This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Scrounge: I hate bo burst your glowing bubble of mass destruction, but Anastasia was actually made by Fox. You'll have to come up with another excuse to nuke Disney. Chicken Little ought to do it, or you could blame them for the Animation Age Ghetto.
Silent Hunter: It was actually Luck of the Irish in the Oireland entry that made me do it then. Oh, there's dozens of reasons to make Disney Ground Zero if Los Angeles ever got nuked. The aim with Anastasia was as a response to having a Tu-95 drop the nuke.
Violet Strange: And to think, my first thought was that the choice of location was in response to inflicting 7 seasons and counting of According to Jim on the public.
10 psi of overpressure equals your building getting hit by a 294 mph window.
Ophicius: A 294 mph window? Interesting mental image...
Concordat: Would it be worth mentioning that a lot of Cold War and post-Cold War military hardware has their electronics hardened against EM Ps? Especially vehicles designed to drop nukes or be near them on the battlefield. It seems like Hollywood believes that EM Ps fry any electronics in its path, when this really isn't the case.
MODULE-32A: Doing so is a little...tricky, however, and despite effects testing in special shielded chambers with lots of fancy machinery designed to create EM Ps for testing purposes, how they'll actually perform in the field in such an environment is often still rather unpredictable.
Let's take cars; cars are made of metal and the like...even today, they're still pretty metal-heavy. That results in something of a Faraday-cage effect...on the other hand, modern cars are jam-packed with microprocessors and other fragile electronics, and the protection offered is a little spotty.
It would do very bad things to power grids and devastate civilian electronics potentially across an entire continent. And even against hardened, shielded military electronics, it isn't to be scoffed at. There's also other high-altitude stuff...you can make a lot of trouble for radars by making big ionized regions up there, inside which radar tracking is severely degraded or impossible. Major implications in the field of ABM warfare, needless to say.
Noaqiyeum: "Fry everything electronic in North America" is probably an exaggeration... I seem to remember reading about at least one test shot where the (unprotected) radios fairly close to the blast were untouched, while more complex systems further away were wiped out - because the amount of energy absorbed by the circuitry is proportional to the length of the wiring (or something like that), and simple circuits aren't long enough to be affected.
rsm109: Was it the MiG-25 that had a radar set using vacuum tubes that wouldn't be affected by EMP?
"That is, there's a net flow of electrons. This is in the opposite direction as the conventional current, which is positive..."
Boobah: Wait. What? Outside antimatter, all electrical current is negative... comes from being made from electrons. Or is this that whole thing where electronics wonks use a model that describes current as flowing from the positive terminal to the negative, while physicists tend to talk about electrons moving from the negative terminal to the positive?
