On Monday 30 May 2005 14:38, Terry Blanton wrote: > Standing Bear wrote: > >However, if an > >alien species assumed our ignorance of this and acted with foolish > >overconfidence...not unlike some of us...then we would have a chance of > >locating him and pinging him with a radar pulse of our own.....or two. > > There is an obscure anecdote that says it was a new radar system which > took down the UFO at Roswell.
Interesting thought! I would have thought that radars of those days were not of extremely high power, although some stories I was told as a sailor on an old MSTS ship spoke of men being killed while working on radar dishes that were inadvertantly and unaccountably 'turned on' while the victim was working on the dish. It would not take much power to do that, however. In any case, a UFO would have to have a power plant capable of orders of magnitude above the best we have in terms of compactness and output. Concommitant with this would be requirements to internally shield components of those ships from radiation from these power supplies. This shielding, one would think, would protect the ship's systems form whatever weak EM fields that we would throw at it even now. In my original post, I only implied finding the craft, not shooting it down, which is a hostile act and a whole new ball game. The only weapon that we could credibly bear on a foreign craft with a high hit probability would be our 'Airborne Laser' that we are building under contract wth Boeing. At a couple of megawatts, its chemical iodine laser, though probably primitive by outsystem standards, would probably be sufficient to cause an insufficiently shielded craft some damage. It is slaved to its radar targeters, and it can fire repeatedly; unlike missiles which take a long time to get where they are going and are one shot deals which usually miss. Standing Bear
