The Pentagon's Ray Gun Can Stall Cars (defenseone.com)

john of sparta quotes Defense One: The Defense Department's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program, or JNLWD, is pushing ahead with a new direct energy weapon that uses high-powered microwaves to stop cars in their tracks without damaging the vehicle, its driver, or anyone else. The jammer works by targeting the car's engine control unit causing it to reboot over and over, stalling the engine. Like an invisible hand, the microwaves hold the car in place. "Anything that has electronics on it, these high-powered microwaves will affect," David Law, who leads JNLWD's technology division, said in March. "As long as the [radio] is on, it holds the vehicle stopped."
It weighs 400 pounds -- it's the size of a large copy machine -- and uses 300 kilowatts of power that's generated by a gasoline-powered turbine.

"To deploy it, the driver would pull out in front of the attacker and turn it on."

Comments

Won't damage the driver??

[taylormc]

...with 300 KW of microwave energy? Good luck with starting a family after that.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[thesupraman]

Ah, but its nice warm fuzzy AMERICAN microwave energy, not evil terrorist radiation.
Its like the American laser 'defense' weapons that instead of burning out eyes, just gently exfoliate the facial skin in a loving caress.
Because, you know, otherwise they would be illegal blinding weapons, against conventions the US signed.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[thesupraman]

Hmmm, lets see..
No, no mention of ionising energy anywhere that I can see, moron.
Perhaps I suggest you go stick your head in a 300kW microwave, and lets see what happens, shall we?

Boiling oil is also non ionising, perhaps you should take a swim.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[Joce640k]

a) Aren't cars made of metal shielding? Don't ECU's have shielding of their own?

b) Don't they have people inside them? What happens when 300kW of microwave power hits the meat?

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[taylormc]

Microwaves are non-ionising, you backward fear mongering anti-scientific luddite. Get your head out of your ass and out of your bronze aged superstitions about magic wands and flying donkeys lol.

Did we ever work together? :-)

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[carlhaagen]

Ionization isn't the only danger with electromagnetic radiation, you poorly educated sap.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[religionofpeas]

Most cars electronics are shielded though, so much of this is kind of worthless, now.

They still need plenty of wires to penetrate the shielding. Of course, all the wires are EMI filtered, but only for normal levels of interference, not 300 kW aimed directly at the vehicle.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[Deadstick]

Most car bodies have a gaping hole in the front

Hole yes, gaping not so much. At 2.5GHz the wavelength is 12 cm, so the amount of energy that gets through will depend pretty heavily on the grille pattern.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[hey!]

300 K is power.... the *rate* of energy being expended. So if you use that power for a very short time, it's actually not much energy.

People are, to a first approximation, a 20 kilo bag containing 40 liter of water. It takes roughly 168000 joules to raise the temperature of that water by 1 degree. So 168 kJ/300 kw == .56 seconds. So a 10 ms pulse, if delivered entirely into an average human body, would only raise the temperature of that body by one hundreths of a degree *averaged over the entire body*. Granted the heating effects would be concentrated on the surface of the body, but if you made the pulse sufficiently short a person wouldn't feel anything.

A computer operating at clock speed of hundreds of megahertz, however, is vulnerable to transients lasting only microseconds.

So this is kind of like the way you need a surge protector to protect your computer but not an old-school incandescent light bulb. People are, from a voltage transient standpoint, more like a light bulb than a computer.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[Khyber]

If it's not shielded, wire becomes ANTENNA. Do you basic radio?

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[Spazmania]

If you're pulsing, you can charge and release the charge on a capacitor. You only need a 300kw generator if you're (a) continuously sending or (b) pulsing at significantly greater energies.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[GameboyRMH]

That's an unusual amount of space to have in the radiator support of a fully assembled car, but that's irrelevant because the ECU is usually mounted right behind the firewall, a decently thick steel plate with just a few small openings into the cabin for wires, hoses and control linkages. It's the panel that makes up the back of the engine bay that extends from the base of the windshield to the cabin floor.

So it seems that this microwave gun is the electromagnetic equivalent of spraying bullets fast and thick enough to kill someone hiding behind an impenetrable wall with ricochet.

There are other sensors in the engine bay of an EFI'd car that could be targeted to cause an engine malfunction though.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[hey!]

Or if you want to be able to power the thing up quickly, say to take a second shot.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[Aighearach]

No. Also, this was demonstrated on American television 12 years ago; the demo had a driver in the car, and the journalist standing right next to it, because there is no reasonable health danger from short-term exposure.

