The Wonderful World of the Gundampilotspaz

They’ve even got a Navy contract to develop the thing. I looked up Invocon’s contract in the Navy’s Small Business Innovative Research database and found this slightly more detailed description of the work:

IVC proposes to investigate the use of beamed RF [radio frequency] energy to excite and interrupt the normal process of human hearing and equilibrium. The focus will be in two areas. (1) Interruption of the mechanical transduction process by which sound and position (relative to gravity) are converted to messages that are processed by the brain. (2) Interruption of the chemical engine which sustains the proper operation of the nerve cells that respond to the mechanical transduction mechanisms referenced in item (1). Interruption of either or both of these processes has been clinically shown to produce complete disorientation and confusion.

Wow! Through the walls? That even beats the Active Denial System — the pain ray that Noah wrote about the other day. Invocon even touts its device as a “Star Trek hand-held Phaser Weapon set on ‘Stun’.”

However, rather than causing intense pain, like the Active Denial System, Invocon is advertising a weapon that boasts the ability to go through walls and incapacitate everyone in a room by making them lose their balance. “Second order effects would be extreme motion sickness,” the company notes.

Basically, you’re safely in your house, an invisible beam hits you, you feel dizzy, and fall over (or puke). Or so goes the promotion:

The benefits of such a weapon would be that in areas of extreme risk to Marine Corps personnel, hostiles could be controlled without loss of life. The weapon effect would be helpful in urban combat where rooms could be subjected to the EPIC stimulus and then subdued without further risk to friendlies or hostiles. Similar technology could be applied to law enforcement operations especially in hostage situations where all the people in a room could be incapacitated without damage and subsequently sorted out as to which are the bad guys and which are the good guys.

This is a huge leap for urban warfare and probably save the lives of hundreds of soldiers after it is developed and hopefully implemented and handed to soldiers faces dangerous situations like going from building to building in Bagdad….or whatever nation we choose to attack next.

It’s an exciting leap in the world of military technology and perhaps will change the way human beings wage war. Why hide in buildings when you can be knocked out without seeing the enemy?

Source: WIRED Blog

Tags: interesting, technology //