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The Pentagon's shiny new ray gun
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Americans used to think that they were the "good guys." You know, we don't get involved with wars for bad reasons, we don't torture, we don't mistreat prisoners, etc.
Whether true or not, we had that perception until our government said, "It's okay if we're fuckbags, because... 9/11."
You should see the stuff we have on the USS Jimmy Carter.
Or not, then we would have to kill you....
It would totally be worth it though.
Wait, you have top-of-the-line death shit on the USS Jimmy Carter? I suppose you get points for surprise.
"Oh, the Americans just sent the Jimmy Carter. They must not be seriou..."
Dead silence.
I kid, Jimmy. I know you've got what America needs right there.
?
amirite?
I guess you don't know what the Jimmy is.
It's the US navy's black ops boat. Sure the name sucks, but I spent 18 months on her, doing shit that you wouldn't even think was plausible. Hell, 90% of the things we did would have started a war if we got caught.
You're very correct, I know little about the Navy, except that they have Seals, and apparently didn't block the release of a horrible movie about said Navy Seals starring Charlie Sheen.
Oh, oh, also I heard that, in the Navy, you can sail the seven seas and put your mind at ease. You can make a stand; can't you see they need a hand? You can protect the motherland and join your fellow man!
But you're saying that they have death blasters and crap, too? Sounds cool.
Yeah, we have a particular kind of device that uses non electromagnetic bursts (as much as I can say) to disable electrical systems in a particular scope, you can set to 90 degrees at full power from a sub and take out the power grid of a whole city.
Both versions can be focused to 1 degree for things like taking down missiles and aircraft.
Is that "off the record"?
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Also, tin foil or no, I'm not in favour of any government having this as its one more method of reducing civilian protests.
I think any government that tries to use this sort of device to suppress peaceful dissent is going to very quickly have to start using actual guns.
The submarines mission/configuration? No.
The details? Yes.
This thing induces pain by boiling the water in your skin. It's not dissimilar to being microwaved. Which, y'know, no big deal if your get out of the way in a few seconds, yeah. But what if, say, you're unable to get away? Due to something like being in a huge tightly-packed crowd that the military is trying to disperse? Or, perhaps, you're unable to get away because you are busy being horribly trampled by the thousands of screaming panicked people who are blindly trying as hard as they can to get out of the army's magic pain ray?
I mean, I can see the value in it as a large-scale nonlethal crowd dispersal weapon and everything, but it's not like we didn't have any of those before. I think this invites a much greater risk of 'accidental' abuse simply due to the way everyone looks at it and says 'oh, hey, it's perfectly harmless! Nothing could possibly go wrong!'
There are problems in that area with tasers and so forth already, which is bad enough, but this thing has a very real potential to, rather than disperse a crowd, simply transmute it into a massive stampede. It may not kill people in and of itself, but how many are going to be trampled to death in the rush to get away from it?
Vis a vis the torture thing, I think the concern people have there is that it doesn't leave any marks. The US tends to have a fondness for, ah, advanced interrogation techniques that don't leave physical evidence behind. Much easier to say 'it's not torture' that way than to try and tell people the bruised-up dude with all his fingers broken wasn't tortured. That's a major reason behind why we use waterboarding, for example.
However, I suspect the practical torturer probably doesn't see a whole lot of value in using a big expensive ray gun when he's got a bucket of water right there, except possibly for the chance to pretend to be a Bond villain.
Tear gas canisters lobbed into a crowd run the same risks, right?
It is also shit like this that is just annoying as hell. SERE Training is going to be even more of a bitch because the 'ray gun' is probably going to be added to the curriculum for everyone still doing D-levels and probably even C-level training.
Just be aware when showing this overwhelming concern for those who are being tortured that many of the techniques have been employed by the armed forces to train our soldiers to resist interrogation. It isn't a scaled down course either. Before this form of torture ever is used on an enemy, it will be used on an American.
Americans are silly creatures.
And teenage girls voluntarily make pyramids in skimpy clothing, but Abu Graib was still inexcusable.
Also, being clubbed in the head with a police baton or inhaling tear gas or being blasted with a fire hose has been known to have more severe results, even causing death in rare occasions.