The thing about "starting a family" tells me you watch a lot fictional television "shows," and that you don't understand what the content is.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[Aighearach]

That shielding won't save you, and is actually the point! The shielding absorbs the energy, causing a large transient voltage spike in your car's electrical system. That causes the ECU to crash, because it isn't designed for those conditions.

One of the key things to understand here is that the car only has two electrical connections, battery + and battery -. Battery - is often called "ground," it will tend to be at local ground because it is referenced to the vehicle chassis which will likely be at ground potential when you start the car. But it doesn't have a third wire with an actual Earth connection, and the wheels are usually electrical insulators. What that boils down to is that shielding works by converting the RF interference into a short voltage spike, some of which is converted to heat in the ECU and any other electronics with voltage regulation. All the devices in the car are already expected to survive "double battery condition," which is when the tow truck driver gives you a jump start using 24V, which is really 28V+ because their engine is running and their battery is charging voltage. So there is a huge amount of voltage margin and the shielding works well without even having system-wide voltage regulation. But in the extreme case, as with this device, you eventually overload the ECU's voltage regulation, and since the circuit is designed to be robust, it simply crashes and reboots as soon as the spike dissipates. Repeated use could easily damage a vehicle, though.

For protection against this, I'd want to try something low-tech like a wire brush connected to the chassis that can drag on the ground slightly, so that voltage spikes can find a path to Earth instead of getting stuck in the circuit.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[Aighearach]

None of that matters, the ECU itself is inside a metal box. I'd think about other theories of operation, before settling on "the microwaves have to touch the ECU."

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[Aighearach]

"Surface" in this case would be something like the top 12cm, though, right?

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[GameboyRMH]

Not always, some have plastic or half-plastic cases.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[angel'o'sphere]

a 20 kilo bag containing 40 liter of water.
1kg of water is 1 liter, so you are somewhere somewhat off ...

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[Aighearach]

I'd still keep thinking about other theories of operation. ;)

Re: Won't damage the driver??

[rfengr]

S band is perfectly fine for RADAR and comms; no water resonance. http://www.rfcafe.com/referenc...

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[viperidaenz]

Standard automotive tests require components to survive 60V peaks.
According to Texas Instruments, an automotive load dump for a 12V system can peak at 87V, a 24V system at 174V

It's not the power wires you need to worry about. They're well filtered, protected and low impedance.
It's the signal wires that would do the most harm. They don't have much more than ESD protection, usually diodes to each power rail. Inducing a large enough current and voltage in, for example the oxygen sensor wire, usually located on the exhaust manifold at the front of an inline-4 engine, would be shunted to the power rails inside the ECU, via the protection diodes, on the processor side of the voltage regulators.

There's many other signal cables in front of the firewall too, like fuel injectors, temperature sensors and all the relays in the fuse box.

Of course it wouldn't do anything to a car without an electronic fuel injection. Like pretty much everything from the 70's or earlier and half the cars from the 80's.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[rfengr]

Earthing something has absolutely nothing to do with electromagnetic shielding.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[dgatwood]

No, this is practically invisible to microwaves.

No, most ECUs are in a small metal box. They aren't practically invisible by any means. Of course, at high enough power, that's moot, but....

The gap required to hold in a microwave at 2.4GHz is actually significantly smaller than the holes in the front of your microwave, it's just that the holes in a microwave oven were chosen to be that size because it's "good enough".

A Faraday cage works with holes that are no larger than half the wavelength. For 2.4 GHz, that means the holes can be almost 2.5 inches in diameter (61 mm). You could shoot bullet holes through the screen, and it still wouldn't leak enough to worry about.

The preferred hole size for a Faraday cage is more like 1/10th the wavelength. That would still allow holes up to about 1.2 centimeters. In practice, most microwaves have holes that are closer to 3mm. They are way better than "good enough".

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[drinkypoo]

Standard automotive tests require components to survive 60V peaks.
According to Texas Instruments, an automotive load dump for a 12V system can peak at 87V, a 24V system at 174V

That's a nice idea, but there are warnings in my 1998 A8's manual about overvoltage during charging. Apparently it only takes something like 19V to damage the PCM. Newer vehicles are probably not actually any better.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[EETech1]

Those load dump tests are a blast!
Reverse battery, double battery, reverse double battery, caps and diodes failing everywhere!

