The defence secretary said the laser could be used to take down Russian drones as early as 2027.

Hilariously full of cope article from an irrelevant former power.

According to Grant Shapps, the weapon could have “huge ramifications” for the conflict in Europe.

Press X to Doubt.

The laser was originally expected to be operational by 2032… ….the defence secretary told reporters while on a visit to Porton Down military research centre near Salisbury that he wanted to speed this up even further. “Let’s say that it didn’t have to be 100% perfect in order for Ukrainians perhaps to get their hands on it,” he said.

Very funny assessment of the readiness and efficacy of this Wunderwaffe.

Any suggestion that UK lasers could be sent to Ukraine to take out Russian drones is optimistic.

Ahh the admission in the article that the whole notion of uk made laser weapons being used in Ukraine is just a nato fantasy.

In the same vain I’m looking forward to future BBC articles about how the uk is sending a battle ready gundam to Ukraine next week

  • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    8 months ago

    Using my warehouses full of fast-reacting chemical batteries to power the laser that protects those warehouses from one singular threat vector, and which can’t protect anything else because it has to be right there and they’re such a big target that it would be insane to put anything else important nearby.

    Modern high powered lasers are very impressive, but ultimately they’re still comparatively short range with huge power requirements and have to spend so much time on target to damage it that they’d need an automated targeting system capable of maintaining almost millimeter precision on moving targets at a long enough range that that’s an absurd proposition but also at a short enough range that it may not even have seconds to disable a single incoming threat. They’re basically militarily useless, like coilguns or railguns which are also neat novelties but which have serious logistics problems that make them useless as weapons.