Star Wars Lasers Around The Corner
Although TechSmec.com condemns violence in all its physical forms, we love violence in a virtual or fictional form, so we’re feeling a guilty excitement about reports that the USA is only a few years away from plane-mounted laser weapons.
Up until now, the potential weight of such a device was prohibitive to its being mounted on an aeroplane, as the cooling systems required are massive. However, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has possibly solved the problem by merging liquid and solid state lasers, producing something much smaller in size. Reports are that it is the size of a small fridge, which still sounds pretty big to us, but is apparently not unusual in the world of airborne munitions.
The HEL weapon, a it is dubbed, currently fires a 1kw beam - hardly enough to heat up a cup of coffee, but the development timescale will see a 150kw version by 2007. That would reportedly knock a missile out of the sky. Whether it would do it a spectacular explosion, or just an electronics-busting fizzle is, disappointingly, not revealed.
Add comment August 25th, 2005