Im sure I saw it ground a plane at Heathrow the other day!

Lewis, never stop writing. You make me want to change the pronounciation of my own name to your geekier, less mafia-like equivalent.

US announces megadeath (to electronics) ray gun, around the same time as a plane drops out of the sky at Heathrow...I spy a test bed....

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/01/18/dell_m1530_electic_shock/

A big-ass corner-reflector, or a field of smaller ones, will reflect all the energy back along the exact opposite track. Unless the platform is moving at a considerable fraction of C, it'll still be there. With precision 90-degree angles, a perfect back-at-ya bulls-eye is guaranteed. A useless suicide mission.

They won't even think about including an initial low-power probe pulse to confirm the target's radar cross section, and the overall return-loss, until Rev. C. And this - inexplicably - in spite of me reminding Them to do so (just now).

How come They monitor all communications but They don't pay any attention to free advice? Okay.. let's get their attention... "Dirty Bomb" (Hey! Hi. Yeah, please review the paragraphs above). There, I just saved the taxpayers $142 million.

Can't remember the dates (around 1934?) but MI6 was getting some pretty bizarre reports that the nasty old Nazis were working on a "raygun" that could deactivate aircraft engines at a distance. Worried that all their (antiquated) bombers wouldn't get the chance to be shot to ribbons, they asked British boffins if they could build one. Whilst they didn't waste time on the raygun idea, the boffins did use the opportunity to do some research into radio echoes from aircraft, producing Radio Direction Finding (later christened "radar" by the Yanks) in time for the Battle of Britain. I expect there'll be some useful research produced as a side benefit of the new project, and who knows - maybe we'll accidentally produce a technology for clearing the techno-scales from the eyes of Apple fanbois!

;)

As you mentioned, you can get decent EMPs from chucking a few nukes around - and they have so many of these I don't understand what the problem is with using a few.

And what could be more environmentally friendly than a nice bit of recycling. Grab the obsolete stuff from the last two or three decades and re-brand them as EMP'ers.

Surely that should keep the hippies happy, no need to worry about how to dispose of the material we use to make nuclear weapons when they become out of date, we'll just use them instead.

I'm sure there must be a few 3rd World countries the US can pretend are threats to its existence, so plenty of places to get some practice in.

And if the technological threat posed by some random African or South American nation isn't enough to scare your average American into green lighting another war - just mention you're doing the world a favour by reducing your stock pile of nukes. So it's all green and peaceful and environmentally rosy.

After all if you can convince Americans that an impoverished, 3rd World nation like Iraq posed such a threat to their existence that they should fear going on holiday in their own country (yes really - I met a whole bunch that were scared about vacationing in Hawaii after it initially kicked off in 2003), surely it should be no problemo to convince them another one needs to have the internet sabotaged via bucket loads of nukes.

We can just tell them it'll be good practice for when the Chinese invade in a few years.

Oh and probably best to keep the geography to a minimum as you have been doing - no need for anyone to realise that your average African nation isn't a hop, skip and jump away from invading the US. Again, yes really - most of the people that were scared about going on holiday in their own country, thought Iraq could somehow attack them in the US. They couldn't understand why I was laughing or why I thought they were over-reacting more than just a tad.

...and my Commodores as well as other fine old computing equipment with nice wide signal traces that will dissipate induced currents and survive EMPs better than all these new-fangled systems. And the same goes for my 1988 Jaguar XJ-6 (and my 1989 model, too).

After the program of permanent war for permanent peace takes its inevitable course and blasts us back a few decades, I'll build my payroll service bureau empire on my VIC-20, a cassette tape mass storage device and a dot matrix printer while the rest of you are out foraging for coat hangers and bottle caps to build an abacus.

Then we will finally see some really serious discussion of vital issues like the TRS-80 versus the Commodore 64, and language wars will revolve around BASIC versus Assembler.

Why are you dissing my TRS-80 Model 1 level 2 for ?? It gave me good service for ages !! It also had a word processor (Electric Pencil) long before Wordstar appeared on the Apple 2E !!

"Hera's main sanctuary was at Argos"

So we can get hold of one of these just by typing in the right seven digit code?

HPM Device - 2 left in stock

So can it be set to stun?

"it isn't a death ray, or anyway isn't meant to be"

But what if it was? Oh goody, goody...

...it was not a ray gun, but was a way to get the desired EMP that would ruin the electonics of a whole city without the many undesirable side effects of detonating a nuke.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1281421.html

They were scheduled to test it sometime in the future, I wonder if

...NO CARRIER

I dont know why there bothering with all this extra research, i mean it's already been done!

Havent they watched Ocean's Eleven! All we need is George Clooney and Brad Pitt, send them and there crack team and boom! All bye bye to the electronics of said bad guys.

What do you mean movies arent real?

One of those "funny warning labels" lists in 2030, includes a photo of the label under the 200 foot long airplane-dropping ray-gun that reads "Aim away from face, and cover genitals".

Tesla would be proud. Maybe the FBI will bid on it - don't they still have his many trunks of documentation (outside of the handful that were released back to the family/trust)?

I think that this is all a grande plot (as opposed to your typical grand plot) being put out by the makers of AA guns.

As Revolutionary! stated one obviously fires the fancy new weponage at the tank, whose C of G being buggered then floats into the air.

Now step in with the old Ack Ack* and shoot the blighter's out of the sky.

Be prepared to duck, a 55 ton** tank falling on yer head will leave some bruises.

*Ack Ack - not the Ack Ack from Mars Attacks***, but Anti Aircraft gun type of Ack Ack.

**55 tons empty, add another 5 tons if the poor tankers have to cart all their health and safety documentation around with them.

***Mars Attacks, now they had some rays gun alright.

Bleedin' cold in Calgary -18C brrrrrrr...