Make lots of tea/coffee: The laser can heat a litre of freezing water to boiling point every second.

How much hot water does a washing machine use? How about a built in hot tub and steam room with your frikking laser?

If you want a shark-mounted laser, you will need one of the bigger sharks to pull the power supply at a reasonable pace.

Lewis, you say it will require "electrical power input of half a megawatt", but that's only whilst it's firing. I wouldn't expect it would need to be firing continuously so they may (for portable applications) get away with some kind of electrical power buffer like a capacitor bank that can be charged between firing by a lower capacity power unit. It would need to be sufficient to power the beam for the duration of the required pulse (possibly multiple shots) and also need to charge relatively quickly in between bursts.

What is the time of each "shot"? If it's relatively short (e.g. 0.1 sec) then you can get away with with a 50kw power supply and still fire at one shot per second (subject to losses in the buffer mechanism).

If it needs to fire for sustained periods then you're back to needing continous power (or a really big capacitor bank like this one http://www.rheinmetall.de/index.php?fid=1805&lang=3).

Will it frikkin fit on top of my frikkin Shark??

...we all start getting along together instead?

No?

Pass the stub then, Shaggy.

"Quantity over quality".

The Soviet counter to technologically superior American defences was always "throw so much at them that something HAS to get through." Thus, their missile-launching ships were capable of launching practically all their cruise missiles in a single salvo.

Currently Afghan and Iraqi fighters launch a couple of mortar shells at a time and skedaddle. But it's not inconceivable that they, or some other, future opponent (Iran, anyone?) would try launching dozens of shells at once.

Also, South African conscripts used to have unauthorised competitions to see how many shells from a single mortar they could have in the air at once. (What a great way to spend MY tax-money. Serves 'em right when they mis-timed it and lost a hand.)

My point is that these lasers will have to be able to fire multiple pulses for a sustained period (and come with an awesome fire-control system) to really be effective as a base defence. So for base or ship defense you would need a power source with an average output close to that of the laser's peak output.

Then again, base or ship defence is exactly the case where you do have the space for a massive generator. So smaller, faster vehicles may well be able to use smaller generators coupled with capacitors, as suggested. It's much harder to rain dozens of rounds on a moving target, after all. A couple of pulses a minute may be all you need to defend, say, a tank.

Still a long way from an offensive weapon, though. It's going to be a while still before that tank dispenses with its main gun in favour of a laser.

The laser burst duration and duty cycle are clearly important factors driving the size of the overall installation; to such an extent that I am not sure that integrating to a warship anything less than summink nuclear powered would be viable. Fixed, ground installations, then. Not sure you need a PC to control the power supplly or the laser elements of the system...

"it's more than half the engine power of a 60-ton Challenger II ", So over 600HP?

Or probably close to about half the engine power maybe of an M1 Abrams? 750HP

So assuming they can shoehorn the thing into a modified turret, would this mean they have to stop to shoot due to lack of sufficient power to drive the tracks?

Maybe Northrop should divert some of the DoD research budget into a nice small clean fusion power pack; they might have a useable system then and a hugely profitable sideline as well.

Black helicopter - that would be the Havoc-N driver laughing at the stationary target for his AT-9's

it misses it's target......when does the beam stop? At least with a rifle or mortor round they will eventually stop but this has the capability to go on for quite a while. Imagine.........

Sir this is Commander Ivan Tobeoutahere at the International Space Staion, I think we have a situation. One of the solar panels has just been shot off by a frikken laser which appears to have originated from the Iraqi frikken border. Please advise........

Mines the coat with the mirrow in the inside pocket to deflect the ray....

It should be able to keep the riff-raff off my driveway or the neighbor's cat out of my garden.

Until I can get my own frikkin' Spartan Laser I'm not impressed.

Goggles?

Because its sensible, Why else?

It's really not hard arranging for half a megawatt of power for a short amount of time. Even a humble car battery can deliver 1000A (i.e. 12kW) for a good few seconds, so forty of them (or a smaller number of truck batteries) would do the job.

