07.28.11

Take the virtual tour of the small business future military tech shop

Posted in Crazy Weapons at 8:09 am by George Smith

I dumped on the mania of electromagnetic pulse weapons recently.

And the comments section wound up with a link to a southern California business, one that’s been around for years, always claiming wonderful inventions.

Except the inventions never do anything. They’re not really supposed to. It’s just corporate welfare for a nest of electrical engineers.

But the junk sure looks great.

Here’s the company:

SARA, Inc., creates custom solutions to complex problems for the defense and homeland security industry. We specialize in directed or detected wave energy from EMP and ELF to laser light, HPM and sound.

Our technologists harness electromagnetism, plasmas, acoustics, electronics, and processing to build practical applications for force protection, renewable energy …

You’ll have to visit the site to see the pretty pictures.

Here’s what looks like the world’s biggest high power microwave weapon. Actually, it’s only the antenna. The rest of it is — if they actually made it — would be as big as a double-tractor-trailer, which would do nothing interesting, anyway. Those guys do look proud, though.

Here’s more do-nothing devices, fruit of the fad belief about a decade ago that projecting high volume or ear-piercing sound would be a game-changing non-lethal weapon rather than something that just annoys the neighbors.

“Since 1992 SARA has developed and tested high power acoustic devices of all shapes and sizes ranging from sources the size of a pencil to the size of a compact car,” it reads. “The acoustic devices have been powered by bottled air …”

Yeah, well, there was that bit in the second Hulk movie, too. YouTube is also full of examples of this old “science” application, which was never much of a hot sale except in Pittsburgh, where one of them is used to irritate small crowds. (Commonly, these are LRADs, not produced by SARA, but with the same idiotic ideas firmly in place. They’re sold to foreign country and a small number of police departments in the US for use against people who aren’t expected to fight back.)

American innovation at work winning the future.

Where was I?

Back at SARA, there’s the abundant pollution free electricity program.

It sounds good but it’s only a molten hydroxide fuel cell. Not a unique idea, it’s never really caught on. For reasons which are fairly obvious if you think about the chemistry and energetics for a bit.

“Almost 3/4 of our technical staff has advanced degrees in engineering or physics from places like MIT, University of California, University of Illinois, SUNY, Georgia Tech and Stanford, yielding an attractive balance of PhD’s, old codgers and young chargers,” reads SARA’s “about” page. “The company is led by persons with extensive experience and training at upper levels of major defense contractors, including Northrop, Raytheon, TRW and Boeing …”

Proudly doing nothing but wasting taxpayer money in Cypress, CA, since 1989.

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