Modern electronics are pretty good at dealing with electrical interference. We used to test with a 25kW Marine radar to be sure it wouldn't cause problems with our systems. Once everything went to surface mount components, and 4+ layer PCBs, the robustness, and noise immunity of electrical components increased significantly.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[viperidaenz]

Perhaps they have load dump protection elsewhere in the system.
Perhaps the load dump protection in the PCM works by shunting current until a fuse blows, as it only needs to survive less than half a second at those high voltages.
Perhaps they don't care, and if your battery connections fail while the engine is running, you're fucked.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[HiThere]

Well, if you assume that this is actually intended to work as described, then it could be induced currents in the connecting wires. But I think this really makes more sense if the intended actual target is drones.

Re: Won't damage the driver??

[HiThere]

Now *THAT* makes sense. You need to wonder what the efficiency would be though. They might need one hellacious heat sink.

Re: Won't damage the driver??

[torkus]

The magnetron in your microwave is 60-70% efficient...and industrial applications can go higher into the 80% range. Even if you assume 50% efficiency, that's only 150kwt to handle.

Unless the magnetron is particularly temp sensitive you can cool that with a decent sized automotive radiator. In the desert. Without trying especially hard. A bit of quick digging shows most magnetron are happy up to around 250c so no worries there.

The bigger issue is *generating* 300kwe...on the moving vehicle that's supposed to get ahead of the target That's a multi-ton generator which is going to dissipate it's own ~300+kwt anyhow.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[torkus]

'Focusing' is the key here...and also the danger. Is it 300kw/m^2 focused and tracked on the target ... or 300kw/100m^2 flooding an area?

For easy numbers, assume a 75kg person and fudge to 4J*g/deg C then 300KJ or 300Kw will raise your body temp by 1C every second. You are unlikely to concentrate the full power directly on an individual but this is also meant to hold a car in place so your duration is potentially minutes or more.

Very curious to know the power density impacting the target vehicle. If it's 'human safe' then it has to be substantially lower than the full output which makes me wonder why they wouldn't do more research on waveguides and simple target tracking to lower the power requirements. Currently the 300kw generator for this device would be larger than the device plus vehicle it mounts on.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[torkus]

Actually 300kw is the power supplied by the generator according to tfa. Their pulse power may be orders of magnitude higher depending on the duty cycle but your generator is going to be your average power. That leads me to conclude this isn't a one-shot-disabled but instead active, continuous interference with the vehicle computer.

Even 10% of the (assumed) average power impacting a person is enough to raise body temp to lethal levels in a minute or so. 75kg @ 4J*g/C = 300kw*s/C so 10% of that for 60 seconds raises body temp by 6c which would be lethal.

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[torkus]

Children can be ter'rists too ya know...

But i've no clue about 40kg of shit in a 20kg bag thing

Re: Won't damage the driver??

[HiThere]

They're talking about a turbine generator to go with it, so the question perhaps is 300KW how often? They didn't say 300 KWHours. If it's 300 KW/microsecond they're going to need a really good heat sink if they've got any repetition rate, and since they're talking about forcing the electronics to repeatedly reboot...

Re:Won't damage the driver??

[Aighearach]

Right. Good work. It has nothing to do with the shielding.

It has to do with giving the voltage spike that results from successful shielding somewhere to go.

Like in a device plugged into the wall with a three-prong plug: If you dump the noise back onto neutral, it pushes noise into everything else plugged into the same supply circuit. If you dump the noise to Earth, then that doesn't happen.

So for example, take an old, simple electric kitchen blender with a metal body, and a two prong plug with no Earth connection. Now, plug an old analog AM radio into the nearest other plug, and turn it on. When you turn the blender on, you'll likely hear a bunch of noise in the signal from the radio. Now, touch the blender chassis with one hand, and touch a metal part of the kitchen sink or faucet. Most of the noise disappears.

Electricity doesn't take the shortest path, it takes all the paths. Adding an Earth connection gives noise an alternate place to go, and if you can make it a low-impedance path then most of the noise will go that way. Otherwise where does it go? Into a capacitor until it leaks out? The battery isn't going to accept it, the electrical system will already be at charging voltage.

You could also use a giant capacitor bank with different value capacitors, maybe add an inductor too, to filter it out, and just use a diode to protect the rest of the circuit.

Cage?

[bmimatt]

How about that Faraday's Cage tho? :)

Re:Cage?

[phantomfive]

That's when they pull out your gun and shoot your tires. Which they should have done in the first place anyway. Especially since they have big vehicle in front of you anyway (or at your side, or whatever).

Re:Cage?

[religionofpeas]

A car is not a Faraday cage. There are plenty of holes and gaps between panels.

Re:Cage?

[Calydor]

Yes, because bullets ricochetting into traffic along with a sudden flat tire or two, on a car controlled by a driver now in a state of panic - that's so much better than a car that just stalls and drifts to a halt.

