Light

Laser warfare is at hand, naysayers be gone! Link

He straps on emerald green goggles. A technician stabs a fire button and calls out the computer countdown. “Three … two … one …”

Then … nothing. Just a buzz of electronics and an ephemeral glow in this darkened room at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. But inside Yamamato’s target chamber, a block of steel spits flame and molten metal.

In those two seconds, 400 blasts of light poured into slabs of clear, manmade garnet. Swollen in energy, the crystal’s atoms then unleashed torrents of infrared light to ricochet 1,000 times between two mirrors and multiply, finally escaping as 400 pulses of pure, square beam.

Kilowatt for kilogram, this is the world’s most powerful solid-state laser. Its invisible beam drilled Yamamoto’s inch-thick steel plate in two seconds. Add larger crystals and it will eat steel a mile or more away.

Laser weapons have actually been possible since the 70s but only recently were effords made to actually build a weapon out of it. Among the first are Beoing 747-400Fs fitted with a laser turret (ok, not really a turret, it’s actually multiple mirrors located in a special nose) will track down ballastic missiles and shoot them down at the speed of light.

Really, the implications for laser weapons are HUGE. Having a light-speed weapon means that snipers will be out of job, since wind directions and target-leading is no longer required. Computer-controlled anti-air lasers will be able to shoot a plane down with the first shot. Of course the most benefitted will be USA’s Missile Defense Agency. Sending a Patriot missile to ram another missile both travelling at a few times the speed of sound with an minute error margin isn’t exactly the safest thought if North Korea went ballastic literally. A laser however, will have the advantage as it travels at light speed.

Ok, actually I just want Star Wars to become reality a tat faster.

UPDATE: HOLY CRAP! I found an article on airborne laser that isn’t three years old! http://news.softpedia.com/news/2/2003/September/4649.shtml. Yup, that’s right September 2003, 6 months more recent than even the Popular Science article. The good news is that the program is still alive, the bad news is the test date is postponed to 2005. Sigh… The lasers work on ground, the aircraft flies with the turrets attached, now it’s just a matter of getting the lasers to work while the aircraft is flying.