Re: Why big ships are too good...

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Name: Eric Weatherby
E-mail: ericjw@cyberhighway.net

You said:

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Anyway, the result of all this is that I still believe I'm right.
No mention is made of whether you do _need_ an atmosphere, but the
description of how EMP is created would seem to be invalidated if
you didn't have (a) an atmosphere and (b) ground.

Now, before anyone mentions it, space ships do have an atmosphere
inside them, so maybe a small EMP effect could be produced inside
them (though the atmosphere here would be pretty uniform), but it's
probably unlikely.

Having now put forward the case for the defence, I'll leave it
to someone else to show me where I've gone wrong. If I have gone
wrong, please tell me.

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Judging from the source materials you quoted, the EMP from a nuclear
bomb in 
space would not be as spectacular as it would be in an atmosphere.

However, no one ever said that a nuke was the only way to produce an
EMP.  
You could, for instance, channel the energy from a nuclear explosion and
send 
it through some kind of superconducting coil, producing a short-lived
and 
very intense electromagnetic field.  Or, you could dump the charge from
a 
really big capacitor into the coil.  I don't know if either of these
ideas 
would really produce an intense enough pulse, but there is another 
alternative.  Just as a neutron bomb is modified to produce more
neutrons 
than normal, you could develop a nuclear weapon specifically designed to

generate an EMP with no atmosphere or ground.

I'm sure that enough PSB applied to the problem will produce some kind
of 
workable solution.

Eric