Boeing raygunship fires first blasts in ground testing

Anyone for popcorn?

imdb "Pure genius".

"hey ali get the lazer defences out"

i cant wait to see insurgents coverd in mirrors trying to reflect these lazers back at the planes! i imagine osama wrapped in tin foil (shiney side out) leading the way!

Mirrors...

...we need lots of mirrors!

/Mine's the sequin one...

Forgive my ignorance

But would just putting a reflective coating on the target defeat this exercise ?

It'd be like 'Saturday night fever' - all those mirrored surfaces..

---* Bill

Put a mega-taser on the plane, not a laser

Wouldn't that be more fun?....

Flash!

"People in the vicinity of an ATL strike might not realise what had happened until well after the event, if at all.". Well yes. Thats because their retinas will have been burnt out. Purposefully blinding the enemy is illegal. Though if they just happen to be looking at the target when it is hit, thats collateral.

@Anyone for popcorn?

The movie title is actually "Real Genius"

...was the first thing I thought of when I saw the article too

Retroreflectors

You need really well polished surface reflectors in the arrangement of the inside of a cube.

And BIG ones at that.

TBH - even a few percent of that power getting back to the plane is going to seriously bad news, and a decent retroreflector ought to turn around practically all of the incident radiation - whether or not it hits the pilots eyes is pretty much a moot point

ICBM no ICBDs

Can see it now.

West Coast wiped out by Inter Continental Balistic Discball, laser defense is useless.

Mirrors are useless

All the laser must to is radiate at frequencies that the mirror absorbs, then burns away, like it wasn't even there.

Was there not a Tom Clancy book...

Cardinal of the Kremlin IIRC when a guy said about fitting ICBM's with mirrors and spinning them, and the response was that 'it's about as useful as a ballerina spinning in front of a shotgun. That energy has got to go somwhere". This is why the "Star Wars" mirrors, lasers, masers et al had serious cooling problems on the sending end...

As for reflecting it back to the aircraft, that would take some funky aiming to get it right... you may get fried a few times before getting it right, and that is only if the mirror does not get totaled by thermal shock beforehand.

20 tonnes?

That's big. Mind you, I think the first iPod was that size and weight.

Give it a few years and these frickin' laser-beams will be small enough to mount atop shark's heads...

@John Robson

"You need really well polished surface reflectors in the arrangement of the inside of a cube."

That just sounds like hellraier (6...or...90...or....whatever the last one was).....Maybe they are secretly trying to make a system to destroy pinhead?

Envision giant disco balls...

... mounted over terrorist training camps.

Mine's the CID with reflec coating.

@Lee

Correct.

Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation

Mine's the one with the opaque goggles in the pocket.

PMSL

Thanks for this line :)

"The secret raygun project couldn't resist a hint as to where they got their new technology"

Take Out?

So this laser thingy is all about 'taking out' enemy vehicles and missiles? Surely they would be better off destroying them, if you took a missile out it might blow up in the restaurant or something.....

Who's up for Curry tonight

cooked curry in under, lets c... 1.30 secs or is that delivered via a Flashy c130

;p

mines the shiny asbestos lined one.... with the curry stains (on the front, that is);p

illuminatus;p

I just want to know when....

...ET started disguising their spaceships as C-130's.

Geez guys!

Its and "A"C-130

A... you know .. like ATTACK!

Mines the ones that says "even wiki knew"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_AC-130

My Cataracts...

there gone!

Sharks?

They are protected. You'll have to use sea bass.

Hopefully you can find agitated sea bass.

Throw me a bone

Funny, it doesn't look like a shark.

Mine's the one with the folded up fembot in the pocket.

Light Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Radiation I believe

On a side issue you dont have to use a solid retro refractive surface, might be easier just to coat target in copper with a water jack over the top, High Specific heat capaity and all that and copper to dissipate heat over larger surface area.

"Get the Americans round Abdul, someone drained the immersion heater again"

LASER

For the benefit of the pedants, and those who cannot spell.

Light

Amplification through the

Stimulated

Emission of

Radiation.

LASER.

With an S.

*Never* with a Z. Ever. Or I'll send over the C-130 with the pretty lights on it and tattoo it on your motherfucking head from thirty miles away.

Hope that helps :-)

Steven R

RE:"ET"?

