See through walls?

OculusMortis · Post by **OculusMortis** » 2006-04-25 10:53am

Well I’m currently working on a Weapon design concept, and I was wondering some of these futuristic films have weapons with Thermal sights which are capable of tracking people through walls, and i was wondering if this is possible with current tech.
Unfortunately a Google search gave me nothing, but i was wondering if any of the insightful and super intelligent residents of SDnet could possibly tell me whether these types of sights are possible? And if so how?

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-04-25 11:28am

Current generation thermal imaging can see through thin walls, probably breezeblock and single bricks or plywood. For anything like you see in Eraser, you'd need some technobabble. T-rays would probably be better, but the technology is still relatively new. X-rays and muon scanners require a sensor behind the target, so that won't work and ultrasonics can be iffy.

LaCroix · Post by **LaCroix** » 2006-04-25 11:31am

Well, a house whose walls let the heat produced by a mere human "shine" trough would be insane expensive to heat in winter. Japanese paperwalls might allow that.

There is a technique to look through clothes using infrared filters and imaging, but that fabric is not nearly as dense as concrete or even wood, so I doubt that would work.

Radar won't work either, lest you use enough power to really fry the house and everything in it.

Technobabble, as far as I'm concerned.

OculusMortis · Post by **OculusMortis** » 2006-04-25 12:02pm

Thanks for the replies, I was hoping to steer clear of techno babble and use something currently feasible, oh well not too much of a problem.

GrandMasterTerwynn · Post by **GrandMasterTerwynn** » 2006-04-25 01:01pm

LaCroix wrote:Well, a house whose walls let the heat produced by a mere human "shine" trough would be insane expensive to heat in winter. Japanese paperwalls might allow that.

There is a technique to look through clothes using infrared filters and imaging, but that fabric is not nearly as dense as concrete or even wood, so I doubt that would work.

Radar won't work either, lest you use enough power to really fry the house and everything in it.

Technobabble, as far as I'm concerned.

Not really, ground-penetrating radar doesn't fry the ground it's scanning. You could tune a radar to reflect strongly off of moisture-containing objects (like people,) and metallic objects, while passing through dry, relatively low-density objects, like most residential walls.

You could also use terahertz-frequency radio waves, but we're still at the stage where it takes a massive free-electron laser, a sixty-foot column, and a strong magnetic field just to produce a terahertz source of a relatively feeble twenty watts.

LaCroix · Post by **LaCroix** » 2006-04-25 01:17pm

Well, I knew that a high- frequency radar would likely penetrate the wall, but I assumed it would penetrate the humans behind it even easier.
I didn't know that ther is a way to make it distinguish between walls and living objects, so I stand corrected.

But there would be a lot more power needed to get a combat-useful range than 20 watts, a 10 watt radar like in motion detectors is only good for ranges of about 10 meters. Even if the concept is placed in the future with higher tech, they would habe a few kW of radar to achieve weapon ranges. A beam of radar in the kW range would certainly produce a microwave-similar effect.

Thats why fighter-crafts have to disable their high-power radar systems on the ground (I have read that in an article.)

Winston Blake · Post by **Winston Blake** » 2006-04-27 04:59am

There's this 'X-ray backscatter' thing which i found pretty impressive when i came across it a year or two ago. I think the fundamental idea is seeing X-rays scattered back in the direction of the transmitter, so with sci-fi technology i'm sure you could get something neat.

However, portable Ultra-Wide-Band radio is already being done, although only showing people as 'yellow blobs'. Link