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According to TFA, today's hallucination appears to have been triggered by the development of 'solid state fiber optic lasers'. Sounded like buzzword bingo but they are really a thing:

http://www.laserfocusworld.com...

(Nice review).

Now, whether or not it can be appropriately weaponized (by Lockeed of all things) is another question. But as been pointed out, $26 million will probably just get some cute CGI cartoons of laser battles which will likely look suspiciously like something out of a Star Wars trailer.

No, you're confusing youself. The lux measurement is the perceptual one, you know, the one that ignores wavelengths that humans can't see, and weights the wavelengths that we can see with peaks at the idealized human visual response. The actual radiant intensity at any given moment is going to be much greater. Measuring light levels in lux is completely useless unless you're a lighting director. It is a statement about human eyeballs, and should not be used when talking about things that are not human eyeballs.

Not that it matters to the point, but in fact they are pretty darn close

As it turns out, human visual response looks nothing likethe response of solar panels. Do note that, consistent with our other conclusions, the absorbed spectrum and peak are wider and differently located respectively. As far as I am aware, there isn't really a reason why we would expect people to try to build a solar cell that is less efficient than the human eye, especially since, as you say, clouds happen.

This was an easy mistake to make. Easy to the point where it's a little suspect why you're repeating it. The appropriate units would be watts per square meter, which is standard across the solar energy industry. I hope you are not using one cherry-picked (wrong) factoid as the basis for your anti-solar-energy stance. For anyone interested in some actual numbers, this calculator given an equation and computes the effective solar insolation (in W/m^2) for a given lat/long/percent cloud cover. Here's a calculator from NASA with many more parameters.

I don't know how practical it will be, but this looks much cooler:

http://www.laserfocusworld.com...

Car powers lasers. Lasers shine on phosphors. Phosphors emit wide-spectrum normal light at high efficiency.

Quite true! The current convention of excited-gas luminescence (High Intensity Discharge, or HID) is very bright indeed. Sports venues are looking into feasibility of replacing stadium and indoor-arena lighting with HID or something similar for the sheer savings in energy consumption.

Headlight glare from HID is only dulled for oncoming traffic by shaping the beam. The technology for laser-bombarded phosphors will probably have the same optical harnessing as HID. (most likely due to cost-efficiency by automakers so they don't have to fully replace their precision manufacturing) As for the 'annoyance' factor, there will continue to be hill-crest and sharp-rise blindness from oncoming traffic until such a time as when all cars are equipped with a solenoid-controlled lens assembly tied to a comprehensive pitch-sensing array. It's also clear that, unlike LED light sources where luminescence is hard-wired in the manufacturing, laser-excited phosphors can be precisely controlled through the phosphor material and packaged optics. As this report shows, the exact nature of the phosphor-impregnated material affects the color and amplitude of the light emitted.

Are they potentially brighter? Quite possibly. Would manufacturers be able to easily mitigate that effect as they roll-out production? Absolutely.

In the meantime, I doubt I am the only one that's concerned with the term, "laser headlights". The emitted light is not actually laser light, it's the broad-spectrum light (as correctly stated by PP) emitted by energized phosphors. The laser only energizes luminescence, the phosphor is what actually emits the light. But it's the "laser headlights" term that implies that the beams are made-up of laser light. Sure, it's a finer point, but I think it stands for comprehensive accuracy. This tech should be known as "laser-powered headlights" or even "Laser Energized Phosphor Emission | LEPE headlights".In fact, I sense a good marketing angle in the latter, at the very least for laser-energized-phosphor emission manufacturers.

The way it's written in those articles is, plainly put, misleading to just about everyone on that point.

There's a good discussion by Jeff Hecht in the Laser Focus World blog: "Progress at NIF, but no 'breakthrough'"
http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/2013/10/progress-at-nif-but-no-breakthrough.html

The amount of energy generated by fusion is quoted as having exceeded the amount of energy absorbed by the fusion fuel [my italics].

The misleading part comes from the fact that the target absorbs only a small fraction of the energy in the laser pulse. The August experiments used a laser pulse of 1.7 million joules to generate 8000 joules of fusion energy (measured from neutron yield). So the fusion energy amounts to a few percent of the energy in the laser pulse (and much less if you account for the inefficiency of the laser).

>It would make the US troops seem more human

>That is a good point, but it's the only thing better about using animals.

I disagree. I believe in most situations it's best to make US soldiers seem, to the extent possible, like technodemons summoned from the cauldrons of American science wizards.

The less known and the more presumed about a US soldier's abilities the easier it will be to fight. Give them night vision and guns that can shoot around corners. Give them air conditioned self supporting strength enhancing armor. Give them networks that let every soldier know where every other soldier in his squad is. Give them flying death robots and laser guns. Emulate every desired superpower you can from ESP to precognizance to golems and X-ray vision. Make every US soldier a nightmare for his enemies, inflating his capabilities beyond any enemy simulation and in the end we'll save money by not having to actually use these abilities.

Another terrible article summary.

In 2010, a solid-state device at 0.67THz was achieved. In 2012, that effort is up to 0.85 THz. Progress is slow, but continuing.

Diode-type CMOS imagers for terahertz radiation have been built. Those convert terahertz radiation into DC, which can then be amplified by standard techniques. But diodes don't have gain. That's why the original article emphasizes that this new device has gain.

There are terahertz lasers, waveguides, antennas, and other components that work up there. The situation is much like radar during WWII; there were a few components that could do specific things at radar frequencies (then 60MHz to 1.2GHz), but general electronics wasn't there yet. Most of the electronics in radars of that period ran at far lower speeds. They still worked.

You are being very assertive. Is this because you have experience with high energy lasers?

Maybe there are no feasible countermeasures, but on the other hand, maybe there are. As far as I have read nobody has a definitive answer. (Example.)

If you can make a reflective layer that only absorbs 10% then you need a 10 times as powerful laser to do equivalent (meaning any) damage. Add to that heat resistant materials or other measures and you up the factor even more. Can you easily achieve the required laser power? I don't know, and I am curious how you can know (although I am suspecting you actually don't).

Not only is solid state lighting more efficient, it's also more versatile. With one fixture you could change the feel of a room from bright and alert to cozy and romantic by using variable color temperature. RGB mixing fixtures could conceivably be hooked up to your entertainment and alter the room color to match the movie or video game.

Molecular interference fit? I should say something smarmy about people who do a poor job at feigning knowledge and expertise, but since there's no Wikipedia article on the phenomenon I'll let it slide. What you are talking about is optical contacting, and has nothing to do with molecular interference. (I'm not even sure what that means in this context.)