Boffins in China have reportedly cooked up a chilling Microwave Cannon “that can down satellites” with waves 68,000 times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field.
The terrifying weapon is augmented by four Stirling engines and can reportedly be fitted onto the back of a truck as the East Asian powerhouse flexes its military muscles.
The cooling properties of the Stirling engines will boost the strength of the powerful microwave weapon, with tests showing it consumes just one-fifth of the energy of other systems.
China has made similar models in the past but none that omit this kind of power – and certainly none that have the capability to operate continuously for around four hours.
If the reports are true, then China’s high-power microwave (HPM) weapon will be the first that uses Stirling engine technology to be openly revealed to the public.
According to the project team, which is led by electronic engineering scientist Xu Ce, the HPM has a continuous, steady-state magnetic field with an intensity 68,000 times stronger than Earth’s.
To put it into perspective, that’s close to half of the magnetic field strength that can be generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe – the world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider.
With the weapon system capable of being fitted onto a truck, China can quite literally station it anywhere they want, offering an endless list of possibilities.
And with it being capable of operating for up to four hours without losing power, longer journeys will not be an issue.
The weapon was jointly developed by the Northwest Institute of Nuclear Technology in Xian and the Institute of Electrical Engineering in Beijing, the South China Morning Post reports.
The project team noted how current HPM weapons driven by strong magnetic fields “suffer from the drawbacks of huge energy consumption and large size.”
Therefore, the Stirling engines are critical because they function as refrigerators, rapidly moving heat away from one location.
