1990 Mara Irena Karavan Militsiya Prototyp (KMP)
The late 1980s were times of increasing political unrest in Archana. To retain their power, the ruling caste initiated a number of projects to develop new technologies to help suppress that unrest.
One particular problem was the ease with which people could hide in the rugged and vast hilly terrain in the northern Archanan Hinterlands or the south coast. The then-common police interceptor sedan models had very limited off-road capabilities whereas their SUVs were dead slow on tarmac roads, leading to a number of successful escapes with no obvious solution in sight.
One of the initiated projects therefore was to make the regular Mara Irena - which had been used as interceptor with a big V8 since the mid 1960s but had been largely supplanted in that role by the larger Kavaler and other models in more recent years - more off-road capable by re-using the Irena ute’s drive train with a manual diff locker and increasing ride height as well.
The sole remaining Irena KMP on display in the Mara Company Museum
In the same project, the 5L Blyz V8 was updated to fuel injection based on the experience gained converting the regular Irena’s Perspek I4 to fuel-injection in an ongoing regular facelift project. This turned out to be not too difficult since the Blyz V8 still essentially consisted of two Perspek blocks bolted together since its initial design in the mid 1960s.
In addition, the engineers were tasked to develop a number of innovative countermeasure prototypes as well. To house all the gadgets, it was decided to convert a Irena wagon instead of a sedan. The prototyped countermeasures included:
- A gun under the front bumper that could be moved mechanically to the left and right and fired from the passenger seat in order to shoot the tyres of cars in front or behind
2) A front bumper that could be moved 90 degrees to the right by operation of a lever and used as a lance - e.g. to nudge a car in front off the road from a distance
3) Propeller-shaped steel hub nuts that could be fired straight to the side - e.g. underneath an alongside car in order to cause loud noises and havoc
4) A spike mat that could be unrolled on the press of a button on the dashboard to quickly set up a road blockade
5) A night vision camera mounted at the front projecting its picture to a monochrome display on the dashboard allowing a ‘lights out’ pursuit on rural roads or trails. To minimise engine noise, the engine got two high-quality mufflers.
6) A prototype of an onboard terminal using a primitive text interface of 22x23 columns and green letters, using the same dashboard display. While limited to a ‘Hello World’ state of implementation for the prototype, the idea was that this could be part of a system to remotely access licence plate and driver registration information from inside the car.
7) A mechanism to place an oil slick on the road by the pull of a lever on the dashboard and thus end a pursuit once the fleeing car had been overtaken.
8) A smoke generator, to produce a cloud of smoke through the hot exhaust (e.g. in the same situation as before or as an alternative to a physical roadblock), drawing from the same supply of oil stored in the boot of the wagon (the one with the dark symbol)
9) A mechanism to dose a car (or people) in water from the roof through a rotatable nozzle. The water is to be stored in a separate storage tank in the boot (see picture above, the larger tank with the light symbol).
10) A directed sound device, allowing the projection of infrasound, ultrasound or very high volume sounds at an area nearby to cause physical discomfort. Hearing protection for the driver and the operator would be provided.
The resulting dashboard needed quite a extra few levers and buttons to control all the experimental features. (They had to use the old Kavaler horizontal speedometer from the mid-1970s since it was the only one available that was going beyond 200 kph.)
An EMP weapon was also considered, but decided against due to the very limited extent that Archanan cars back then relied on electronic components in their engines or other crucial car systems.
Luckily, the limited funding meant that the project did not leave the development stage before the sweeping and (largely) peaceful changes in Archana at the end of the 1980s. The almost finished prototype remains in the Mara company museum. However, a limited number of Irena wagons were indeed modified in 1990 with the updated 5L V8, a substantially increased ride height and the Irena ute’s drivetrain with a manual locker, but without any of the prototyped countermeasures.
A battered Irena KMP after completing an arduous trial run on Hinterlands trails on the Archanan
And while these converted wagons were little more than stopgap measures, their relative effectiveness, however, nevertheless paved the way of developing a somewhat off-road competent wagon in addition to the traditional sedan for the successor of the Irena’s larger counterpart, the Kavaler.