General slliness with freeze rays

[KhorneFlakes]

Although I have looked all over the place for information on the subject, I have sadly been unable to find anything that tells me about whether freeze rays could potentially freeze a vehicle.

So, thus comes my stupid question. What kinds of temperatures are neccesary to freeze a MBT (i.e let's just say a Abrams or something) solid, to the point that it is literally encased in ice, and is it possible for any sort of technology to generate those temperatures practically?

[open_sketchbook]

Um, presumably, zero Celsius, if you threw some water on there. Well, I guess you'd have to negate the engine heat, and you'd want it to freeze fast, but it's not just temperature that's important; you need some water to chuck on there as well.

[KhorneFlakes]

Oh, I forgot about needing water.

Well, we need something to shoot water at the tank, of course.

[TheFeniX]

Not really a "ray," but would it be possible to combine a water hose and liquid nitrogen sprayer? Or would the nitrogen boil off too fast once it hits the air?

[Rabid]

More likely it would result in you launching chunks of ice and liquid nitrogen at high speed that would immediately boil and possibly explode on impact.

Maybe not a good anti-material weapon, but it could be interesting as some kind of anti-personal, potentially non-lethal weapon.

[KhorneFlakes]

That souns rather interesting, actually.

[Batman]

Is there any way to make the traditional superhero comics freeze ray work without asking the laws of physics to leave the building?

[Manus Celer Dei]

More likely it would result in you launching chunks of ice and liquid nitrogen at high speed that would immediately boil and possibly explode on impact.

Maybe not a good anti-material weapon, but it could be interesting as some kind of anti-personal, potentially non-lethal weapon.

It sounds like it'd be hilarious to watch, at least.

[Simon_Jester]

Is there any way to make the traditional superhero comics freeze ray work without asking the laws of physics to leave the building?

In a word, no.

It's still awesome though.

[Batman]

Well it's not like that answer was exactly unexpected.

[Sea Skimmer]

More likely it would result in you launching chunks of ice and liquid nitrogen at high speed that would immediately boil and possibly explode on impact.

Maybe not a good anti-material weapon, but it could be interesting as some kind of anti-personal, potentially non-lethal weapon.

You might have better results with a mixture of alcohol and water. The alcohol will delay freezing, and when boiling off it will carry away additional heat. However a big problem with a freezer weapon is ice is a pretty good insulator, so if your trying to freeze material like a tank to the core its actually not a good idea to quickly coat it in ice.

Humans would just die, or remain mobile. Its not going to be very effective either way. Get close enough to stop them, you'll stop them with massive frostbite and potentially suffocation, hooray we've made a very elaborate shotgun. At any distance its like blowing them with snow, very annoying but you'd also obscure any view of what they are doing, liquid nitrogen create billowing clouds if used in any quantity, so its incapacitating value is very questionable and proportional to the rate at which you are causing frostbite anyway.

Maybe best results would come from some kind of device that would hit the target with super cooled helium, which never freezes, perhaps in a string of grenades, then apply the water/alcohol + liquid nitrogen snow spray.

[Serafina]

You could just go with a glue-sprayer whose product happens to look like like ice.

[Sea Skimmer]

Hun, you know that makes me think, what about those chemical cold packs? They work by dissolving stuff in water that sucks up lots of heat to dissolve, a super version of this plus glue could well replicate the freeze ray effects then any other idea. All the more so if the chemical cold compound could somehow be made to form a gel that hardens from the glue.

[Serafina]

Hun, you know that makes me think, what about those chemical cold packs? They work by dissolving stuff in water that sucks up lots of heat to dissolve, a super version of this plus glue could well replicate the freeze ray effects then any other idea. All the more so if the chemical cold compound could somehow be made to form a gel that hardens from the glue.

Hmm, yes, something like that sound quite realistic.
It's of course still not a ray, but we manage to get good range out of flamethrowers (around 100 meters i think), so i see no reason why we shouldn't get similar range with this freeze-glue. Hardly an effective battlefield-weapon, but then again it makes much more sense as a crowd-control weapon anyway.

