Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!bellcore!att!cbnews!military
From: jwtlai@violet.waterloo.edu (Jim W Lai)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Particle Beam Gun
Message-ID: <10234@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 14 Oct 89 01:56:22 GMT
References: <10149@cbnews.ATT.COM> <10184@cbnews.ATT.COM>
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From: jwtlai@violet.waterloo.edu (Jim W Lai)

In article <10184@cbnews.ATT.COM> brown@ncratl.Atlanta.NCR.COM (Kyle Brown)
writes:
>There are some *major* problems with using particle beams as weapons.
>Not the least of which is that the power required to make a particle beam
>do anything interesting (say cut through armor more than paper thin) is
>in the megawatt range.  Also, Proton beams are the only candidates for such
>weapons, and these are *not* easy to generate or play with (any plasma
>physicists out there want to elaborate?)

With respect to SDI, the APS directed-energy weapons study considered only
neutral particle beams.  They mentioned that neutral-particle beams are
rapidly ionized once they enter the thin upper atmosphere at 100 km, and are
then rapidly deflected by the Earth's magnetic field.  For terrestrial use,
we can rule out neutral particle beams, since they won't be neutral for very
long at ground level.  They power requirements they considered of practical
use for killing missiles were between 100 MW and 1000 MW, depending on range
and retargeting rate.  Considering this, IMHO the problem of scaling down
and modifying such technology for use by, presumably, armored vehicles is
nontrivial (i.e. difficult).  I would expect the crew would have to be
shielded against the magnetic forces used to accelerate the ions.  I don't
know enough to estimate the range of a beam of positive ions in air.  How
much power does a tank engine produce?