Light Firepower

 The way that's done is, instead of just building a single laser at 50 kilowatts or 100 kilowatts or something like that, we are actually taking individual fiber-lasers and combining the outputs of the beams into a single high-power beam, and we do that using a technique we call Spectral Beam Combination... Fundamentally, what we did was we took something, if you're familiar with wavelength division multiplexing in telecommunication—how to break up the spectrum that's available to you into many different laser-lines and send all that light down a fiber to increase your communications bandwidth. So, all of a sudden, we took a large number of fiber-laser channels, all closely spaced in wavelength or in frequency, and then by reflecting those beams off an object. We could call it a grating, or you can think in your mind of it like a prism, the beams all combine into a single output beam. 

Think of it as a mainframe computer breaking up into a supercomputing cluster. So, instead of just building a bigger device, we're combining in parallel. And so, what that enabled us to do is build a high-power laser that's scalable by adding modules that delivered a weapons class beam, but with very high beam qualities.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37775/how-the-once-elusive-dream-of-laser-weapons-suddenly-became-a-reality

Star Wars is becoming real.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Space Gas

  The average human being farts up to 15 times a day. That’s not a big deal if you work in the open air, but slightly more problematic if you work in an office or shop, and potentially deadly if you are lucky enough to be an astronaut.  ”Farts can kind of hang out,” Mike told Gizmodo. “There’s not as much airflow as on Earth. You gotta introduce airflow to get rid of contaminants and carbon dioxide”. He says that astronauts’ digestive systems don’t work quite as well without the help of gravity, and they tend to get “a little stuffed up”. Generally, astronauts try to go to the loo if they feel a fart coming, where at least there’s a little more ventilation to break up the stink.  The problem is, says space expert Derrick Pitts from The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, that "If you fart...the gas stays right there. It doesn’t go anywhere. “If you fart in zero G, you have a major problem,” he adds. Many of the gases naturally produced by our digestive syst...
Read more

Crumbley

Evidently, Mommy and Daddy Crumbley are on the run: Police are searching for the Michigan school shooting suspect's parents just hours before they are to be arraigned on involuntary manslaughter charges.   Check the border crossing to Windsor, Ontario.... Ethan Crumbley currently faces 24 felony counts, including four counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of assault with intent to murder, in addition to the terrorism charge. He will be tried as an adult and faces life in prison if convicted. The whole family seems to be dysfunctional.  
Read more

Run Away!

  PONTIAC, Mich. — A prosecutor filed involuntary manslaughter charges Friday against the parents of a teen accused of killing four students at a Michigan high school, saying they failed to intervene on the day of the tragedy despite being confronted with a drawing and chilling message — “blood everywhere” — that was found at the boy’s desk. James and Jennifer Crumbley committed “egregious” acts, from buying a gun on Black Friday and making it available to Ethan Crumbley to resisting his removal from school when they were summoned a few hours before the shooting, Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald said. So Mommy and Daddy did the logical thing: they hit the road.  By mid-afternoon, authorities said they were searching for the couple. Sheriff Mike Bouchard said their attorney, Shannon Smith, had agreed to arrange their arrest if charges were filed but hadn’t been able to reach them. Ethan Crumbley, 15, emerged from a bathroom with a gun, shooting students in t...
Read more