Re:Cage?

[luis_a_espinal]

That's when they pull out your gun and shoot your tires. Which they should have done in the first place anyway. Especially since they have big vehicle in front of you anyway (or at your side, or whatever).

Depends, are we talking civilian/LEO use or military use. For the later, yeah, blow that shit to bits. For law enforcement, no, you do not shoot at a car regardless of whatever stupid shit we see on TV, not unless you have serious circumstances to save life and limb (yours or someone else.) Once the bullet leaves the barrel you have no control where it goes, but you almost certainly have the responsibility of what/who it hits accidentally or not.

That's why there are things like spike strips and caltrops (even if they aren't perfect solutions themselves, see here.

Re:Cage?

[Spazmania]

Law enforcement doesn't shoot the car, they ram the car. Much safer, much more controlled.

Re:Cage?

[Aighearach]

If they pull out my gun and shoot my tires, I already stopped caring about my car when whatever happened immediately before that happened that caused me to be outside my car, and them to be holding my gun. :)

A more likely use case would probably be when a car is approaching a checkpoint and doesn't slow down or stop at the correct spot. The correct military decision is to destroy the threat, but it is more often a civilian idiot or phone zombie than some sort of attacker, and it is unpopular to shoot people for being stupid. So with this they have an extra chance not to kill an idiot and their family. That's why it doesn't matter that it is easy to harden a car against this; cars that are hardened against it can still just be destroyed, if this works on regular family cars it could save a lot of lives.

Re:Cage?

[luis_a_espinal]

Law enforcement doesn't shoot the car, they ram the car. Much safer, much more controlled.

Oh, I know that. It's just the internet LEO expert who thinks LEOs shoot the shit out of cars in real life.

Re:Cage?

[torkus]

Have you seen the stupidity cops in the US are capable of these days?

https://nypost.com/video/reckl...

UFO's

[wolfheart111]

"As long as the [radio] is on, it holds the vehicle stopped." Creepy

A solution: "very" old tech

[burni2]

1.) gasoline engine - carburator - passive tech works not very efficient but works, with manual choke

weakness1: ignition coil, could get damaged
weakness2: transistor based ignition - solution -> back to non-transistor based iginition

but much less electronics.

2.) diesel engine - inline fuel injection pump with passive spring "controlled" injectors
no electrics at all

Start it and it runs till its out of fuel.

3.) yes K.I.T.T. had it long before this article.

Re:A solution: "very" old tech

[tlhIngan]

passive tech works not very efficient but works, with manual choke

For varying degrees of "works".

It's not just efficiency, it's basically ease of operation. One of the big things about modern cars is they are "twist and go". You twist the key (or push the button nowadays) and the car goes. Doesn't matter if the engine is hot (vapor lock is not an issue), very cold, or any other thing, including poor fuel. You want it to go, it goes, and unless something is very wrong, it will go. (You can even shoot out cylinders and while it stalls the engine, you can have a V8 engine with 6 dead cylinders still barely run. It's not happy, but the computer is able to compensate and get you home, albiet slowly).

Anyhow, did you wonder why it took 300kW to do it? It's because an ECU is very well shielded to begin with - the metal body of the car already is a great faraday cage. But the ECU is also encased in a metal body because it's a very challenging environment with a lot of stray RF caused by all the high voltages around.

In fact, if you're willing to settle for post-millennium vehicles, disrupting the keyfob-car communications will generally be far easier - the windows in the passenger compartment don't generally block RF, and the signal levels are weak since keyfobs are powered by itty coin cell batteries with poor peak power performance, so they don't have much transmit power. (I had to replace the battery in my keyfob - it still measured 3V, while batteries that are generally dead used in PCs measure pretty damn close to 0.5V. Heck, even my watch which died suddenly had a battery that measured around 0.5V. No doubt the battery was low, so it couldn't supply the necessary power for the transmitter)

Re:A solution: "very" old tech

[burni2]

For the twist and go I will install a carburator with auto-choke (passiv) and will put on a sticker into the window

1.) Turn engine for 1,5s - then stop (to have fuel in the fuel hose - passive on engine fuel pump - tends to have a backflow to the tank)
2.) Push gas pedal 3 Times (to trigger the accelerator pump to have enough fuel in intake)
3.) start engine ... yeah I would not sell any cars.

Btw. you might like this documentary especially Part2

Part1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Part2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Great use of public funds!

[Gravis Zero]

Another technical achievement that can be defeated by aluminum foil. ;)

Re:Great use of public funds!