[Rabid]

I wonder how toxic this freeze-glue would be, or what would be the odd of it finding a way to block the respiratory system of the target subject...

[Marko Dash]

about the liquid nitrogen water/alcohol firehouse thing, would that be any good at crowd control? break up a roit or mob by creating a layer of ice on the ground and/or using it to quickly make low barriers

[Rossum]

Well, if you're spraying alchohol or any liquid to cool down the target then the resulting liquid will turn into a vapor as it carries away the heat (unless it's like a solid or soemthing, then it turns to liquid). Spray a riot with refrigerating alchohol and you'll get a cold crowd in an area full of alchohol vapors. I seriously doubt the fumes would get anyone 'drunk' but it would do something... like sting alot? Actually, it sounds like it would be hightly flammable and an errant spark would set the crowd on fire or make the air explode or something.


Spraying a crowd with a firehose that shoots ice-water sounds about as close as I can think of without getting too dangerous. In that, the goal would be to disrupt the crowd and the cold litterally takes the energy out of them to make it harder to riot. Can also slip them up or knock them down like with regular water (Maybe make it more effective at putting out fires? Just give the fire truck some kind of super-cooling system built in?).

Things like encasing stuff in ice would be better served with that foam that turns solid. Best used against machines or people you don't mind suffocating. Other less-lethal things might involve extra slippery goop that trips them up and makes it harder to grip things. Maybe the goop is kept cold so becomes more slippery or sticky once it hits human body heat or something?

One of the biggest issues with freeze rays is that you're going to need a source of water and water just doesn't compress that well. Things like foam or soap can be mixed up rapidly or stored with liquid and gas components but you really can't do much with water by itself. I suppose you could have some kind of thing that blows out snow or hail (mix of water and cold air) but that's about it.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Or you could do it with lasers; http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hb ... scool.html-

This was part of the 1997 Nobel prize, and basically you bombard something with laser light and get it to emit- excite it with the laser and induce it to spontaneously emit- shedding energy along the way.

Tunable beam, match to the emission spectra of the material- ta-dah, freeze ray.

On alloys- on compounds- it might be a shade iffier, but it might just have a place in the Plausible Midfuture; combat- hardening a scientific instrument to actually make it useful would be tricky, and it would have all the power/fragility problems of any other laser, but basically, why not?

[Sea Skimmer]

about the liquid nitrogen water/alcohol firehouse thing, would that be any good at crowd control? break up a roit or mob by creating a layer of ice on the ground and/or using it to quickly make low barriers

Systems already exist that will spray absurdly slippery chemicals on the ground to create barriers, on pavement they make walking or vehicle travel completely impossible, without the risk of frostbite a spray of ice would have. They also wouldn't melt in the sun rapidly. Actually spraying a crowd with ice is a bad idea.

[cadbrowser]

A laser type device was what I was thinking too. Something that removes the energy of the atoms moving around so that they slow down to a stop; which if I am thinking correctly would cause it to reach absolute zero (or very close to it).

Or am I just being retarted again?

[Sea Skimmer]

Its a fair question. Laser cooling can work more then one way. One method works by slowing the atoms, another uses photos to transport heat away and I think others still besides that. As far as I can tell, the methods all rely on hitting the target material from multiple directions at once, though in varying manners. The atom slowing method certainly works that way. Additionally they normally have the target material already held in a magnetic field which disconnects it from all external physical contact, and can be adjusted to allow the hottest atoms to spill out, significantly supercooling the material before the lasers get involved. It doesn't seem very likely at that these methods could even remotely scale up to rapidly cool a large internally heated object like a person or vehicle.

However a sufficiently advanced freezing weapon might be able to employ laser/magnetic cooling in ordered to prepare its ammunition. The colder the stuff you can spray or project on a target, the better you'll cool it down all else being equal. Supercooling isolated ammo would be much easier then supercooling an unenclosed target.