AviationWeek
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2019–2021
2:03 · 230K views · Nov 11, 2016
Cleared Defense Department footage of Raytheon's Phaser high-power microwave weapon bringing down drones during a 2013 live-fire demonstration at Fort Sill. Raytheon says it has halved the payload size and is offering the system for operational use.
HN cites it as evidence that microwave and electromagnetic weapons against drones are real and already tested.
3 comments from Hacker News
Non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse generators are a real weapon that I think is more significant than the nuclear EMP that people are afraid of. Here is one example: this video Many amateurs have demonstrated disruption or destruction of electronic devices at short range with magnetron tubes from microwave ovens. I think those military prototypes use travelling wave tubes, they could probably be made more compact and efficient with gallium nitride transistors. The big avantage for anti-drone use is that the energy costs pennies per shot as compared to scaled down AA weapons such as Iron Dome that are more like $50,000 a shot. That same kind of device could wreck electronics at ground targets too, probably even be mounted on a plane. Note also that the nuclear electromagnetic pulse is produced by a plasma explosion, that is, if you have an explosion where the temperature is high enough to ionize the gas, the electrons will leave the scene of the explosion faster than the ions, so you will get a temporary charge separation that produces a pulse. The same thing can happen when a fast pulse laser hits a target and ablates the surface, or when a meteorite hits a satellite in space. The effect is much weaker, but it is at point-blank range and might be the dominant kill mechanism in those situations. (Note that antipersonnel laser weapons that use a fast pulse won't "burn a hole" in the target but instead cause a flash-bang like effect where EMP contributes to localized pain and discom
This brings to mind a microwave beam developed by Raygheon to down drones [0] and an article I read well over a decade ago about EMPs. Wonder how these are doing on the consumer front? [0] this video
Jamming would address inter-swarm communications, but then they'd revert to solo operations. EMP isn't realistic, but microwave systems have already been tested: this video