NiMH would be better. The battery pack in a Prius probably delivers 60kW when you floor it.

Capacitors can deliver much higher amounts of power per unit weight, but for shorter amounts of time. Either way the real question is how much energy is needed during a period of hostile incoming (minutes? hours?). It's that which will dictate the size of the generator, etc., not the peak power drain.

If I fit my mortar shells with shinny tinfoil hats will they get though?

Are you blind, man? A "chain" would be a number of lasers in series, and those beams are quite clearly in a parallel configuration. So I don't think you can call this prior art.

Actually, I think you will find that Average Power is preferred. These are solid state lasers, so for this kind of application the slight advantage in Peak power obtained by over-driving is offset by the need for continuous operation - no point pulsing it when it is the total energy delivered that matters, not the instantaneous intensity.

Yes that may be the biggest but this is the prettiest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_machine

Brilliant, I'm going to get radiated in my own work place here in Fareham, England.

Northrop Grumman is just up the road from me!

The Earth is flat and the center of the Universe, man will be unable to get enough air to breath above 25mph unless he carries it with him and the idea that anyone could actually *fly* to America from Europe is quite clearly preposterous...

Thus far, scientific "proof" that something is impossible does not exactly have a good record of success, does it really? Just because it has not been done YET does not mean it cannot be done at all.

Spot the difference between things like Newton's Laws of Motion or the Combined Gas Laws (all "proven" by repeated experimentation with consistent results) and the claims that there will NEVER be man-portable laser weaponry powerful enough to vaporize like in the movies and the ones in my first paragraph... (but at least young Al Einstein realised he didn't have all the facts, hence he called it his THEORY of Special Relativity)

You dumb asses will still be busy arguing over the reasons these things will not work when our Alien Overlords descend from their mighty starships and take over the planet.

Bags I "Quisling Traitor in charge of Northern Europe" come the Day of Visitation.

When ships were made of wood (and men of iron), cannon shot were often heated red hot before firing at the French ^H^H^H^H^H^H enemy, in the hope that they would ignite the target. BTW, this is the source of "hot shot".

If the laser heated but didn't destroy the incoming shell, the result might be similar.

Folk have commented on the likely issues faced with hitting (small) projectiles but I suspect this sort of tech will be deployed against decent sized non spinning objects, such as planes and cruise missiles.

I believe the Patriot missile system was originally intended as an anti aircraft platform which was why it's F&C systems had problems against the /ballistic/ SCUD missiles.

Trying to accurately target a very small and rapid object is probably just a big a challenge.

"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid. "

though will they look like a dressed up British submachine gun when they go into production?:)

will be a scaled-up version for the ISS, called the "Death Star superlaser, version 0.25".

I hereby patent a mechanism of placing bicycle reflectors on ammunition. You know, the kind of reflector that sends all the light back in the direction it came.

You know like the ones Cheney seems to have cloaked .. er that is both horns.

Anyways I'd like to start the bidding .. I can name the first problem in 2 words "Friendly Fire" .. ooohh that's gonna sting.

RE: Range? .. well lets just say there are gonna be some ET's that were having a picnic on Gliese 587c and they are *really* ticked now!!

RE: and a playing card in the spokes .. you do know that devices that reflect nearly 100% of the light striking them back in the same direction they came from are called phase conjugate mirrors, and they are quite build able.

At 100% efficiency there are 683lumen per Watt

Ordinary light bulbs get 10lumen per Watt

High efficiency fluorescent get 90lumen per Watt

Sodium street lights get 135lumen per Watt

Your Northrop laser is doing 136lumen per Watt

That is about as good as it gets. What do you want, blood?

So how would this laser weapon work? I really don't understand the type of damage they would do, would they burn, slice, incinerate, or even be possible of delivering some form of explosive charge?

The rail gun I can understand they shoot a projectile but laser weapons just baffle me as I can't see them doing any real damage.