Set Phasers to Stun?
It’s been the long time dream of science fiction to produce a ray gun that won’t kill, well it now looks like that’s now reality according to this BBC article:
“A newly-developed heat-ray gun that burns the skin but doesn’t cause permanent injury is now with US troops in Afghanistan. The Active Denial System (ADS) is a non-lethal weapon designed to disperse violent crowds and repel enemies. It uses a focused invisible beam that causes an “intolerable heating sensation”, but only penetrates the skin to the equivalent of three sheets of paper.”
With the current technology the gun which sits on a truck can fire up to 1,640 feet away, but what’s interesting is that they’re working on ways to shrink the system down to the size of a gun. Here’s a graphic that shows the Active Denial System (ADS) in action:
By the way I should point out that the phaser predated Star Trek by quite a few years (and this is a later example from 1961):
