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Pastimes : Shuttle Columbia STS-107 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (454)	2/8/2003 7:30:50 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 627

Joe, EMP cannot bring down civilization because the high voltage transients do not harm the bulk of the wiring. Tranmission lines will not be affected, but control points will be, and they can be hardened easily in Faraday shields(continuous metal cases with filters where wires pass). cars are easy to harden, since it is mostly a metal box anyway, a box and filters around the CPU boxes and sensors will do it. Main wiring will not be damaged. What EMP can do is knock you down until you get it all reset or replaced. Unprotected computers can be fried, but as long as you use metal boxes and fiber network cables and have filters on the AC power supply you will survive. Now a near EMP, where it is 20 miles up so you get zero blast wil be more serious as a high enough pulse can make it's way through filters by exceeding their max joule rating, but 50 miles away most filters will be fine, and military filters are unfazed by a near miss. Military filters made commercially would add $1 to the cost of a computer or monitor. making a Farady cage around them would cost more. Laptops with their LCD arrays will be sensitive, but they can have black copper mesh placed in front on them(as the military does now to harden them), only cost a few $. Much of the cost of military hardening is the system and the small runs. Make it for 10 million Dells and the cost for hardening would be less than $10 each for a steel cage, mesh and I/) ferrite filters.. Not quite up to MILSPEC, but 95% as good. In passing, common semiconductors passed the MIL requrements in force at the time of the shuttle manufacture and design in about 1985, in terms of mean time between failures etc new parts from jaor makers are extremelly reliable and the military could cut their costs dramatically by not having an X-ray of every resistor in a radio, etc. Bill