posted on May, 31 2011 @ 03:09 PM
Meh. There are a couple of tripod mount prototypes that sort of do what you're talking about. Sort of. One of the technologies was abandoned a few
years back as being basically workable but totally impractical in the field. The other is still pursued, sometimes actively, sometimes on the back
burner under another name.
Nothing shoulder fired, though. Not yet, anyway, although the last one I saw was a bit smaller than they used to be. They really want it to get there,
though, and maybe one day they'll get it. The power supply is the main issue, that and cooling. Used to be an Alliant TechSystems project. I see
variants of it get bid out by various military groups pretty much every year, SOCOM is generally on that one.
FWIW, the agency didn't stop with the little gelatin darts with the neuropeptide payload. There was a bid out maybe five, ten years ago for a new
updated system, think of it as sort of a Taser with mods. We fiddled around with it forever but couldn't get past a basic roadblock - you had to
actually spear the target with both probes to get it to work, and even then it took several seconds of signal analysis and stimulation to do the job.
Might as well make it a contact system with handles, which is not what they wanted. There wasn't any way to do the thing with an arc like you do with
a Taser, when the probe hangs up in clothing. You had to separate out cardioelectric signals from the ton of noise the arc connection made, and we
just couldn't do it reliably. Alas.