[MrKaos]

Another technical achievement that can be defeated by aluminum foil. ;)

So you're advocating walking around wearing a tin foil hat?

Stylish!

Re:Great use of public funds!

[Highdude702]

Got to look good while you're being a criminal.. How else are you going to make headlines.

Re:Great use of public funds!

[MrKaos]

Foil around the engine's control unit, obviously. How would a hat help in this situation?

Posting tired. I was trying to figure out how much microwave energy you would need to get through the steel car body to affect the ECU enough for foil to make a difference, for some reason the image just popped into my head when I was imagining being in a car with it being fired at me.

I think I'd consider wrapping my testicles in foil too and watch out for sparks.

Re:Great use of public funds!

[Aighearach]

Another technical achievement that can be defeated by aluminum foil. ;)

True, that. Just make sure to wrap it well enough to get under the car's wheels, because the car is already shielded and the only workable theory of operation is to create a path to Earth to dump the transient.

Re:Great use of public funds!

[Aighearach]

The foil changes the temperature of your testes the whole time you wear the foil, the microwaves only heat them for a 10ms burst.

Re:Great use of public funds!

[MrKaos]

The foil changes the temperature of your testes the whole time you wear the foil, the microwaves only heat them for a 10ms burst.

Red Underpants on the outside of his tights worked for superman, I think sparks of mini lightning coming off foil coated testicles in 10ms bursts would be really impressive.

Besides that the foil keeps them fresh.

Won't work on my car

[Harold Halloway]

My Austin Allegro is impervious to anything.

Re:Won't work on my car

[Hognoxious]

My dad had a Maestro and there's no way some gadget like this would have stopped it, mainly because it wouldn't start in the first place.

One question

[mridoni]

If you have to take along a 300kW gasoline-powered turbine and a copy machine-sized unit, isn't it easier to just throw this stuff in the path of the car you want to stop?

Re:One question

[wierd_w]

Really, I had this idea a very long time ago. You don't need the full 300kw power system if you use a pulsed maser instead of a constant broadcast. That means you can use some kind of storage system with a smaller input, such as an air-coil resonant tank, or a super-capacitor array. You just need to be able to deliver the 300kw on each pulse. It takes time for the ICM to reboot; you dont have to keep roasting its ground lanes with signal. You just have to make it malfunction and restart in a reasonable interval. 1hz pulse width would be sufficient.

Assuming these tools are driving their emitter nonstop, that would let you use 1/60th of the power generation hardware, or ~5kw power system. Even less if you use a 2sec interval instead of 1.

For some variations of the pulse timing, a second alternator on the delivery vehicle would be sufficient; the bulky part would be the super capacitor array, which could be installed in the trunk, or in the rear seats.

The referenced idea I had called for a klystron resonant cavity with a pulsed electron beam, and a low power reference microwave signal produced by a small magnetron. As long as pulse duration time is some whole integer product of the reference signal frequency, it should work fine.

Hilarious that an idea I had as a teenager in the 90s is being seriously considered here though. LOL.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's primary purpose is as a non-lethal way of stopping 3rd world suicide bombers from driving their IED-cars into US military convoys.

(The other option is that they just assume the worst and fire .50-cal Gatling guns at any suspected vehicle. "This kills the crab.")

Re: One question

[Anonymous Coward]

folks were making car-stalling microwave guns built from old microwave ovens and posting how-tos on the internet decades ago

Re:One question

[Deadstick]

One word: Prototype.

Re:One question

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

That's what I was thinking, too, when I read this quote:

"To deploy it, the driver would pull out in front of the attacker and turn it on."

At that point, you could just drop the equipment in the path of the "attacker". Or just step on the brakes.

Also, isn't "fugitive" more accurate here?

Re:One question

[Aighearach]

If you have to take along a 300kW gasoline-powered turbine and a copy machine-sized unit, isn't it easier to just throw this stuff in the path of the car you want to stop?

No, you park it right next to the road to stop cars at the checkpoint, if you put the equipment out in the road without turning it on they'll just hit it with a suicide bomber.

This is to stop the car a few feet farther back, keeping most of the checkpoint outside of the blast radius, and allowing a way to kill less civilians who don't stop at the right time.

Re:One question

[strikethree]

I actually considered this too when I took some Navy electronics training. My biggest concern was the heat dissipation. For the exciter in the EA6B, we had a dedicated oil cooling system and it was HEAVY. Of course, more energy was being poured into that, a full jet engine's worth, than 350kw, but still, heat is an issue.

