Today in “wake up, we live in the future” news, Boeing has decided to set us on the path to an inevitable Imperial Empire.
We’ve been wanting our laser weapons, and so here you go: Now it’s on an eight-wheeled, five hundred horsepower truck. Are you happy now? No? Well, it’s going to be tested to shoot down missiles from the sky. How about now? Impressed?
There’s no pleasing you until we get a Death Star, is there?
Over the next year the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD, which they didn’t have to go into all that trouble of naming it. They could’ve just called it “THE EFFING LASER TRUCK”) will have a chance to show what it can do.
The US Military itself had long tried to develop a laser that could shoot down missiles and artillery shells from the sky, but development on the project had been slow. Perhaps because scientists were too busy quoting this at one another:
Anyway. The problem with artillery and rockets is that they aren’t up in the air for all that long, so any projectile-based quick-response would not be all that helpful. Not to mention that heavy gunfire puts potential friendly targets at risk as well. (Note, my friends from back home: Shooting a gun in the air doesn’t mean the bullet stays in the air.)
The HEL MD, which can shoot a laser at 186,000 miles per second, renders that problem irrelevant.
And we all know that laser guns are vastly more efficient than projectiles because of its near-infinite ammunition, beholden only to the needs of power. What I would like to know, and I’m sure I could look it up because the question most certainly has been asked and answered, is how was the Death Star able to power such a laser?
For extra credit: Explain how it’s powered without using any made-up words.
Question: What futuristic military hardware would you like to see become a reality?
