Sure, it looks like somebody strapped a satellite dish to the roof of a box truck and painted it camouflage, but that doesn’t make China’s newest nonlethal weapon any easier to stomach. In fact, take a gut shot from this thing and your stomach will feel worse than a kitten in a microwave. Yet somehow, it won’t kill you. Probably.
There aren’t many specs on the weapon, dubbed the Poly WB-1, available yet. However Chinese officials report that the weapon currently has a range of 80m (and could be extended up to a full kilometre in later iterations) and that it utilises a millimetre-wave beam — just like the one in your home microwave — to excite water molecules within the cells of the target, resulting in gut-wrenching pain. That will show those rablerousers and their calls for democratic reform.
The WB-1 closely resembles the half-baked ADS (active denial system) that Raytheon debuted back in 2007 but was pulled from the Afghanistan theatre by 2010. That pain beam also used microwaves to stop advancing forces in their tracks but required 16 hours to boot up before use and could only remain active for a short while as it guzzled its fuel supply. There’s no word on whether the Chinese version has solved those issues but, if it has, our troops may need to start wearing an extra layer of lead-lined body armour to counter its effects. [Extreme tech – PopSci – Janes]