I don't know about the rest of the Fallout community, but I for one was under the assumption that Electric shells were too far-fetched to make reality.
Wrong.
<blockquote><p><em>It’s midnight. You’re a cop patrolling the wrong side of town when you spot a mugging. The assailant is about 40 feet away, out of range of your stun gun. You shout, but he darts down an alley. It’s a dead end. The crook picks up a bottle, hurls it at your head, and makes a break for the street. You draw your gun.
And so goes the “capability gap,� one of the trickiest situations in law enforcement. For an officer in the field, this is a danger zone spanning 35 to 65 feet in which an assailant is beyond the range of Tasers and yet near enough to throw a deadly object, pushing an officer one step closer toward the use of deadly force. “Plain and simple, we need a less lethal option that works within throwing range,� says Sid Heal, a retired commander with the Los Angeles sheriff’s department and a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense.
That’s where the Extended Range Electronic Projectile, or XREP, comes in. Unlike Taser’s conventional stun gun, which shoots tethered probes up to 35 feet to deliver an incapacitating jolt, the company’s new XREP is a 12-gauge wireless projectile that can be fired up to 100 feet from any pump-action shotgun. It sails through the air like a normal slug yet induces muscle paralysis on impact. “It takes everything that’s a Taser and puts it in a slug-like device,� Heal says.
Logistically, the biggest engineering challenge was miniaturization. With a Taser, two probes attach to the assailant, arcing up to 50,000 volts of electricity, enough to penetrate clothing. The XREP, on the other hand, uses just 500 volts to allow for smaller circuitry. Instead of arcing the current, it sends it directly into the body via barbed electrodes that pierce the skin. Lead XREP engineer Mark Hanchett says the key isn’t so much the voltage but the waveform. The current, shaped to mimic electrical signals in the body, jams the nervous system. “The waveform is the secret sauce,� he says.</em></p></blockquote>
The article continues here. You can also read on the DoD/Taser joint project of electrified 40mm rounds here.
Spotted @ Popular Science
