[civilitty]

> His area of work was extreme magnetic fields. Experimenting meant building giant copper coils, running enough current in them to melt them in place, and then very quickly detonating explosive around the coil so that, for a fraction of a second, the magnetic field at the center of the coil became the most intense ever built by mankind, before the whole setup was destroyed by the splattering of liquid copper thousands of degrees hot.

Explosively pumped flux compression generators [1] are fun!

That’s how real EMPs are made, in case anyone is interested in a career in super villainy but doesn’t know where to start.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_comp...

[59nadir]

Thanks, this will shave years off of my post-retirement projects!

For real, though, I've always found things like these fascinating.

I used to be very interested in working with software for weapons (specifically for fighter aircraft) because they've got very interesting problems to solve that usually are very direct. The amount of irrelevant code paths you can add, the amount of really far-away external stuff seems very limited at least in theory, so it seems a very interesting field to work in.

I could never get over that it would feel very bad being part of a process that ultimately might end in killing someone, though, so it was a non-starter.