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posted by mrpg on Tuesday March 06 2018, @05:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the eggs-and-heads-will-roll dept.

[...] An anonymous source, identified as a former Dynex exec, told The Sunday Times that the acquisition of Dynex Semiconductor by Chinese railway firm Zhouzhou CRRC Times Electric in 2008 "could have helped the development" of the Chinese navy's new railguns.

Dynex produces, as its name suggests, semiconductors, in particular insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs). These can be used as critical components in railguns and similar catapult-type technologies thanks to their very high voltage and current ratings.

"In these big electronic systems... you need to be able to turn on and off big power very, very quickly. And your standard power switches are too slow," the former Dynex exec told the newspaper.

The basic principle behind a railgun is that a current passed between two rails via a sliding armature generates an electromagnetic field that flings a projectile carried in the armature out into the great beyond. A little lateral thinking easily turns this into an electromagnetic catapult. To make it work you need seriously high currents and voltages – sufficient to generate 160MJ, if this paper is taken at face value.

[...] The national security implications of this tech transfer are obvious, and troubling. Britain's post-Brexit answer to maintaining national prosperity is to go full throttle into cutting-edge technologies, racing ahead of other countries to commercialise and license the technologies we develop. If that comes into conflict with our strategy of using Chinese capital to cover the upfront costs, and the result is that British advanced technologies find their way into Chinese weapon systems, that will not only make the world a less safe place, it will potentially harm Britain's standing with its allies – particularly the US, which is keen to confront Chinese challenges to its hegemony.


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 06 2018, @05:54PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday March 06 2018, @05:54PM (#648589)

    Hyperloop isn't trying to compete with traditional trains I think, it's to compete with airplanes. Would you consider jetliners to be "mass transit"? Didn't think so. Hyperloop is much the same: not that many passengers per trip, higher costs, but higher speed. Hyperloop should be a competitor to airplanes, offering even higher speeds, and probably greater throughput (more cars, more frequently), and better reliability and safety (underground tunnels are more predictable and generally safer than the atmosphere at 10-30k feet; there's no bad weather in a tunnel). It might cost more than a Delta or United flight though, but hopefully it'll just be competitive. If things were working properly in this country, the cheapest way of getting around (at least around the northeast corridor where cities are close together) would be by regular heavy rail.

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