US Army will test most powerful laser weapon ever built next year
Lasers are currently used to shoot down small drones, but a more powerful weapon could take on larger targets
Technology 29 October 2021
By David Hambling
“The high power, compact laser weapon… will produce a lethal output greater than anything fielded to date,” Scott Forney, president of GA-EMS, said in a statement.
The US Navy deployed the first high-energy laser weapon, known as LaWS, on the USS Ponce in 2014, with a reported 30 kilowatt output. Most military lasers tend to be in the 30 to 100 kilowatt range, which is mainly useful for shooting down small drones, so the new weapon is a significant increase.
Read more: The US Army is building the most powerful laser weapon in the world
Typically such weapons are based on multiple industrial fibre lasers, with the output combined into a single beam. The new weapon instead uses large slabs of glass connected in series. Such slabs have previously been hard to use due to waste heat and issues with beam quality, but GA-EMS says connecting them in series solves these issues and removes the need to combine beams from multiple fibre lasers.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2295435-us-army-will-test-most-powerful-laser-weapon-ever-built-next-year/
