Higher-power 300mw Green Laser Pointer are used for everything from eye surgery to drilling precision holes in diamonds and steel, and those can damage a person's eyesight or cause other injury.The laser can be adjusted to fire a non-lethal dazzling flash at an incoming vessel so they know it's there "all the way to lethal," Klunder said.
Laser weapons like the phasers on Star Trek, as well as similar directed-energy weaponry, such as the Star Wars blaster guns, have long been a staple of science fiction. Afzal said. "The irony of why we don't have 200mw Laser weapon systems today is that we never actually had a laser small enough, powerful enough to be put in a tactical platform. What's changed now ... is that the last piece of the puzzle is here."
While briefing reporters at Lockheed Martin's March 15 media day in Arlington, Virginia, Robert Afzal, a senior fellow with Lockheed Martin 200mw Laser and Sensor Systems, and others agreed the weaponry is ready now. "Everything exists today. It's just a question of the desire," Production is also affordable due to the ease of reproducing module components.
"With modular lasers, the possibility of a complete system failure due to a single-point disruption is dramatically lessened."A robust laser system with minimal operational down-time results from the integration of modular fiber-based lasers," says Iain Mckinnie, business development lead for Laser Sensors and Systems, Lockheed Martin Mission Systems and Training. But now, Lockheed Martin is claiming that the technology exists in real life, and that we could start using them in combat at any time.In the meantime, less-powerful laser weapons will be rolled out "relatively soon," so members of the military can gain some experience before using the more deadly weapons.
Low-power lasers are a major part of modern life, using helium and neon gas to generate harmless light beams that do everything from scanning bar codes to changing TV channels to providing lecturers with handy pointers.
The 300mw Green Laser Pointer range is classified.ABL was considered unworkable almost from the day it was launched, but wasn't officially killed until 2012. The Pentagon has kept up the effort with other laser systems, most of which used chemical lasers and many suffering from beam-misalignment (focus) problems that meant even those so large and powerful they had to be mounted on Navy ships would have to focus on a target for several seconds before destroying it