Re:One question

[Thelasko]

It takes time for the ICM to reboot; you dont have to keep roasting its ground lanes with signal. You just have to make it malfunction and restart in a reasonable interval. 1hz pulse width would be sufficient.

I've seen operating engine ECMs reboot due to coding bugs. They boot incredibly fast. In milliseconds. The engine would keep running, but it would misfire when the ECU rebooted. The engine and vehicle have kinetic energy, so they don't stop dead in their tracks.

I'm not saying it won't work, but 1hz may not be fast enough. It might only slow the engine down.

Re: It won't stop an old diesel car.

[Anonymous Coward]

>not every vehicle has a computer in it

Have no fear citizen! Deliquent and possibly subversive citizens who refuse to upgrade to new eco-standards compliant vehicles will be progressively taxed like the Japanese and flagged for monitoring by the NacebookSA.

Enjoy your freedumbs! Im sure your handguns will fix all these problems and moar.

Re:One question answered

[MrKaos]

If you have to take along a 300kW gasoline-powered turbine and a copy machine-sized unit, isn't it easier to just throw this stuff in the path of the car you want to stop?

I suggest that would mean there wouldn't be an excuse to deploy microwave weapons within civilian populations.

Ship radio/radar can muck up a lot of things

[Viol8]

Waiting in a port a few years ago I noticed that all my central locking had failed and the alarm was dead - had to manually open the car with the key (good luck trying that these days with so called smart keys). Luckily the car started and I could drive it away. Once parked out of the port everything was fine. Went back to the port a week later - exactly the same thing. I don't know if it was the radar or some high powered HF radio transmitter but whatever it was it nicely disabled my car systems.

Re: Ship radio/radar can muck up a lot of things

[Deadstick]

I once encountered a distraught lady with exactly that problem: her smart fob's battery was dead and it wouldn't unlock her car. I asked for her keys, opened the door with the real key, and directed her to a Radio Shack.

Re: Ship radio/radar can muck up a lot of things

[tgeek]

Good thinking! Direct her to Radio Shack so she could buy a cell phone to call somebody. Good luck with that strategy today . . .

Re: Ship radio/radar can muck up a lot of things

[Deadstick]

No, in those days they'd have sold her a battery and put it in her clicker. Today, I'd have sent her to Ace Hardware.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

PROTIP: "non-lethal" = *worse*!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think it can't get worse than death, you are utterly clurless and sheltered about life.
Don't get me wrong, I am happy that peoplle can have such a safe life nowadays,
but like vegans and other diseases of city dwellers out of touch with reality outside of society's shelter, they forget how bad things can get.

Death is not a punishment, but a salvation, for situations such as this. Sure, if you could, you'd choose life without the torture. But for incurable diseases or other situations where there is just no. way. out. ... life is stilll the far worse choice.
I mean if you're dead, you don' give a fuck about anything anymore anyway.

Never choosing death is just a stupid meme mindlessly parroted by herd thinkers who did not really have any life experience.

Any older person who has *really* seen some shit, ...
including near-overdoses (with a pseudo-coma where painkillers give you horrrible pain without the ability to scream and say stop, while they just cluelessly believe you just need more painkillers!), horrible war injuries (like limbs being twisted off and artificially keeping you alive beyond reasonability), unimaginable torture (like literally putting a child on a stake and frying it alive over open fire and eating it and forcing its firends to eat bits of it, which my ex-Yugoslavian neighbor actually witnessed with her own eyes), or "just" broken neural mechanisms that constantly give you a huge dose of sadness and the inability to ever feel anything good again that you cannot even begin to imagine, ... will tell you that it is FAR more complex than the idiotic "death is NEVER(!!11oneeleven) an option".

Wait a year

[AndyKron]

I'll wait a year and get the hand held model on Banggood for $10

Re:Wait a year

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait two years, the military will be giving surplus units to your local police. The police, in turn, will deploy their new weapon on civilians, and face wrongful death lawsuits from the families of those with pacemakers.

Law suits

[ukoda]

Law suits from the first person operating a target vehicle in that trial to get cancer can't be that far off.

Re:Law suits

[schwit1]

Good luck proving it was this microwave generator and not the thousands of other possible causes.

Who is who?

[Threni]

"To deploy it, the driver would pull out in front of the attacker and turn it on."

The person using it is not the attacker? So the attacker is the person being stopped...by the driver. Not the attacker driver, the driver who's deploying the device. Got it.

300kW of microwave radiation, NOT dangerous?

[carlhaagen]

If you'd be left with only your fertility taken from you after that you'd be lucky. It's fucking insanity and downright lies to label this power of EM aimed at a person as harmless.

