And we're ready for 'em with Reed Richards-esque technology:
As pirates armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades closed in on a luxury cruise liner off Somalia's coast last weekend, crew members fended them off with water hoses and an electronic device that blasts an earsplitting noise.
The device, developed for U.S. warships after the 2000 attack on the USS Cole off Yemen, unleashed a piercing barrage nearly twice as loud as a smoke detector, while passengers huddled in a dining room away from windows. Capt. Sven Erik Pederson called for full steam ahead, taking the 10,000-ton Seabourn Spirit as fast as it could go. Pederson eventually outran the pirates, who were in small boats, and sought refuge in the Seychelles, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean.
''These guys bit off more than they could chew,'' said Bruce Good, spokesman for Miami-based Seabourn Cruise Line, a subsidiary of Carnival Corp. ``The ship is seven decks high and 439 feet long. It takes a certain amount of stupidity or audacity to attack something like that.''
The pirates approached in one, maybe two boats measuring 25 feet long about 100 miles off the Somali coast Saturday morning. The Spirit doesn't go very fast -- it has a cruising speed of just 16 knots, or 18.4 miles an hour -- so crew members countered with hoses and a nonlethal weapon called a Long Range Acoustic Device, Good said.
Developed by American Technology Corp. of San Diego, the device transmits a high-pitched, piercing noise in a directed beam, without affecting its operators or anyone outside its target range, such as the ship's passengers.
Long Range Acoustic Device. It's so rad, it's L-RAD. Take that, Pirates.
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