From Newsgroup: alt.fan.heinlein
"a425couple" wrote in message news:ggGyP.6766$
SVG3.3001@fx42.iad...
Seeing todays (March 7, 2025) comic Wallace the Brave,
V
https://www.gocomics.com/wallace-the-brave/2025/03/07
Reminded me of:
2Robert Heinlein's 1953 short story Project Nightmare. The bombs are not dropped, but are smuggled into the US and hidden in various places. A
team of psychics is used to locate the bombs and prevent them from
exploding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nightmare
I am sure I have mentioned how much Heinlein hated the USSR.
IMHO, pure evil ending!
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Somewhere I read a story about designing a destructive machine so
complicated that its function couldn't be discovered from its plans, and
then leaking those plans to the USSR.
An integrated circuit approaches that complexity, I spent close to a year learning to become an IC test tech by etching down and tracing out the connections and transistors/FETs of a sample Hot Swap controller, which is a mixture of analog, digital and power. I got almost all of it right and
passed the test.
Microwave circuits such as impedance matching a transmission line to a transistor can be similarly obscure although they may look simple. The trick is to absorb the signal's energy instead of letting some of it reflect back, similar to a car wheel spring and shock absorber. The engineers watched the vector network analyzer's Smith chart (impedance vs frequency) while I
trimmed slivers of metal from the intentionally oversized matching stubs. I could do it all but they like to feel useful without getting their hands dirty. The unknown factors are the dielectric constant of the circuit board insulation and the capacitance to the underlying ground plane which have manufacturing tolerances.
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