Listen, crowd control and riots are tricky propositions. Nobody WANTS to have to use crowd dispersal weapons, but we have to have the MEANS to do it, and having a tool that's proven to not cause severe after-effects or verifiable mortality rate is a good one to have.
As long as the device is calibrated to fire timed bursts to avoid prolonged exposure and give time to escape, I'd rank it over most other crowd control weapons.
I understand why people might be freaked out by it: They don't understand it. It's new. People get freaked out by airplane travel, even though they're far more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash. Same basic principle.
Or you could just get a fucking gun.
The other option is just to use a focused beam and play it over the surface of the crowd, people will be exposed, panic and hopefully run away unharmed. If you stay in the front of the crowd and advance you will be hit again, if you run away you are likely to not be hit again.
I think this is a fantastic idea. Second to some kind of genuinely invulnerable highly mobile land based military unit which can be deployed to the field (invulnerable to conventional arms and terrorist bombs at least, allowing you to effectively ignore fire from ambush parties and stroll over and arrest them) I can't see what can be more useful from a military perspective in a situation like Iraq or Afghanistan.
Well, you can definitely control where they don't go.
This, unlike a police baton or tear gas, seems to have a much more instant, wide-spread and painful application. Tear gas you can run away from, it doesn't incapacitate you with nerve burning pain and a baton round the head requires someone to do it and they can't do it to everyone no matter how hard they try.
This weapon doesn't seem to incapacitate anyone. I saw a reporter get subjected to it, and he was able to jump out of the beam easily enough after three seconds.
If you're in a crowd of people experiencing intense pain and in panic, I can't see you legging it anywhere fast, again, without injuring someone else.
How is this substantially different than a wall of cops with billy clubs and shields wailing away or a cannister of tear gas shot into the middle of a crowd?
Its not really. But there is one thing I would like to say, if you're going to invent a ray gun of any sort make it hand held. It would make so much more sense, but I guess technology isn't there yet.
Even if tear gas is affecting them, they can move and shouldn't be in the sort of pain that the description of this device gives. While some may be able to walk out of it, others aren't pain junkies and will probably not take well to it.
As for a wall of cops, if you're confronting a wall of cops at close range, you're asking for it.
I'm going to assume, just for a second, that people trying to mitigate a riot using these things are also on a bullhorn explaining to people that if they don't get out of the way, that they're going to take counter-riot measures, just like they'd do with any other method.
It puts the lotion on its skin, or it gets the hose again, right? If they warn people, and there's no reason to think that they'd just jump out of an alley with a tank-mounted sonic beam cannon to surprise a crowd, then anyone who remains is also "asking for it." I, for one, probably wouldn't be able to run away well if being blasted with a fire hose, either... but I'm smart enough to run away if they get the hose out. Hopefully I'd be smart enough to leave if they drove out the huge science-fiction beam tank, too.
You ever been in a crowd that was tear gassed? I have (woo Seattle WTO riots) You don't know what the hell you are talking about here. This thing sounds like a much better tool than gas and riot gear.
Er, the ray doesn't even do that.
A "grenade" of this would make people run away from the source of pain; it wouldn't incapacitate anyone.
High-tech = scary.
Like I said before, people fear flying in airplanes more than riding in automobiles even though you're statistically more likely to die in a car crash than an airplane crash. This is probably because cars are lower to the ground, so they can theoretically survive being thrown free of the wreck, wheras if a plane crashes there's really nothing you can do about it if you're not wearing a parachute.
In this case, while the beam might not be more dangerous than standing a bit too close to a camp fire, the fact that you can't even see the thing that's hurting you is what scares folks, I think.
At least this one's horrible burning goes away immediately.
Well, the beam pulses- even if you're unable to get out of the way and the operator isn't directing it over a crowd, there's a natural cut-off point before it starts doing real damage.
Even so, it'd just make it a "less than lethal weapon" rather than a "non-lethal weapon", which is no different than tear gas, water cannons or bean bags- only significantly less dangerous.
IMO, it's a very good torture device. It's also open to huge possibilities of abuse even if deployed with the intended goal. The frequency of automatic weapon use against crowds is close to zero and if this is widely available it would be pretty much used without consequences.
As I said before, abusing this thing seems like a great way to put yourself in a position of having to use automatic weapons.