Diesel emissions system causes ambulance to shut down. Patient dies.

chinese EMP ;-)

The original poster was worried about the Chinese dropping the bomb and EMP destroying all solid state electronics, leaving everyone's car unusable.

Frankly, if I were him, I'd be a lot more worried about getting gasoline under such conditions. Or food. But in fact the aftermarket CDI systems can be removed in the event of national disaster or the Rapture or whatever silliness you happen to be worried about.

--scott

you probably know more about this than i, but i don't think ignition systems are the world's most emp-vulnerable devices. under-hood noise is huge, and they have to withstand that. they're also under a metal hood - otherwise known as a faraday cage.

radios, with their external antennas and microvolt sensitivities are another matter, and that's where the emp scare originated.

The EMP quip was hyperbolic.

During/after some Armageddon-level event, your average guy with a rifle will have no problem finding gasoline food or whatever. Ignition systems will not be a critical factor.

if anybody still has one.

the chinese are pretty smart. they studied our political reptiles and determined that they could bribe their way to "most favored nation trading status" and proceeded thereby to get our reptiles to give away our economic heart - our technology and our industrial [military] capacity. is it such a stretch to imagine that they could also bribe our reptiles to take all our guns and thereby their last obstacle?

historically, most wars start with land and economic ambition. we've seen the economic here at home, and we're seeing the land with their saber rattling against the japanese, philippines, etc. they also have a huge male-skewed population surplus...

That's true. Really, everything inside a car is pretty solid in that regard, and there aren't any very long wires connecting it to the outside world to worry about acting as antennas.

Still, there are a lot of things that have to work right in modern cars these days, lots of integrated systems that go into making the engine operate. Only one of them has to fail to be a problem.

I've seen lots of car alarms and key transponder systems fail in ways that kept the car from starting too, though. It's stuff like that which is going to be the real gotcha.

--scott

well, that's even AFTER you deal with huge new orlean exodus style traffic jams

me thinks a horse is an all time classic despite the new age allergy in Pindostan to westerns (must be all the imported wussbags to blame, gotta get more colored gentleman as good guys in the upcoming westerns, hollywood, take notice. An indian and a chinese are the bare minimum to oppose native indians as all time bad guys)

welcome to the world of aluminum ever going thinner and, on an expensive occasion, carbonfiber

is not there anything in the points ignited car that's susceptable to the EMP?

few local folks commented that points based system would succumb to emp as well

I'm not certain that that's factual. EMPs pretty much only take out electronics, not electrical components. I'd expect a car with points to shrug off pretty much anything. The most complicated/modern electrical components would be the condenser in the distributor and the diodes in the alternator if so equipped - so maybe you ought to think about keeping that old generator, and keep the coil-and-points type regulator as well.

Interesting side note: the reason that if you are into vintage audio a lot of the tubes that you can still buy are Russian or other Eastern Bloc manufacture - apparently the US and Russian militaries took two different approaches to making their avionics etc. - the US invested countless dollars in shielding, hardening, etc. while the Russians simply kept using the "old" vacuum tube technology which didn't care about EMPs.

nate

I don't think so, and it's for the same reason that I suspect it's not a big issue for electronic ignition either: the wire lengths are very short and they're in a big conductive box.

The only thing that could be damaged in a Kettering-ignition car would be the condenser or the coil, because really there isn't much else to the system anyway. The coil is pretty well potted. The condenser is again only a very short lead to the coil, and it's designed to heal if the foil is punched through.

They probably don't know what they're talking about, but that's nothing unusual.

--scott

"They don't know what they're talking about, but that's nothing unusual."

ftfy.

emp is an electrical induction event. voltage induced is proportional to the "antenna" size and the proximity to the source. if you're too close to the source, emp is the least of your worries. if your antenna is wire inside a metal cage, and the source is outside, voltage is going to be low. and most likely below the kind of noise generated next to spark plug leads.

not true. power grids, because of their huge antenna sizes, are highly susceptible - huge voltage spokes can arc out insulators and blow transformers.

we didn't invest a cent into hardening until that defector landed his mig in japan. before disassembly and return, we had no clue that they were using tubes. and when we saw them, we initially laughed that they were using such "antiquated" equipment in their latest fighters. then the penny dropped. and suddenly, we have to go ahead and spend a fortune panicking to harden all our hitherto completely vulnerable systems. the soviets were pissed off about the loss of their plane, but i think they got the last laugh out of it.

In the context of things found in a home or car, however, there's nothing with a big enough antenna relative to its power handling capabilities to qualify. Well, if you have a transistorized radio in your old car that's probably gonesville in an EMP event, but that's about it.

You are correct in that how susceptible something is to an EMP is proportional to antenna size (note: doesn't have to be an actual component that is intended for use as an antenna, merely something that

*can* act as one) relative to how much power that component handles in normal operation.

nate

well, there are some limits to that. I'd be hard pressed to see how you can implement latest and greatest stealth bomber entirely in tubes. And given that the land leg of the nuclear triad is looong gone you do need a strategic bomber fleet that's up to date

and that means some stealth which, sadly, means some electronics

of course nothing precludes you from mixing tubes in some systems with latest in greatest in other systems so that the failures due to emp or otherwise don't have as drastic of an impact

"stealth" is not showing up on someone else's radar - no electronics in that afaik.

no point - all our stuff is hardened now.

but for the sovs, the point was that they were practical and we were asleep. when we spent millions funding the development of the ball point pen so astronauts could write in zero gravity, the sovs simply used pencils. our propaganda machine of course would spin that as their being low tech or backwards, but that was far from the truth.

I am saying that jamming pod implemented solely on tubes would be huge and the carrier of such a pod would hardly be stealthy.

Or you suggest that instead of being a silly fighter lugging your own ECM pod around bring a dedicated ECM aircraft along for the ride?

Maybe there is enough space in the bomber's airframe for all those lamps though. Tell darpa promptly that prew has to be reimplemented in lamps ;-)

That's all dandy when you have gravity. When you have to sharpen a pencil or catch the breaking off graphite bits all of a sudden your life in space becomes a whole lot interesting.

Maybe they have a fans running the air through the filters to combat crap floating around, but, still, I don't want crap floating around when gravity is not absent counting on the air filtration system to do its job trapping an retaining (or disposing of) all the stuff that's not supposed to be there in the first place.

ecm, aka "jamming", is last resort when there's a missile on your tail because it requires transmitting a signal. the moment you do that, you're effectively screaming "here i am".

better not carry any pesky humanoids in your spacecraft then - those things shed untold amounts of detritus, snot and other filth into your nice clean management systems.