So, likely not deployed on civilian airports, but rather likely to be at military installations? Any word on what they do to humans who are (un)lucky enough to be in the way? And how are they affected by inclement weather?

All the issues with microwave emitters that you've mentioned would be even bigger problems with lasers, Ron. A laser beam would be dispersed and disrupted by rain or fog, and one with enough power to fry a missle could at least blind people if even tiny amounts of it was split off and sent in random directions. Microwaves, on the other hand, might be absorbed by liquid water, but also evaporate it extremely rapidly, allowing microwaves to literally burn right through inclement weather... a fact that explains the continuing popularity of microwave communicators in military and civilian airports.

Military installations don't need these sorts of things, as they already come equipped with various noncoms toting M-16s to ensure base security, along with myriad fences and other forms of controlled access.

People would suffer severe burns both internally and externally that could potentially kill them.

Lasers don't leak in the same way microwaves do, that's most of the point. They do require massive amounts of energy to create beams powerful enough to damage equipment. At first it was producing lenses that could withstand those forces that was the stumbling block. Now it's mostly a set of engineering issues revolving around the handling of large amounts of really nasty chemicals.

T - yeah, that's what I figured about lasers and the like. However, I wasn't sure if the microwaves had the same problems, seem they don't.

S - yes, but actually it's less of the non-coms and more of the privates and corporals (or airman and senior airmen. Or seamen and semen. hehehe. the navy's stoopid) patrolling. And given the possibility for attack, I figure we'd probably want these anyway. If our enemy gets close enough to lauch an manpat missile, it's too late for the security to do anything about it. And as a former mechanic, I would be very annoyed if I spent hours repairing the C-130 or F-16 and it got messed up by a missile. Aside from the wasted time, now I'd have to go out, fill out all sorts of paperwork, try to salvage things, etc.

Microwaves can be kept from leaking fairly effectively; modern microwave ovens would still have pacemaker warnings on them otherwise.

The problem with microwaves, is that while we have lots of things that can absorb and reflect them, we don't have anything yet that can refract them, at least not while retaining the wave properties that cause water to boil and metal to arc. As a result, focusing is limited to mirror-based methods that will always suffer some degree of "haloing" (like a flashlight)... probably what Scott means by "leakage."

Not to mention that metal is the number one reflector of microwaves, so a microwave that induces a current powerful enough to detonate a missle at range will induce an even more powerful current in the reflectors used to focus it. Resistivity in stainless steel being what it is, even with proper grounding things could get mighty hot, which is probably why it's self-destructive too.

Actually, this is not true any more, and perhaps is one of the innovations of the new system. These new "super radars" consist of arrays of hundreds (maybe thousands) of individual trancievers (sp?) which can transmit, listen, or jam on individual frequencies all at the same time. Each one is apparently a powerful radar in its own right. They are supposed to be SPECTACULARLY good radars, and somehow it was discovered that all their computerfied goodness allowed the transmission of a radar beam focussed enough and powerful enough to fry electronics at a useful distance.

AvWeek actually teased this out over the course of several years... to this day nobody is saying much of anything on the record.

The current plans for the stuff powerful enough to fry THINGS instead of just electronics is to weaponize it. Mount it on a cruise missle so you don't care if it melts the transmitter or not, that sort of thing.

WOOT!!!

All your bases are belong to us!

That's what we'll paint on the side of our missiles as they streak over the horizon and reduce SAM sites, telecom sites, and other strategic sources to mildly glowing slag.

I christen thee AYBABTU missiles. Break out the wine in a box!

Hmm. From what I've heard, most modern SAMs would be either detonated or rendered inert by electronics-frying levels of microwave energy. They usually rely on solid-state detonators rather than impact-cap detonators, so the missile can be detonated in situations other than "direct hit on a really fast moving object over a thousand yards away."

Still, missiles would be easy enough to retrofit with anti microwave shielding, so knocking them out of the air with radar dishes would only work the first few times.

You know, come to think of it... maybe they already HAVE adapted airport radar arrays to do such a thing. Seems I recall some news articles about missiles being fired at planes in Israel, only to miss or fail to detonate.

That assumes that the countries at hand can actually afford to do the retrofit. Maybe the can, maybe they can't. However, I think what Scott's talking about, to an extent, is actually hitting them with enough energy to do serious structural damage, along with frying electronics.

And that is something I'm all about.