Re:300kW of microwave radiation, NOT dangerous?

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

To say nothing about the effect on bystanders, or someone behind the intended target.

Driver == meat

[aepervius]

Firstly a human driver and a peace of meat are not that different - except maybe for some parts like eye and lens/vitreous humor which I can't imagine reacting the same to heat as muscle. Secondly 300 kW means nothing. is it 0.1 second exposure (30 KJ) or 10 seconds exposure (3 MJ) that makes a difference. Then you have got to examine the quantity and the part of the body it affects. Then use 1/R2 laws to determine how much energy there is at a distance, and angle, to examine exposure. 3KJ in your eye and 3KJ in your upper arm muscle won't have the same effect. Basically I can imagine situation where this is not harmless and could have long lasting vision damage but not much else. Would probably run afoul of some convention on blinding weapon.

Re:Driver == meat

[saider]

i think the point is that if it is not at 2.45GHz, then the impacts on water (and flesh) will be dramatically reduced. Microwave is a pretty broad spectrum.

Re:Driver == meat

[religionofpeas]

Water absorption in the RF band is actually very wide. The reason that microwaves use 2.45 GHz is because that band is free for unlicensed use.

Re:Driver == meat

[Mr D from 63]

Maybe the old pacemaker microwave scare thingy can be relevant again.

Re:Driver == meat

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, 2.4 GHz was chosen as the microwave oven frequency because it has close to the highest dielectric loss (heating) effect in water (as it drives the water dipole like a little motor). The very highest heat comes with a frequency that is slightly higher, but it was not chosen because it would cook too fast. They wanted penetration. So, when the first microwave oven was patented by Panasonic in 1947, the FCC created the 2.4 GHz band to accommodate it. It made a class of bands that could be used for that and for other purposes, for emissions that could be restricted to a fairly small locale.

Re:Driver == meat

[HiThere]

As described it also sounds nearly useless, as it should be easy to shield against. Microwaves won't penetrate a solid piece of metal, and I think even a good foil wrapper around the electronics should defeat this. I think it would spark off the sharper corners of the foil on the outside of the wrapping.

OTOH, if I reconsider this as an anti-drone weapon it makes a lot more sense.

How can this be safe?

[Sqreater]

If the tiny EMAG energy of a cellphone is supposed to cause brain cancer, how can 300kW blasted at you NOT do something deleterious??

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Guglielmo Marconi made this in the 1920s

[spiritplumber]

and it was strong enough to mess with a car's magneto. Normally I would take this sort of thing with a grain of salt, but my great grandma saw it in action.

Sigh.

[ledow]

Gimme 300KW of directed energy from a gasoline-powered turbine, and I'd stop a car no problem at all.

But this is just stupid.

"To deploy it, the driver would pull out in front of the attacker and turn it on."

Sigh. Press button. Stinger drops in road. Problem solved without lots of stupid and dangerous ideas.

And anything the military might want to attack that's not just a commercial car? Yeah, they'll shield the relevant parts against this from the first time you use it.

Sometimes I really wonder just how much money is thrown away to try having something someone saw on Star Trek, rather than just taking the more obvious solution.

No damage?

[TJHook3r]

Nice that the manufacturers can guarantee no damage. My first thought was that a speeding criminal with no engine or steering might plough into somebody but they obviously have this covered. This being the US, it will only be used when bullets have failed anyway.

FS: 1982 300SD

[drinkypoo]

For sale: 1982 Mercedes-Benz 300SD. The fuel cutoff is vacuum-driven, and there are zero computers involved with the normal operation of the vehicle. It can even be pull-started (or bump started given a sufficiently large hill) in spite of the automatic transmission. The transmission is governed by a vacuum line and a cable so it doesn't need a computer either. Runs like a champ, but needs extensive cosmetic work like new paint and a good carpet cleaning. Located in Kelseyville, CA. $2500 OBO

Re:It won't stop an old diesel car.

[gbjbaanb]

sure, but most car thieves and fleeing criminals/terrorists won't choose a "classic" vehicle for their getaway. I think the authorities will let those edge cases go.

Good for attacking NYC or LA

[biggaijin]

Crashing the vehicle's control computer is good for attacking modern vehicles, but the fix is easy: just arrange for your tanks and trucks to use conventional, electro-mechanical ignition systems (as most of them still do outside the US and Western Europe, I bet). These war machines would all be immune to the microwaves. However, the drivers still would not be good prospects for parenthood afterward.

