/tech/ - Technology★

No.

>>951217 (OP)

Electricity, like water, takes the easiest path possible. Think about it for a minute.

>>951226

Electricity takes ALL paths available to it.

>>951226

We're talking about AC, you baka.

>>951217 (OP)

The hard part is making the intended discharge path have lower resistance than all other paths to the ground and all objects in range can be considered "grounded", electrically speaking. You would have to somehow ionise (or better, plasma-ise) the air on the path to make it electrically conductive before the discharge. Maybe an extremely high-energy targeted microwave laser pulse could heat up the water suspended in air enough to turn it to plasma. Then again, at this point you have a badass microwave laser weapon OF DOOM, why would you need a following electric shock?

I say it's a completely impractical idea that will stay in fantasy land forever. Having said that, a few real-life (non-weapon) Tesla coils every mile or so would look very nice on the Wall™ for decorative and scare factor. Ping Trump on twatter with the idea ;).

>>951308 (Me)

Another way I can think of would be to fire a small physical projectile filled with hot plasma designed to disperse a trace of plasma along its path. Due to needed temperatures it would probably have to be fired with a coil gun or such, rather than a traditional explosive-based gun, as no barrel would withstand firing it. The projectile would be small, the size of a rifle bullet and would not inflict much damage on its own, the damage would come from the following electric discharge along the plasma trace.

>>951313

>huge capacitors

With current technology. Caps are getting denser by the year as the industry thinks up and polishes new ways of constructing them. It's only a matter of time before they become lightweight enough to power a practical energy weapon.

This is the same problem faced by the electric car industry, by the way. Electric engines are a solved problem for a century already, we were waiting for battery tech to catch up to make off-grid vehicles viable.

>/tech/ is now home to retarded /pol/yps jerking off about muh wall and putting videogame bullshit on it

Sad!

>>951329

>>>/leftypol/

>>>/oven/

>>>/auschwitz/

don't tell me you wouldn't want similar tech guarding your gulags, comrade

it was the commies who had them in RA, after all

>>951217 (OP)

Research the Plasma Focus.

No it is more energy effcient just to make a rail gun anyways

>>951331

Fuck off, retard.

>>951331

I was looking for the unit list of those games, and came across this funny piece. Back in 1997, when you didn't like something and wanted to rant on the web, you pretty much had to build your own site. Posting this for nostalgia reasons.

http://ra.afraid.org/html/lib/rasucks.html

>>951404

Feel free to explain why there are no railguns in existence today that don't require huge buildings full of giant capacitors.

>>951525

>A is more energy efficient than B

>Why does A need so much energy then?

What are you even trying to get to?

>>951474

I hated red alert with a passion. After loving the original C&C so this is a great read for me.

>>951525

Because THERE ARE RAILGUNS IN EXISTENCE TODAY, and there are not tank-busting tesla towers. If the latter was more efficient we would have used that a long fucking time ago, but it's not because the strength of an electric field is inversely proportional to the square of the distance away from its source. The fall-off is so fuckfast that you wouldn't need a hundred huge buildings full of giant capacitors to even get close to the range and effectiveness of a railgun. We're talking about producing lightning bolts here, which require "weather" scale forces to produce. Billions of tons of cloud sliding past hundreds of miles of earth just to generate the spark big enough to jump the gap.

>>951589

but don't railguns launch projectiles?

> We're talking about producing lightning bolts here, which require "weather" scale forces to produce. Billions of tons of cloud sliding past hundreds of miles of earth just to generate the spark big enough to jump the gap.

What you think they are doing at HAARP?

>>951598

>but don't railguns launch projectiles?

Yes, which is exactly why they are more efficient than tesla coils. You pack all the energy into a lump of metal and make it go really really fast, and that lump of metal is only constrained by friction and gravity and none of those have inverse square roots. By converting the energy from one form into another form that is easier to transport from one place to another, you have made it more efficient.

>What you think they are doing at HAARP?

Not fucking blowing up tanks with lightning bolts.

>>951609

And the fringe benefits are out of this world.

>>951308

It doesn‘t need to be that complicated. Dust is usually positively charged which result results in thunderstorms when they‘re accelerating high up by circular winds between high and low pressure areas.

You could just use a Dyson on reverse with high enough voltages.

I fucking knew that a retarded HAARP LARPEr was bound to appear on this fucking thread.

IT'S FOR FUCKING REFLECTOMETRY YOU GOD DAMN PEANUT SIZED SMOOTH BRAINED CHIMPANZEE

>>951420

no u

>>951643

There's unironically lasers burning houses and incinerating cars, CIA nigger. The future is already here.

>>951525

Go ahead and google 'handheld railgun'

i dare you

>>951746

So?