EMP weapons and the destruction of a civilisation

[channonyarrow]

Quite bluntly, I don't have the physics to understand the information I'm getting. I've searched EMP weapons, EMP itself, read some articles about what happens when the sun decides to kill us all, wound up on a couple of survialist websites (fun!), and gone through tags and found semi-relevant questions in weapons, catastrophes, and technology.

Comments

[ffutures]

If they have wormhole technology in use for routine travel your scenario has a small problem - any electrical equipment will be VERY thoroughly screened against electromagnetic pulses, because a wormhole is going to create enormous pulses. One of the minor disadvantages they don't mention in Stargate...

[rurounitriv]

Is there a reason that it needs to have a physical cause vs something like a computer virus? Since the boats and airships are designed to be piloted, they would be more vulnerable to a virus, especially if they were all linked through satellites.  Hacker gets into the satellite system, uses that to transmit the virus, boom, every system in contact with them suddenly loses their control systems, for example, and suddenly the engines shut down and the navigational equipment isn't working. A good sailor will be able to figure out how to do basic navigation, and with some ingenuity the crew might eventually figure out some way to propel their ship, but airships wouldn't have time to figure anything out before they went down. Ships that were docked at the time might automatically try to link to the sat system upon startup, infecting them as well if no one realized what was going on in time or if they were unable to access the satellites to disable the virus.

The cities, since they wouldn't be using the sat systems for navigation and would

[nyxelestia]

Seconding this.

Additionally, short of something physically attacking an airplane and damaging its structural integrity, anything you do to them will turn them into gliders by default - EMP or virus. Now, these gliders will still crash, but a few of them being controlled by experienced pilots and which happened to have been over geographically favorable locations at the time might make a controlled crash-landing. Most of them, however, will simply crash and kill everyone onboard.

[channonyarrow]

Excellent! Maybe I will be generous and let one or two land safely. :)

I do need it to be a physical event (this depopulates and destroys my city and the area is interdicted) but I can work with not having all the airships fall out of the sky at once. The geographically favorable conditions and experienced pilot points you've made are excellent, thank you.

[channonyarrow]

Unfortunately, yes. This event is the reason that the city that did this has been depopulated, abandoned, and interdicted for two thousand years. That absolutely needs to happen, and it needs to happen basically immediately on the heels of this, which is why I was toying with a nuke for the cause.

[eve_n_furter]

To safeguard your walking cities against electric pulses you can build them inside Faraday cages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

[cdozo]

You could have every walking city protected by a Faraday cage, and then have the integrity of the cage of some of the cities compromised by age, or terrorists, shoddy workmanship or some other cause. If the continuity of the mesh for the cage is broken in enough places, the cage won't provide protection from the EMP.

[channonyarrow]

Could I just cage the computer/other electronics or would the whole city have to be in the cage to make it work? It looks like the former is fine?

I'm currently thinking that these were initially developed as a kind of troop transport (I'm still thinking it through so don't expect it to make sense yet) and the cities developed on their backs as a result of this event when the world became an unsafe place to live. So what they were built to withstand could be very different than what they currently need to.

[eve_n_furter]

Depends on practicality. If the electronics are self- contained: have their own energy sources and are not connected outside the cages, you could have them in smaller cages inside the cities

[stickmaker]

A true airship is unlikely to crash, since by definition it is neutrally buoyant. If there is provision for manual control of buoyancy it could be landed safely. Some sort of hybrid which has hydrogen or helium for primary lift with the rest being through aerodynamic lift could, indeed, glide.

[channonyarrow]

Because this is a lesson in the dangers of technology and what man hath wrought, etc. While I find the image of the Big Bad shaking her fist at the sun and shouting "I'll get you one day, you stupid sky-circle!" hilarious, I really need this to be something they brought on themselves, not an unavoidable/unpredictable event that took advantage of the technology they developed.

[ashen_key]

Well....to a certain extent, if the sun does it, it IS because we did this technology to ourselves. We have become so dependent, and not built in nearly enough safeguards, that we are very, very vulnerable through entirely our own making. Just look at how much we flail now in bad ice-storms, whereas a hundred years ago we'd have been able to just shrug it off.

So, the sun might be the instrument, but it's the technology and our dependency that's going to screw us up.

[channonyarrow]

Right, I got that. That's not what I want to do, as stated in the original post. I still need to kill a lot of people as a next-step result of this event, so a CME on the order of the Carrington Event or greater isn't going to do what I need it to do.