this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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277
China’s ‘land aircraft carrier’ charges flying drone with microwave beam (www.scmp.com)
submitted 1 day ago by FTonsilStones@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
65 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Scientists in China have demonstrated a wireless power transmission system that uses a ground-based microwave emitter to beam energy to an antenna array mounted on the aircraft’s underside. Importantly, they were able to do this while both the drone and charging system were in motion.

In tests, the car-mounted system kept fixed-wing drones in the air for up to 3.1 hours at an altitude of 15 metres (49 feet). The key challenge that the team overcame was maintaining alignment between the emitter and the drone during flight, wrote Song Liwei, the project’s leader.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 10 hours ago

Are you somehow entirely unaware of the DEW crowd control devices that have been being used for like 2 decades now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System

Yeah, the whole point of these things is they basically microwave the outer layer of your skin, when in wide beam mode.

Or, they can be dialed in to be a more concentrated beam... to uh, internally heat up a bit more than just your skin.

But uh, for legal reasons of course nooo they do not do that and cannot do that.

While it is claimed not to cause burns under "ordinary use",[50][51] it is also described as being similar to that of an incandescent light bulb being pressed against the skin,[14] which can cause severe burns in just a few seconds. The beam can be focused up to 700 meters away, and is said to penetrate thick clothing although not walls.[52] At 95 GHz, the frequency is much higher than the 2.45 GHz of a microwave oven. This frequency was chosen because it penetrates less than 1⁄64 of an inch (0.40 mm),[53] which – in most humans, except for eyelids and the thinner skin of babies – avoids the second skin layer (the dermis) where critical structures are found such as nerve endings and blood vessels.

I would imagine that if you had an emorous amount of microwave energy from an orbiting solar array, being beamed to a recieving station on earth, (ie, a very small small space compared to the distance involved) and it uh, missed, yeah, yeah it would microwave people.

There's also this:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8733248/

Brief but intense pulses of radiofrequency (RF) energy can elicit auditory sensations when absorbed in the head of an individual, an effect known as the microwave auditory or “Frey effect” after the first investigator to examine the phenomenon (1). The effect is known to arise from thermoacoustically (TA)-induced acoustic waves in the head (2).

Lin has proposed that the Frey effect may be linked to unexplained health problems reported by U.S. officers in Cuba and elsewhere, the so-called Havana syndrome (3).

Probably don't tell any schizophrenics you may or may not know about that.