FUD Missile

When the Rocket Dogs project first contacted the Weapon Shop of Isha, the mandate was clear: they needed a dozen or more weapons, each simple, reliable, robust - and most of all, hilarious.

Isha insisted on designing the first weapon - the FUD Missle - herself. The propulsion system of the missile itself was simple enough; in fact, she could mostly re-use other existing designs. It was the warhead that was the tricky part. How could she create a detonation that could create an expanding cloud of fear, uncertainty, and doubt?

Drawing from her extensive pre-weapon-shop experience in local government, where she had interacted with the Toba equivalent of a town zoning board, she knew where to start her research: with the science of bureaucracy and paperwork. …but knowing the general principle wasn’t enough; she needed specifics. Locking her office door, and banishing her team to other projects, she dug deep into the roots of the problem. Flipping through old history books, political analyses, marketing literature, and more, she came up with all the details she needed to design the warhead for the FUD Missle. The core was a small computer and an even smaller antenna array. At the moment of ‘detonation’, the computer runs a program that runs through trillions of combinations of marketing claims, incorrect interpretations of legal codes, bluffs, nonsense, hysterically incorrect claims, and more…and the antenna array broadcasts all of these claims to any Rocket Dog within the area, thus befuddling and confusing them until the small battery powering the whole thing runs dry.