In this work, we present a new and efficient numerical method to calculate the electromagnetic scattering from arbitrarily shaped conducting bodies directly in the time domain. The solution method is based on the method of moments, and involves the triangular patch modeling of the arbitrary body in conjunction with the patch basis functions. Detailed mathematical steps along with several numerical results are presented to illustrate the efficacy of this approach. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.