Dude?
MAD= Magnetic Anomaly Detection . . Why would plastic(non ferrous, even non METALLIC) be detected by that? Why woult PLASTIC be obvious of all things?
EVERYTHING METAL has an impact on Magnetic Fields, be they ferrous metals or not, i think . .
And Aluminium/Titanium are Metals. Even without being ferrous metals, they still have more impact on the magnetic field than Plastic and Kevlar . .
Okay, I'm a Licensed Security Officer and Crowd Controller and I've used hand-held MAD wands in my day-to-day work. And Stahlseele isn't far off. I've picked up the tiny amount of aluminium in a condom wrapper. I've picked up a single, half-millimeter of steel in a persons stitches (3 stitches). I've picked up the staples in someone's stomach, the 5 cent piece someone swallowed on a dare. Now, the guy standing next to me has used the same thing on the same people and gotten nothing, because he didn't use it properly. (Hint: I use the wand to also pat you down. I didn't lay hands on your junk, but I still know how much you're packing.)
The point is, in the hands of a trained operator, the stuff two-bit operations that I've worked with can pick up ANYTHING with even the SMALLEST AMOUNT of METAL. Ferrous, non-ferrous. I don't care. Metals, even those that aren't
attracted to magnetic fields, still distort them. Now, a MAD system won't pick up plastic. But it
might pick up the ceramic or kevlar. "Uh, whu?" I hear some of you say? Yeah, I know, here's where you need to understand these materials. Kevlar... well, there's Kevlar
tm and there's Kevlar. Original Kevlar, the trademark, no. But almost nobody uses that any more. But modern "kevlar" is made of stuff like Gortex, or Spectra-weave. It also often includes metallic threads, which an MAD can pick up. Ceramics are both worse, but better, because it can depend on the aggregate within the clay. If it's an oxide, or composite, then it might contain alumina, at which point it would depend on the density of the ceramic in question, but for the most part, you're not likely to get a reading. It's not that the field isn't getting distorted, but it probably won't be enough metal to distort the field enough to be noticed.
But then we get to how a Cyberware scanner works (supposedly). It's just an MAD scanner with a sophisticated expert system monitoring the distortions, coupled with a camera, a millimetric radar and an imaging processor. Now to really blow your minds. You know how there's calcium in your bones? Calcium is a metal. The Cyberware scanner knows how much distortion to expect, not only on the MAD, but on the radar, and when it detects the anomalous distortion, it checks it against it's database in a manner similar to object recognition software. Which also goes to explain why higher grades of cyberware is the primary determiner of how difficult something is to detect. It doesn't matter how big the object is, what matters is how close to how you're "supposed" to look it is, and that's a function of grade. And even plastic will alter the density readings from the radar.
EDIT: Oh, two other things I've picked up with my wand. I've picked up the titanium pin in a guys shoulder, but that's not hard. PURE titanium is brittle as hell, but titanium ALLOYS, that's the strong stuff. The second thing was a bottle of Jack Daniels tucked into the armpit of a guy's jacket. He'd removed the metal cap and sealant ring, replacing it with a cork. Not only did I hear and feel the clink of my wand against the glass, but the MAD went off. Why? Because of the TINY amount of metal in the label's PAINT.
