Military looking for 'compact' lasers

Danger Room:

The Pentagon’s mad science arm is moving ahead with a project to build a laser weapon “compact enough to be carried on board a tactical aircraft - say a B-1B bomber or an AC-130 gunship,” Aviation Week reports.

Darpa is getting ready to hand out 24-month research contracts to defense contractors Textron or General Atomics for the next phase of its High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) program. In the works since 2003, the program is now looking to “build and ground-test” a 150 kilowatt laser weighing about 750 kilograms early in 2012. If it works, the result would not only be a power-to-weight ratio ten times better than existing laser systems. It could mean the next step in giving the U.S. a fleet of laser-blasting aircraft.

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It still sounds to big and heavy, but we are just not down to the Buck Rodgers ray gun yet. It is progress. Hopefully the technology will advance as rapidly as the computer which have been shrinking in size for decades. How long until we get the laptop version? Could we get Apple to big on this project too?

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