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Re: Future of Firearms
Posted: Sat Jan 16, 2010 4:37 pm
by seamusTX
rzym20 wrote:Respectfully, that's only partially true. I used to do RadHard work at Motorola Semiconductor. Radiation-hardened electronics are perfectly capable of surviving an EMP attack. Military communications grids were designed with this in mind. As for the rest of society, yeah they'd be having a bad day.
I would hope that the military is prepared for an EMP event.
But imagine what happens when no civilian has e-mail, and ATM, credit-card, phone, and cable networks go down. Can you say "screeching halt"?
The other stuff being discussed on this page is beyond my knowledge or expertise.
- Jim
Re: Future of Firearms
Posted: Sat Jan 16, 2010 5:59 pm
by ELB
seamusTX wrote:rzym20 wrote:Respectfully, that's only partially true. I used to do RadHard work at Motorola Semiconductor. Radiation-hardened electronics are perfectly capable of surviving an EMP attack. Military communications grids were designed with this in mind. As for the rest of society, yeah they'd be having a bad day.
I would hope that the military is prepared for an EMP event.
...
- Jim
When I worked in military procurement in the mid 1990s, EMP requirements were dropped from a lot of avionics and communications contracts since the threat was deemed much lower after the East Bloc collapsed; this enabled the military to take advantage of commercial electronics, which made things
much cheaper and often/usually rendered better performance. In GPS in particular, unit costs of equipment dropped radically both due to this and the natural prices drops as an industry gets more experience with a new product.
I assume/believe that certain systems, e.g. nuclear weapons systems, probably certain comm systems, retained rad-hard requirments, but I believe that most other systems went to commercial electronics if at all possible. I don't know if this has changed in the last few years, but there will be a lot of non-EMP protected components out there for years to come.
Re: Future of Firearms
Posted: Sat Jan 16, 2010 6:15 pm
by seamusTX
Qué será será.
I work with a military agency that shall not be named, that is using equipment more than 10 years old that met the standards of the time. They will not "upgrade" to current commercial equipment.
We had an ATM network breakdown in this area several years ago. I would not call it the end of civilization as we know it, but it was close. One becomes accustomed to swiping that card. I was ready to bring out the gold coins and figure out how to make change.
- Jim