Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Victor Khomenko (i) on August 09, 2000 at 06:26:09:

In Reply to: Re: Victor, are vacuum tubes a good choice for an orbiting satellite armed with nukes? posted by Victor Khomenko on August 08, 2000 at 16:32:48:

I shall not pretend to be a "true" military expert, I just spent some time in that area of development.

The answer to your question is basically NO. EMP is only one of many things you need to consider. If your equipment can survive EMP but can't see the target because it has limited processing capability - I don't think this is a good compromise.

*****In the Soviet military electronics the transistorization started years behind the US - due to significant shortage of the technological resources.**** Once it started, however, it was clear that this was the way of the future - all EMP be damned. As far as I know the systems were converted to solid state as fast as it was possible, because with every such conversion PERFORMANCE was improved by a great degree. Most military systems - missles, aicraft - have very long service lives on their bodies, frames, etc. It is avionics that needs to be upgraded constantly. Look at B-52's, F-15's, F-16's, etc - how they had evolved over 20years or so. Little changes to the airframes, HUGE changes in electronics.

So if you ask me is it possible that a particular piece of equipment was designed with the sole objective of surviving the EMP and therefore was tube-based - I would say it is possible, but perhaps that is not the best possibility. But as the general approach - tubes are leaving. They are hindrance to better performance, simple as that. Are tubes still flying in the US and Russia? As far as I know still yes in both cases.