Imma Chargin Mah Lazer! - Powerful enough to zap midflight mortars!
Lasers have been the weaponry of choice for the sci-fi realm for, well, as long as sci-fi weapons have been around, mainly due to their coolness factor.
Apart from being a very novel application of energy, they're deadly precise, and in most cases powerful enough to blast a hole clean through a slab of metal - but we haven't had access to that technology for real, until now.
The awkwardly named Joint High Power Solid State Laser, or JHPSSL, has an activation time of less than one second from an off state, can operate at up to five minutes of beaming, and is incredibly scalable.
It is a modular design that allows the simple addition of extra battery cells and other components to increase the power level - all the way up to 100kW.
Just to give an idea of how much power this is, a single kilowatt is equal to 1000 watts, and an average household will use a single kilowatt of power in a whole day. The JHPSSL is a thousand thousand watts of power focused into a intense beam, or 100,000 watts.
One hundred thousand watts of power.
There are some hurdles however, and with this huge amount of power being shuffled around also means a lot of heat. Efficiency currently stands at only 19.3%, meaning that over four fifths of the electricity used is turned into heat, which needs to be dissipated elsewhere.
The good news is that the tech is so modular it can eventually be worked and tweaked down into a mobile truck form (not at the full 100kW), and can potentially be used to hit fast-moving aerial targets such as missiles, mortars or possibly even grenades with pinpoint accuracy.
It's all incredibly exciting tech, and laser weaponry might make its way to the battlefield in the next couple of decades - just make sure you're not in the way when they're fired.
Check out the press release for this massive laser over at irconnect, and dream up all the uses for this massive laser you can think of.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009