EMP and redundancy

Henning said:
I got on the big scale at Winn Dixie yesterday with full pockets, 158. Gravity is getting kinder.:yesnod:
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Piker. Stuff another hundred pounds in those pockets and we'll talk. Any weenie can get a 310 into the air with a sub-FAA-weight pilot, it takes a MAN to coax and harangue a Cherokee off the runway with 475# of combined pilot and passenger. :rofl:

That reminds me... I gotta get back to the gym and get the bikes down from their winter hangers in the garage. Sigh... gotta shed some of this ballast I'm carrying. No thread creep here, folks, nope, none at all.
 
Henning said:
Yeah, pretty cool huh? The difference in velocity is relative to what though? The Earths gravitational sphere. The part of energy that is the mass of our aircraft is represented in inertia. Inertia is the mechanism through which gravity effects both mass and time.
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Inertia is merely an objects resistance to acceleration and has nothing to do with gravity, within the limits of a downwind turn and wind gusts.

General relativity, whole 'nother story, but we really only see the effects of that with corrections on the GPS and they built those adjustments into the software so we don't need to worry about them.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
Inertia is merely an objects resistance to acceleration and has nothing to do with gravity, within the limits of a downwind turn and wind gusts.

General relativity, whole 'nother story, but we really only see the effects of that with corrections on the GPS and they built those adjustments into the software so we don't need to worry about them.
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I never said there was a worry about either, just that they were interesting effects.;) Please explain the mechanism of inertia without including gravity? Are you saying that gravity has no effect on inertia?
 
Henning said:
I never said there was a worry about either, just that they were interesting effects.;) Please explain the mechanism of inertia without including gravity? Are you saying that gravity has no effect on inertia?
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As we aren't near a black hole, not doing particle physics, are working within a small region of space-time, and are well below the speed of light, gravity has no effect on inertia (note my comments on general relativity- only the GPS time is affected and the software handles it).

For everyday life, Newtonian mechanics work just fine and inertia really only depends on the mass of an object.

You don't calculate Riemann-Christoffel tensors to determine how a wind gust affects you on a downwind turn, do you? The effects of such a calculation are overshadowed by all the accumulated errors in measuring all the velocities and masses with the tools you have.
 
Henning said:
I never said there was a worry about either, just that they were interesting effects.;) Please explain the mechanism of inertia without including gravity? Are you saying that gravity has no effect on inertia?
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Luckily, Newton was still alive when I went to school, so let me put in my two cents worth as I understand it. Inertia is a function of mass. You can have mass in an object in deep space well away from any gravity well. (For the sake of this argument we will ignore the tiny tiny tiny gravity well of any object with mass, and the combined gravitational effects of the universe in deep space) So floating in deep space light years away from any significant gravity source it will take applied force to overcome inertia, but gravity is out of the equation. However In the range of any gravity well the effects of gravity must be overcome along with the resistant mass of an object to effect movement.
 
Some of the EMP scare is exaggerated. Power transformers can be damaged in solar storms because they're hooked to miles of wire. Your magnetos are hooked to a few feet of wire on the way to the kill switches, and a few inches of wire on the HV side to the plugs. In both cases, if you're in metal (or most composite) airplanes, those wires are surrounded by a faraday cage.

Studies done years ago found that the voltage spikes reaching radio and computer equipment through power lines would be capped by upstream obstacles such as the breakdown voltage ratings of AC outlets and breaker boxes.

Some antennas are "DC-grounded," meaning they have a structure that appears as a 50-ohm load at 120 MHz, but as a short-circuit at DC or low frequencies to bleed off static which builds up in flight.

I don't ever want to find out for sure, but I'd bet many COM radios would survive EMP.
 
The question, as posed, left out a significant detail.

How far away was the EMP producing event?

You gotta love the distance-squared rule...
 
denverpilot said:
The question, as posed, left out a significant detail.

How far away was the EMP producing event?

You gotta love the distance-squared rule...
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Good question, also ask about the power output.

I think most of us were assuming a nuke optimized for this task nearish (how's that for precisely defined?) a large city.
 
