Egypt’s ‘Iron Pyramid’ System To Intercept Locusts, Hail

Pharaoh chose those plagues because they are the most likely to recur.

Memphis, June 28 – Military engineers have been working day and night to develop technology for shielding the country against enemy plagues, a spokesman for pharaoh’s palace told reporters today.

Called the Iron Pyramid, the system will be designed to blow apart hailstones into less harmful fragments and to shoot down incoming swarms of locusts, according to the spokesman, so that the kingdom will be able to shield itself from at least some of the threats it has faced in recent months.

“The Iron Pyramid is scheduled to come online within four years,” said Grand Vizier Ra’mses Interseptr. “It will be a triumph of Egyptian ingenuity and engineering, integrating various technologies to an unprecedented degree, and offering the land protection from several of the more fearsome scourges we have seen of late.” Interseptr explained that Pharaoh chose those plagues because they are the most likely to recur.

“While our ruler the Divine Son of Ra has utmost confidence in our engineers’ ability to develop a system that could transform blood into water, or to shoot body lice as they crawl from person to person, in His divine and royal wisdom, priority will be given to methods for countering plagues that are unlikely to be once-in-history events,” he said.

An expert detailed for reporters some of the challenges that developers of the system will confront. “First of all, the system will have to have a way to determine what kind of threat has been detected,” said retired military ballistics engineer Gaim Setmatch. “I imagine that will be accomplished by eyeballing the incoming objects, possibly with the use of conscripted labor. But then it gets complicated. If locusts are detected, the system will have to have the capacity to shoot down hundreds of millions of the creatures within a short time, which cannot be accomplished with the methods we have – even having crowds of slaves fling rocks in the general direction of a swarm will have minimal effect. What will likely be necessary is some use of flaming projectiles that fan out and consume many little beasts at once. – but done in such a way that no harm occurs to the crops that need protection.”

“On the other hand, hail poses its own problems, especially if it contains fire inside it as it did last time,” he continued. “I don’t know exactly what the Pharaoh’s technologist shave in mind, but I would suggest a network of salt catapults. Salt melts ice, and is not flammable.”

Setmatch added that the limits on such a system’s performance would be determined by the quantities of fuel and ammunition available, since human slave power continues to be an effectively inexhaustible resources.