Re:Good for attacking NYC or LA

[HiThere]

You're worrying about the wrong part of the body. The balls would probably be fine a lot longer than the eyeballs.

Still waiting for my flying car...

[hey!]

The internal combustion engine killing ray was a staple of 1920s and 30's pulp fiction super-science villains. It was a common trope in spy thrillers and detective stories. In those stories airplanes (the highest of high tech) were continually falling mysteriously out of the sky, brought down by the villain and his henchmen's engine freezing ray.

If you think about it, the internal combustion engine in 1930 was newer to the general public than the computer is today. Before the model T in 1908 it was an extreme rarity -- it was still the era of horses and steam engines. And rays were the latest thing too. X-rays had been discovered only 35 years earlier -- in our time reference, that's about the time that the ARPANET migrated to TCP/IP or the IBM PC was introduced. There was a positive mania for radiation. Shoe-fitting x-ray fluoroscopes started to show up in shoe stores and people were consuming radium-based patent medicines -- what we'd call supplements today. Some people died so hot they had to be buried in lead caskets.

The thing is if this concept is proved, some of those old pulp magazine super-science scenarios have to be regarded as physically plausible. Fu Manchu was, in modern terms, a "terrorist".

Re:Still waiting for my flying car...

[david_thornley]

A lot of UFO encounter stories feature the car just stopping for the duration of the encounter.

Non-lethal?

[natex84]

I hope the person in the car isn't using a pacemaker, or other electronic device for their survival...

"To deploy it, the driver would pull out in front

[mark_reh]

of the attacker and turn it on."

And if it doesn't work, you've stopped that truck full of explosives and it only cost one soldier and a truck full of worthless electronics...

Um ...

[fahrbot-bot]

It weighs 400 pounds -- it's the size of a large copy machine -- and uses 300 kilowatts of power that's generated by a gasoline-powered turbine. "To deploy it, the driver would pull out in front of the attacker and turn it on."

Wouldn't putting a giant truck carrying the 400 lb "ray gun" and generator in front of the oncoming car also stop it?

Re:Um ...

[vandamme]

Yes, but that's at very short range. HPM can be focused in a narrow beam and stop things far away. If they can set off their charges and leave a big crater a quarter mile away, you just have to fix the road and clean the blood stains off it but none of your guys get hurt.

Newtonian mechanics notwithstanding

[bill.pev]

When they say stopped, I think they mean stopped for good, once it glides to a resting stop. Hopefully its not a drive by wire kinda car. Or going down hill. etc.

Re:One question answered

[Aighearach]

If you have to take along a 300kW gasoline-powered turbine and a copy machine-sized unit, isn't it easier to just throw this stuff in the path of the car you want to stop?

I suggest that would mean there wouldn't be an excuse to deploy microwave weapons within civilian populations.

Almost everywhere the military operates already has a civilian population. Wars aren't conducted safely off-planet, or whatever. If you're well-enough educated you can tell which civilians it will be used on based on which part of the government is operating it. ;)

scale it up

[bferrell]

And you can knock down drones at distance too.

Re: It won't stop an old diesel car.

[Cederic]

You might find NSAcebook is easier to pronounce and also more easily identifiable as two disparate privacy invading organisations.

Re:One question answered

[MrKaos]

If you have to take along a 300kW gasoline-powered turbine and a copy machine-sized unit, isn't it easier to just throw this stuff in the path of the car you want to stop?

I suggest that would mean there wouldn't be an excuse to deploy microwave weapons within civilian populations.

Almost everywhere the military operates already has a civilian population.

Usually not their own.

Wars aren't conducted safely off-planet, or whatever.

I've never thought of wars that ensure peoples safety.

If you're well-enough educated you can tell which civilians it will be used on based on which part of the government is operating it. ;)

We have seen that. We've seen microwave weapons used on citizens in England protesting American bases.

Re:#physics

[HiThere]

Well, since the brakes are also electronic with a fail-safe, they lock on hard. Assuming you believe the press release.

"Tank, charge the EMP."

[DirkDaring]

Much better solution.

Re:This is quite literally...

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I can almost BET they have already squandered a ton of taxpayer dollars from which they will get kickbacks one way or another

Plus there will be costs for court cases where people are injured by this... even assuming it *really is* human safe, what happens if someone's smart-phone/tablet/laptop explodes?

Re:1 Bullet is cheaper

[ebvwfbw]

Bullet, 50 cal at the block, bunch of stuff. WWII bazooka would do it. Lots of stuff would be cheaper.

Maybe this is a kinder, gentler kind of stopping them. You know, so you can bring a BFG to bear on it.