Although many of us have MW ovens, I can name like one Saw movie and one DIY channel that showed it’s potential to melt things, and I watch\read a lot of gore and torture on the web. It won’t be used in a military context due to how power consumption and short distance make it useless. But in a Home Alone situation it seems promising, especially as a trap because you won’t stop anyone with that immidiately.
My qustions are:
- How a breaf exposure is dangerous, and can it be used not to harm but to scare off?
- How it’d be treated legally due to it’s weirdness?
- What are general downsides of that, like reflecting it back to the sender or dealing irreversible fatal damage etc?
I’m stupid at basic physics so I’m sure I miss something.
Think about it. Your house is probably wired for a maximum of 100A (maybe more if newer). A microwave oven uses 10A, typically. The maximum power you could put into an array of household microwaves would be the equivalent of ten microwaves.
Now if you considered all of this being converted to, say, an electric heater – you could probably heat a fairly large space with this much energy – probably even your house in a Minnesota winter if it was at all insulated. If you were to be able to direct this heat towards someone, it’d be like standing right in front of the furnace while it was on and blowing all of its heat at you. It’d heat you up real good, but you could always just leave that spot.
But with 100A, you could power a lot of LED lights, and very bright ones too. Like airport runway level bright. You’re probably better off building something like that which you could shine at an intruder. Just don’t blind yourself during testing ;)
Ah, but your house power would have no trouble charging a colossal bank of capacitors to provide a brief instantaneous kill shot. Also, I think the design would be improved if you added a wave-guided magnetron so that the energy was more directed, but I don’t know much about that - I am more of a laser person myself.
But mah invisible ray of torment!
Really good point on power consumption.
That said, any space heater I’ve used that draws 10A can’t heat water to boiling in 1 minute.
So I guess something about how a microwave delivers that energy matters in this equation? (I’m thinking distance from the emitter).