I thought it was a directed energy weapon when the first reports came in. I assumed someone in close approximation to the embassy buildings was doing it. Now I wonder if it could be delivered by satellite in a confined area of the embassy buildings.
The problem with directed energy weapons, is forcing them into an incredibly narrow beam, like a laser.
Engineering terms, we express it in simple terms, like a soap bubble, within a soap bubble.
Size of the bubbles are really immaterial, it's the principle. You have a beam in the center, that shoots through the first bubble (taking up x square units) that then project the same energy on the second bubble (taking up many more square units) - this shows the dissipation of energy being an inverse square of the distance of the projector.
So, shooting an RF based weapon a half-mile, takes a heck of a lot of energy. Now, beam forming is quite different - but the general gist is you have to beam form that weapon - the larger the target, the exponentially more power you will need.
IMMENSE power - the inverse-square law is no joke. You also need an uninterrupted LoS, otherwise you fry everything in your path and would be found out easily.
Same deal. Even more power needed for xRays that they are incredibly short wavelengths. Everything from visible light, to xRays, to radio, wifi, it's all the electro-magnetic spectrum, and the inverse-square law applies. We call these frequencies different things based on how we we use them, so people tend to think of them as wildly different from one another - you probably don't consider your car radio, microwave, wi-fi router to be the same but they are. They are all simply frequencies of the EMS. The application of manipulating those frequencies and wavelengths is vastly different, but it's all the same.
I thought it was a directed energy weapon when the first reports came in. I assumed someone in close approximation to the embassy buildings was doing it. Now I wonder if it could be delivered by satellite in a confined area of the embassy buildings.
The problem with directed energy weapons, is forcing them into an incredibly narrow beam, like a laser.
Engineering terms, we express it in simple terms, like a soap bubble, within a soap bubble.
Size of the bubbles are really immaterial, it's the principle. You have a beam in the center, that shoots through the first bubble (taking up x square units) that then project the same energy on the second bubble (taking up many more square units) - this shows the dissipation of energy being an inverse square of the distance of the projector.
So, shooting an RF based weapon a half-mile, takes a heck of a lot of energy. Now, beam forming is quite different - but the general gist is you have to beam form that weapon - the larger the target, the exponentially more power you will need.
IMMENSE power - the inverse-square law is no joke. You also need an uninterrupted LoS, otherwise you fry everything in your path and would be found out easily.
What about xrays?
Same deal. Even more power needed for xRays that they are incredibly short wavelengths. Everything from visible light, to xRays, to radio, wifi, it's all the electro-magnetic spectrum, and the inverse-square law applies. We call these frequencies different things based on how we we use them, so people tend to think of them as wildly different from one another - you probably don't consider your car radio, microwave, wi-fi router to be the same but they are. They are all simply frequencies of the EMS. The application of manipulating those frequencies and wavelengths is vastly different, but it's all the same.