Re: Police prepare stunning end for high-speed car chases

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

At 09:54 AM 8/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

>
>(And I'm not ignorant of such technologies, having attended several of the
>Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conferences. I also played around with
>this as a minor plot element in a novel I was working on several years ago,
>namely, a character killed in Los Alamos when the Electronic Engine Control
>circuitry of his BMW was zapped while on a mountain road. This, by the way,
>is a "side effect" of widely deploying such EM cannon technologies--people
>using them on twisty mountain roads. I can think of some places near Big
>Sur and around Devil's Slide where such a gizmo would produce real
>interesting effects!)

Why would you need an "EM Cannon" for this?  Just string a 1-car-sized loop 
of wire on the surface of a road, and off in the bushes hide a battery, 
DC-to-Hi voltage DC converter and 20kv+ capacitor, and a vacuum switch or 
some other switch arrangement.  When the car in question traverses the loop, 
short the switch and the car will be blasted with 20,000 volt-turns of 
induction.  Sure, most of it will pass harmlessly through the car's steel, 
but even iron has a limited "mu" which means that every electrical device in 
the car will be subjected to a certain amount of induced EMF, probably 
enough to at least reset a few microprocessors and possibly even destroy them.


Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com