Product: Weapon: Landmine
Appliqué urban anti-vehicle mime   (+2)  [vote for, against]
Meme streets

Anti-vehicle mimes are very useful route denial weapons, but extremely difficult to place in urban settings. They normally have to be either buried in the road surface, or placed via an existing culvert or drain. This greatly limits the options. But do not despair* ! The MaxCo weapons engineering team have the answer.

The ingenious solution is to adapt the numerous service and utility access points embedded in roadways. Now, spoilsports that they are, many authorities have taken to tack-welding these closed, precluding their easy and discreet removal. So, to overcome this, MaxCo have developed a thin, mime- packed appliqué cover which fits over the existing fitment and delivers a devastating walking-into-the-wind effect to a vehicle passing over it. While the device only contains a couple of mimes of secondary competence, it is more than enough to demoralise the crew of a typical soft-skinned vehicle.

To aid concealment, the kit comes complete with a portable wide-format printer. Simply snap a photo, and then print out a covering that exactly resembles the existing fitment. There’s no need even to approach the chosen site, as utility companies are unimaginative and tend to fit numerous examples of the same type of manhole cover throughout their delivery area, so having identified the type of cover required, simply find one elsewhere that can be photographed without attracting attention. Then peel the self-adhesive backing from the sheet and stick it onto the mime’s upper surface. Shims can be placed below the sheet to produce genuine 3D texturing, so that from a low angle it’s indistinguishable from the real thing.

To deploy, peel of the backing from the device itself and place it over the chosen location. For extra stealth, this can be done during the hours of darkness, from a small van that has a suitably-sized hatch cut in the load space; the van stops momentarily over the target, guided by concealed CCTV cameras, and the team in the back then just press the mime down onto the existing manhole cover.

Initiation can be by a selection of systems; command wire, simple pressure/impact, secure radio, cellular phone, or best of all radio paging technology which gives wide area coverage using a commercial system, but has no telltale back-channel like a cellular phone – it’s essentially a passive receiver.

Now it’s easy to ensure that, for those who you may disagree with, their day may end very differently – but alas no sooner – than their expectations.

*MaxCo does not believe in asterisks.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 07 2019

While rather gruesome and inhumane, we do quite like this idea. It has a certain familiar quality, however.

// MaxCo does not believe in asterisks //

Nevertheless, they exist whether you believe in them or not.
-- 8th of 7, Jul 08 2019


No they don't*.

*we have proof of this.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 08 2019



random, halfbakery