10 Top Secret Weapons You've Never Heard Of
6. The Heat Ray
Sonic weapons, lasers, and now this. The Active Denial System (ADS) is a directed-energy weapon being developed by the US military. It heats the surface of the target, along the same principles as a microwave, messing with the molecules of water and fat in the top layers of skin (around 0.4mm deep).
The ADS, or heat ray, is designed for security and crowd control measures at present, as the decreased penetration of the short wave bursts only allows for minor surface blisters, not the nastier injuries that microwaves can cause. The longer the beam is applied to the surface of the target, the greater the heat application. In tests on over 700 volunteers and around 10,000 applications, pain thresholds were exceeded after 3 seconds, and no one could take more than 5 seconds.
Key to the non-lethal selling point of the ADS is that as soon as the beam is removed from the skin, the pain vanishes immediately. It's been described as a highly effective weapon with a low likelihood of genuine injury. However, drawbacks include the fact that a target unable to leave the beam's area of effect (say, for example, someone pinned down, a child, or a disabled person) would continue to be heated until the operator chose to remove the effect. Proper reflective clothing is also likely to completely nullify the beam's effect.
What kind of reflective clothing? Common kitchen foil would do. You could protect a regiment by nipping to Poundland in your lunchbreak.