Boeing Developing Planes with Laser Beams
As far as air-to-ground weapons go, bombs are effective but not known for their precision. That’s why Boeing is hard at work on a project the U.S. military has long lusted after: plane-mounted lasers. Once we get these things operational, putting your munitions factories next to your day-care centers isn’t going to work anymore, and we’re already at the testing stage. Watch out, Enemies of Freedom!
Boeing calls it the Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL). It fires from a belly-mounted rotating turret mounted to a modified C-130H cargo plane. On May 13, the chemical laser was tested on the ground. Soon, they’ll advance to actual air-to-ground testing against fake targets. No actual test data or specifications for the laser (or the damage it can do) have been released.
Image and link via io9.com
One more step towards ray guns. I approve.
My God; io9.com should be ashamed of themselves for that terrible photoshop work in the image.
Aside from that, been doing some reseach into how this works. Short version is that hot gas (primarily oxygen from a reaction between NaOH and H2O2, with a bit of iodine, at least in the versions I’m familiar with) is used as the lasing medium, with the benefit over solid-state lasers that when the thing gets so hot it would melt a solid laser they can just eject the hot gas and start again. This means they can give it more power.
According to popsci.com ( http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2008-03/how-it-works-airborne-laser-cannon ) we’re talking about sufficient energy to burn a hole in a tank. Considerably better than I was expecting, frankly, though it does beg the question “What if you cover your tank with mirrors?”