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Airborne Boeing Laser Blasts Ground Target
coondoggie writes "The airborne military laser which promises to destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage has for the first time actually blown something up. Boeing and the US Air Force today said that on Aug. 30, a C-130H aircraft armed with Boeing's Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) blasted a target test vehicle on the ground for the first time. Boeing has been developing the ATL since 2008 under an Air Force contract worth up to $30 million."
My! Isn't the written description of a horribly killed human being such a wonderful source of levity? I am chuckling so! Almost chuckling audibly. You might even say, with some amusement and a smile, laughing out loud.
The only thing that could have made your description of a human being with a hole in his head more enjoyable is if someone got to whip out their cock and fuck that laser head hole! Wouldn't that be such fun? Can we drink beers whilst we tell each other such stories? I am certain that with a few beers we can thing of some even more amusing and laugh inducing ways to kill human beings.
It'll be just like that scene in Schindler's List where the soldiers lined up a bunch of Jews just to see how many people their rifles could penetrate in a single shot. Imagine what kind of fun it will be to see how many human heads our laser can burn through! Oh it will be so much fun, we should have CAKE after we try it! Not the dead people though. No cake for them.
I'm sure I can find a Bible passage somewhere that can justify these kinds of things.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The funny thing is that you expect the United States to follow any international convention ever.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Did it take you more than an hour to copy and paste from wikipedia? ;-)
I've not heard a valid example of the US violating it. Remember, the Geneva conventions are primarily concerned with the treatment of uniformed members of national military forces (and includes definitions of such).
It also is only in force when engaged in war with another state that is also bound by the convention. Legally, at least; morally/politically is a different game, of course.
The effective range of weapons like this is a few hundred miles at most: any more and atmospheric effects disperse the beam too much to do any damage.
ICBM's are also only vulnerable in boost phase; the warhead itself is hardened against reentry, compared to which these lasers are like flashlights. So in order for this to be useful as a defense against ICBM's, you've got to get your huge plane within a few hundred miles of the enemy's ICBM launch site and keep it there on the off chance that they try to launch an ICBM at you. Oh, and somehow you've got to do this without getting your expensive (and big and slow) laser-toting plane shot down.
Weapons like this actually make an ICBM strike *more* likely against the US. If conventional war were to break out between the US and a country like China, with neither party really wanting a nuclear escalation but reserving their nukes as a deterrent, they'd be afraid that if they lost the ability to effectively shoot down aircraft over their territory they'd also lose the ability to launch ICBM's in case of escalation. So, at the first sign of the US gaining air superiority, they'd go ahead and launch ICBM's.