The ray gun, or directed energy weapon as they like to call it these days, continues its remarkable ex-migration from the pages of science fiction…we mentioned the Airborne Laser (ABL) a while ago - it’s designed to shoot down ballistic missles during the launch phase. Boeing’s new Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) achieved first light this month - the ATL is intended for use by aircraft against ground targets.

And looking ahead to about 2025, the aptly-named FotoFighter should make its appearance. According to the military, the FotoFighter will have “embedded arrays of semi-conductor lasers as sensors and weapons” for both defensive & offensive purposes. It will also likely be pilotless and/or autonomous, have invisibility, and be able to fry the countryside with megajoule bursts of energy, but only, one supposes, after ‘de-cloaking’.

And looking still further afield, we should see the start of efforts to weaponize quantum mechanics. Some future defense appropriations bill may well include line items associated with development of a retrocausality weapon, timeline modification via the entanglement of time, extra-dimensional warfare, or delivery systems based on quantum teleportation, or the expedient of simply re-programming reality, assuming the universe is indeed a quantum computer. We’ve no idea what we’re talking about here…speculative pseudo science at best.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 1:34 am and is filed under Aerospace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.