Defending Boardwalk » Mark

DEFENDING BOARDWALK » MARK

The perimeter of Boardwalk had to be defended — well enough to prevent a breach, and without causing serious harm to any aggressor. We wanted to avoid violence, but we needed to be immovable without our consent. A cross between the Himalayas and André the Giant.

A number of solutions to this defense do not work: threatening lethal violence will not deter certain aggressors; tranquilizers are not like in the movies and can be both ineffective and deadly; knock-out gasses would be great, but are similarly unreliable; and finally weapons like tasers need to be aimed and fired at a potentially overwhelming number of aggressors. What we needed was a kind of ‘riot control’ from a position inside the riot. That matches an allto-common situation in the United States: prisons.

We defended our compound as if we were the remaining guards within a prison that had completely rioted, including the prisoners arming themselves. In this situation there is no hope of being in control. We can only defend ourselves, and we committed to doing so without forcing any attrition (i.e. killing) of the aggressors. So the prisoners are in control, and if they come for us we can only hold them off until they settle down or someone comes to help. Calling the police and other government forces ‘armed prisoners’ might seem a little unusual, but unless they decided to bring in the actual military and destroy us, the analogy is pretty apt.

We had 8-foot walls — and chicken-razor wire filling the gaps, which provides a pretty effective core of a defense. Assaulters had to go over, under, or through containers or razors. Under seemed unlikely given there were no tunnels beneath this part of the parking lot. Drainage pipes were all outside the perimeter. Through the razors was possible, but would require people to single-file cut through chicken and razor wire, with potentially armed people positioned with direct line-of-sight of the assault. That seemed tactically unlikely. Cutting through the containers had similar issues

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for the assault team.

We decided the most likely tactic was for them to try to come over: either over the containers or potentially over everything and landing on the tents themselves. The tents seemed unlikely since anything could be beneath them (say giant spikes) and there would be no way for them to retreat once dropped. So we decided the only really soft point that needed extra hardening was the containers: if an assault team could get and hold the top of a container, they would have a good tactical position against us.

To combat this tactic — all the containers had ‘flip out’ barbed wire mounts, which looked similar to the overhang wires on tops of fences or the edges of buildings. Because they were hinged, they were slightly structurally weaker (an assaulter could push up on them), but that weakness did not provide much help in breaching the container if you were coming from below. It might be a problem if they had a foot-hold on the top of a container and then could disable the overhang.

But far more essential than the structure of the overhang is that the whole flip-out awning and container roof was electrified. Our goal was to convince any assaulters that turning around would be an excellent idea. Better than any other idea that might come to them. “We should just turnaround and go home to enjoy an evening by a cozy fire with a warm cup of cocoa. Enough of this standing in a lightning storm”

To make sure these would-be assaulter could physically achieve their new purpose in life, we needed to not electrically glue them to the fence. And in worst case, we needed to be able to easily keep them alive and eventually revive them.

An electric fence runs at about 8000-volts — This is to get an electrical current through hide, skin, and clothes to the nerves beneath them. Unfortunately, 8000-volts applied against the human body — with a resistance of about 1kΩ (thousand ohms) — leads

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to 8-amps of electricity flowing through that body. That amperage is about a quarter of the current that goes to an electric oven, but it is carrying more than twenty-times the voltage. So it might feel a bit like being cooked at 2500 degrees… if you remained conscious after the ‘jolt’ caused all your muscles to contract, your brain to shortcircuit, and your heart to stop.

The solution to cooking (not) the intruder is to put a limited amount of energy onto the wires. Each wall-container has an energizer which takes its power from a pair of Tesla Powerwalls, supporting about 40-amps of load and able to run a dozen lightbulbs for a day. The energizer puts energy into the wires like they are giant capacitors (storage for energy, like transitory batteries). That stored energy provides the initial shock to an intruder. The energizer also replenishes any lost energy, about once a second. This limited speed of replenishment combined with the capacity of the fence is what prevent it from frying (and worse) the intruder.

So all we need to do is run a standard 8000-volt energizer against the string of wires protecting the container, and any intruder would turnaround as soon as they encountered this obstacle. Except we thought that unlikely. People play with electric fences all the time and learn to handle the shock. The assault team would almost certainly have some kind of protection that increased their resistance. We needed to encourage intruders to turnaround of their own free will, but to disable them if they did not.

So we tweaked the energizer — It started like normal and replenished the wires once per second, but it doubled the frequency every time the replenishment occurred within the same minute. So once a second would progress up to a thousand times per second if the doubling happened ten times. Doing this ramp within ten seconds seemed a bit draconian, so we gave the intruder a full minute to change their mind: every six seconds it would double. But in exchange for our generosity, the system never stopped increasing frequency until the replenishment was unnecessary: no more energy lost either because the intruder turned around, or they were down for the count. All living team members were warned to stay away

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from the container-wall during a breach because it could be deadlyhot depending on the behavior of the assaulting team. It was debilitatingly-hot for vampires too, but they would revive and repair eventually.

To add some fun to the defense system, we also blew bubbles at intruders with a misting system. This both made them wet, so the first shocks should be closer to 8000 volts, and because it contained some soap, it made the containers really slippery. Our vampires manning the tops of the containers had super-resistant and supergrippy boots & gloves so they could clamber around on the container tops in spite of these defenses.

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