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Warfare at the Speed of Light
unassimilatible writes "From the They Said It Couldn't Be Done Dept., the Oakland Tribune reports that the Lawrence Livermore Labratory is ensuring that the Pentagon, inside of a decade, could be armed with a beam weapon that is near-instantaneous, gravity-free and truly surgical, focusing to such hair-splitting accuracy that it could avoid civilians while predetonating munitions miles away - perhaps someday even being mounted on Humvees."
Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaser
--
Kent, Stop playing with yourself.
"The ignorant fight to win, the wise win before they fight." -Sun Tzu
Hold Your Fire!
Too Late!
You Vaporized Kenny! You Bastard!
can you point it at a mildly victorian house from on board a jet fighter and fill the house with popcorn?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The evoloution of Thinkgeek's line of optical toys: 1. Red Lasar 2. Green Lasar 3. Lasar capable of pre-detonating munitions from miles away. (But no one will buy it because it is neither green nor capable of being seen in the air.)
"We're anxious to get out there and do something."
Always reassuring when someone in the US Army makes such a statement...
A laser arms race already is under way, chiefly in California.
...
Wow, Goverminator hasn't been elected for 2 weeks and Skynet is already flexing its muscles
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Conspiracy theorests trade tin-foil hats for head-mounted mirrors.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
But would the detonating munitions know to avoid civilians as well?
Would a gravity-free weapon (even with light) defy General Relativity?
Will the enemy start using mirrors?
"... it could avoid civilians while predetonating munitions miles away..."
So it can avoid civilians who are miles away from the munitions? Even the few dumb bombs dropped on Iraq avoided most citizens in Kuwait...
I think (that you know) that it means munitions miles away from the LASER could be predetonated (pre- as in before the enemy sends them our way).
But the real question here is how whether they're implying that the civilians could be detonated too, separately without the munitions, now that we'll have got a big friggin' laser gun...
"There goes the supertechnological soldier, staggering forward to wreak destruction on anyone he can entice within range. Meanwhile, the despicable enemy has opened fire with an old-fashioned but extremely efficient sub-machine gun."
Wish I could remember who wrote that book.
Holds up a mirror?
Uh yeah, if you are shooting at something in the horsehead nebula that might be an issue, you tart! Unless some fuckhead coughs up a black hole in Bagdhad (in which case it really wouldn't matter if the weapon shot blue bananna peels and laughing Barneys for all of the few nanoseconds Earth manages to survive), I don't think there is going to be any problem pointing the weapon at a large object and hitting it. The amount of deviation might be a problem if they were trying to score hits against the tachyonic particles in Saddam's mustache, maybe.
you are constantly at risk of the laser beam bouncing back and obliterating you.
If you stand next to a solid surface, like a tank, and fire a conventional automatic weapon at it, you had better be wearing some serious bullet proof armor.
The main problem is that any reflecting surface can act as a mirror
Mirrors do a great job of reflecting low power light. Put a sufficiently high powered pulse laser on the scene, and the behavior of reflective surfaces becomes "non-linear" in the sense that it will simply burn through them.
and turned the h20 into h202 which is deadly hydrogen peroxide
Which is regularly used as a mouth wash, and easily noticeable because it tastes like crap and fizzes in your mouth.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
That actually should be: This laser is capable of emmitting a beam of pure vaporware
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?