No I'm sure the ET's have these things small enough to fit on hip holsters, or if you fancy some of the more obscure sci-fi, wrist mounted devices.

@Chris G: Yes! Because everyone knows that 'friendly friar' is more accurate!

also BTW polished copper is a good reflector of infrared, I imagine it could be used *behind* camo that is transparent to those frequencies ... OOPS, high $$$ tech once again 'foiled' by simple field engineering! Oh well, I guess its back to the plasma weapons.

RE: Sharks?

"They are protected. You'll have to use sea bass."

Oh great. It isn't enough that we have to tolerate freetards - now we've got basstards.

Mirrors

would simply fail, even if the laser was visible light. All mirrors absorb some small percentage of incident light. At the wattage this thing puts out, that percentage is more than enough to burn through the mirror in milliseconds.

@Franklin

1st, you can not see any wavelength of light traveling thru clean air, though I understand you have those visuals from science FICTION tv and films

while you might not be able to see it, infrared can certainly burn a retina .. but if you *observed* a good reflection of this laSer, it's likely your eyeballs would explode a nanosecond before your retinas were destroyed

as far as gold, maybe not third world, but wouldn't be too surprised if Putin were to gold plate a couple of those mobile Nuke's for next year's Red Square military gala, where he'll probably show off a bigger laSer than this, and gold plate that too ..

then US will start goldplating it's military stuff .. and we'll have a US-Russia Gold War until Sony develops it BlueRay Death LaSer .. then the Geneva convention will spend 10 years deciding which Death Ray format is to be used ..

.. and I'll probably be dead before I can afford a home use version <sigh>

my mind boggles, obviously

No rules in love or war?

"Purposefully blinding the enemy is illegal." ooohhhh... naughty! It's the war crimes tribunal for you, Marine!

But slamming high-velocity depleted uranium into their craniums, blowing their limbs off with cluster bombs, burning them with phosphorus or melting them with microwave anti-personel rays ISN'T illegal, so, like, go for it!

I saw a laser demonstration years ago

The one they were showing off could burn through 8 centimeters of armor grade steel in less than 3 seconds from a range of .5 kilometers.

They then demonstrated with a block of acrylic. The beam sputtered out about half way through due to the dense smoke.

So, if you don't want something fried with a laser, cover it with plastic! Or just put it in a foggy area, lasers are useless in less than clear conditions!

(I'll be off then, to gitmo, for revealing state secrets!)

Call me when they build this round a FEL

Meh. It's a chemical laser. Those things can only go a few shots before the reactants are used up, and they create a load of really, really toxic waste products. I can certainly see the attraction of frying a truckload of Jihadis completely silently from 20 clicks away - if for nothing more than psychological reasons.

What we really need is a free electron laser capable of MW power output and low cycle time. That really would be a deathray worthy of the name.

Fire hazard icon for the pyrotechnic hijinks possible with your laser-armed gunship.

Fake right?

This looks like a faked picture. The C-130 has landing gear that doesn't extend far enough from the airframe to land or take off with that dome hanging underneath. Perhaps the dome is retractable, but that's a lot of trouble when there's more apt and more stable platforms available.

There's no way they'd redesign the landing gear on a C130 to accomidate that. There's no reason to add complexity (and weight) to extremely heavy test gear by making it retractable. I wouldn't think that the low running cost of a C130 would be a deciding factor when you are developing a weapon such as this.

There's a slight odour of rodent in the air.

Mirrors do work....

A 2-bar electric fire dissipates 2kW (mostly infra-red) and reflects it into the room with a chrome-plated steel sheet of about 0.1 square metres.

This reflector has a life-time measured in years!

silent?

All of the mirror comments wont matter if they aren't kept clean, a spec of dust will begin to heat on the mirror surface and then burn it away, gold or not. As for peoples comments about it being kilowatt class and mirrors being useless at this power level, you can reflect gigawatt beams with no problem as long as you have the right wavelength (99.99% reflective) CLEAN mirrors.

And the bit that really bugs me: SILENT!!!!

you ever heard a laser melt something, or vap it entirely. Its not quiet.

I agree with the comments from David Giles, they sure do make some nasty waste. Infact if you totted up waste against usefullness these probably outweight a nuclear reactor.

Fire coz we all know burning stuff isn't silent