Journalist Gets Blasted By the Pentagon's Pain Ray — Twice

dsinc writes "Wired's Spencer Ackerman voluntarily subjected himself to what the U.S. military calls the Active Denial System, an energy weapon commonly known as the 'Pain Ray' that turns electricity into millimeter wave radio frequency and blasts targets with heat. He describes it thus: 'When the signal goes out over radio to shoot me, there’s no warning — no flash, no smell, no sound, no round. Suddenly my chest and neck feel like they’ve been exposed to a blast furnace, with a sting thrown in for good measure. I’m getting blasted with 12 joules of energy per square centimeter, in a fairly concentrated blast diameter. I last maybe two seconds of curiosity before my body takes the controls and yanks me out of the way of the beam.'" The device has been tested now on over 11,000 people, with only two serious injuries to show for it. However, the device has limitations: rainy weather decreases its effectiveness, and its "boot-up" time is 16 hours, making it useless for breaking up unexpected, impromptu mobs.

Comments

16 hours?

[Haven]

What electrical components take 16 hours to boot up?

What mechanical operation requires 16 hours of prep?

Any insight? I read the article, and it had very little in the way of information.

Re:16 hours?

[Anonymous Coward]

I could be completely wrong here but I think it is because you need to create a superconductive state and it takes 16 hours to get cold enough. That's the only thing I can think of.

Re:16 hours?

[0111 1110]

The puzzler for me is at 100 GHZ you're gonna use WR8 or WR10 and those do not tolerate more than 10 KW or so before arcing over.

You seem to be thinking solid state. Think tubes. I would imagine such a high power device would almost certainly use a gyrotron. With a gyrotron they could output megawatts of power, even in long pulse or CW. I bet L3 Communications (their California Tube Laboratory) made them the gyrotron and maybe designed the whole system as well.

Re:16 hours?

[idontgno]

ADS is a Raytheon product. They're already pretty good at high-energy microwave systems. And the know a little about tubes, since that was their original product line.

Wear Foil!

[owenferguson]

Would a foil suit help? Can we reflect it back at the source somehow?

Uh, what

[ShooterNeo]

Ok, I get that this baby is running on beta hardware. But 16 hours? Can anyone here venture a guess as to why? No matter how sllloooowww the CPUs, or how inefficient the code, 16 hours isn't plausible.

So, it must refer to something the hardware is doing. Still, 16 hours? Thermodynamics is normally quicker than that for a machine that can fit on a truck. That's an awfully long time for it to be heating up or cooling down.

Any RF engineers here know a reason for this? My best guess is that components of this device rely on superconductivity, and require very slow peltier coolers to bring the operating temperature down to the range of operation. I've seen radios sold on ebay that use superconductors for parts of the RF elements.

Less Effective

[wisnoskij]

Sounds less effective, most costly, and more dangerous then tear gas.

Torture

[sideslash]

Why is it OK in public spaces for law enforcement and the military to use extreme pain from heat rays and Tasers (TM) to force people to do what they want, yet it's not OK in a private cell to force somebody through pain to share information? We can torture people without leaving permanent physical injury, just like with the heat ray. So do we as a society really have moral qualms about torturing people because of the pain, or is it purely a pragmatic decision based on the low signal to noise ratio of intelligence from tortured prisoners?

Re:Torture

[JustinOpinion]

There's that. There's also the fact that these non-lethal weapons are intended to be used against someone who is being violent: in other words, they are a last resort to subdue someone out of control before they do serious harm to someone, whether that be another citizen (either protestor or bystander), a police officer, or even the person hurting themselves. The purpose in using a non-lethal weapon is that in doing this harm to them, you will prevent a much greater harm.

Which, really, highlights how inappropriately all these non-lethal weapons and anti-riot instruments are used nowadays. They've gone from 'preventing imminent violence and harm' to 'making someone unstable easier to deal with' to 'a way to subdue someone, no different from handcuffing them really'. It's positively criminal and evil how thoughtlessly devices like tasers, rubber bullets, and mace are used nowadays by law enforcement. These things were designed as last resorts and are now being used routinely. If a person is being disruptive but there is no imminent threat of harm, then these tools should not be used. Even if the person has clearly broken a law and needs to be arrested, these tools should be avoided: the person should be subdued peacefully somehow (sometimes this means just waiting, letting them yell and whatnot, until they tire themselves out and can be safely arrested).

Re:The same old problem with non-lethal weapons

[pz]

There was an instance of non-lethal weapon abuse by a Boston policeman who shot a Red Sox reveler with a projectile that's supposed to only cause the sensation of burning, like pouring hot sauce on the skin. It's like a targeted remote pepper spray. Problem is, the policeman hit this poor woman in the eye. She died as a result of the injury.

The words "non-lethal weapon" should more accurately be written as "not-usually-lethal weapon". A weapon designed to hurt enough to seriously distract everyone it is used against cannot be non-lethal in all cases, given the wide range of physiologies found in humans, and the wide ranges of unanticipated potential uses. While one might argue whether the officer in question above should have aimed at this student's head (if the weapons are so inaccurate that they cannot be controlled well enough to avoid hitting someone in the head, or if the officer was inadequately trained or prepared to do so, then that is another matter entirely), because he did hit her in the head that must therefore be an anticipated use. Thus this particular paintball-like weapon, and by extension, all non-lethal weapons, must be considered less lethal, but certainly not non-lethal.