you're close enough to ground zero to get a peaceful and dignified end. That's all fine and dandy if you only have yourself to think about...

OK, so you'll need a bigger roof and more lawn chairs...

> OK, so you'll need a bigger roof and more lawn chairs...

You jest, but imagine lining up your four year old to die (you may be childless, so that might be hard for you).

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#207

Post by testing22321 » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 6:00 AM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #204

testing22321 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but they’ll go on living as they have for 300,000 years. I spent time in 35 African countries getting as remote as possible. The vast major Of remote peoples lives would not change at all if entire continents were completely destroyed (unless they cop the fallout, or the ash causes crops to fail).

The discussion here isn’t about whether the lives of remote people would be upended, but whether those countries would help to rebuild the ones hit by the war, the way devastated cities were rebuilt after WWII.

With all the fallout? I doubt anyone would be living in those place for a very long time

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#208

Post by wat10000 » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:24 PM UTC

grapesodaaaaa wrote: post #205

wat10000 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starfish Prime blew streetlight fuses 900 miles away. I don't think lighting can do that.

As mentioned elsewhere, streetlights were a very different design back then.

Unless lightning strikes were blowing them out from 900+ miles away back then, I don’t see how that matters to my point.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#209

Post by wat10000 » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

testing22321 wrote: post #207

wat10000 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion here isn’t about whether the lives of remote people would be upended, but whether those countries would help to rebuild the ones hit by the war, the way devastated cities were rebuilt after WWII.

With all the fallout? I doubt anyone would be living in those place for a very long time

And yet:

"How is anyone supposed to take that seriously? Is that how Cologne, Dresden, Würzburg and Pforzheim, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked a decade after they had been destroyed in Allied bombing raids? The truth is that even after infrastructure gets bombed back to the Middle Ages, life remains surprisingly normal, and people quickly rebuild."

That's what I was responding to.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#210

Post by testing22321 » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 4:07 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #209

testing22321 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all the fallout? I doubt anyone would be living in those place for a very long time

And yet: "How is anyone supposed to take that seriously? Is that how Cologne, Dresden, Würzburg and Pforzheim, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked a decade after they had been destroyed in Allied bombing raids? The truth is that even after infrastructure gets bombed back to the Middle Ages, life remains surprisingly normal, and people quickly rebuild." That's what I was responding to.

The nukes that would fall today are a few orders of magnitude bigger than those that fell in Japan, and there would be many orders of magnitude more of them, and close together.

The world has never seen destruction and fallout that is even remotely comparable to what we’d get.