My first thought was, "My airplane would probably be fine if Israel nuked Iran! What's the big deal!?"

;) ;) ;)
 
> So what if the sun went out? Would I have enough light to finish my VFR Day
> 250 mile XC if I was 200 miles into it with a 20 knot headwind in a 90 KIAS C150?

No.
 
EMP is a really big field, for a very short period of time. How much energy can your device dissipate? Is it solid state, or hollow state (that's vacuum tubes for you youngsters). You'll burn up transistors a whole lot faster than tubes.

We had a request for proposal 30 years ago where I worked and amoung other things, they wanted us to EMP harden a CB radio. My solution (and, no, our managment didn't like it) was to install one in the truck in a quick disconnect mount and stick a second in a steel box under the seat. After the EMP event fried the first radio if anyone was around to care they could pull the replacement radio out of the box and plug it in. Far less expensive than hardening a $100 radio. Oh, and they wanted us to EMP harden a handheld radio. I wanted to know who was going to carry it. King Kong? That sucker would have been heavy when we got finished with it.
 
rainsux said:
> So what if the sun went out? Would I have enough light to finish my VFR Day
> 250 mile XC if I was 200 miles into it with a 20 knot headwind in a 90 KIAS C150?

No.
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8 minutes to permanent night.
Hmmm. Can it be logged as night if it's mid afternoon and nowhere near sunset? The sun hasn't set, just turned off.

Then there's the whole problem of what major problems occur to make the entire sun go out like a burned out lightbulb and not take 5 billion years...
 
DaleB said:
Either the mags are OK and you finish your flight as planned, or they fail and you land on the smooth, glassy surface below. Then you die from radiation. Or more likely the shock ad heat wave vaporizes you and the plane.
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Hmmmm... interesting scenario, now lets consider the Enola Gay and Bock's Car and their crews and the crews of the associated flights as well. Didn't they all prove out that the magnetos would survive as well as the people? They weren't that damned far away.
 
Henning said:
Hmmmm... interesting scenario, now lets consider the Enola Gay and Bock's Car and their crews and the crews of the associated flights as well. Didn't they all prove out that the magnetos would survive as well as the people? They weren't that damned far away.
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Those bursts were so low that the electrons stripped off by the gamma rays were pretty much absorbed by the atmosphere before they could interact much with the earth's magnetic field.
 
Did anyone consider that things OTHER than thermonuclear weapons can produce an EMP?
 
Cap'n Jack said:
Those bursts were so low that the electrons stripped off by the gamma rays were pretty much absorbed by the atmosphere before they could interact much with the earth's magnetic field.
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IIRC same or similar tests of much higher magnitude were performed using the same delivery technology.:dunno: I guess that's the question really isn't it. Just how large of an energy event would it take? How close do you have to be to detonation?
 
Jaybird180 said:
Did anyone consider that things OTHER than thermonuclear weapons can produce an EMP?
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Yes. That is what I thought of irrespective of a nuclear attack. Why destroy stuff, when you can just render it all useless. I really do think that will be the next attack. Communications will be gone. Make everyone effectively defenseless, deaf, dumb, and blind and panic ensues.
 
Jaybird180 said:
Did anyone consider that things OTHER than thermonuclear weapons can produce an EMP?
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I could only come up with cosmic events that would have the energy to overload your magneto, although thinking about it it might damage the spark plugs.
 
Henning said:
IIRC same or similar tests of much higher magnitude were performed using the same delivery technology.:dunno: I guess that's the question really isn't it. Just how large of an energy event would it take? How close do you have to be to detonation?
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And those tests for EMP were higher in the atmosphere, actually the edge of space. It also depends on the latitude you set it off. The effects in the continental USA would be worse than that test off Hawaii that I mentioned earlier for a similar device due to the way the earth's magnetic field runs up here.
 
Jaybird180 said:
Did anyone consider that things OTHER than thermonuclear weapons can produce an EMP?
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Chemical pumped EMP is really weak. The cosmic things Henning mentioned either aren't near enough to matter or won't happen for a few billion years (assuming current theories are correct).
 
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