Thursday, February 02, 2006

Jumbojets: now with deathray goodness!

Hee hee hee. If you're one of my three regular readers, you'll know we've been waiting for this...

UPDATE: Burn, baby, burn... The Air Force Times has a short article up (and it's hard to get more official than that), which confirms one of the guesses I had regarding usage. Namely, a nose-mounted laser makes little sense for tactical operations. You don't "strafe" with a laser weapon... you linger on-site, and put somebody like my younger brother with tons of quick-twitch responses i.d.'ing and removing targets as soon as they appear. And the article confirms that, by noting that rather than being nose-mounted, this sucker's going to be fired from an underbelly turret.

Size and weight issues are still currently insane -- a C130H is a lumbering behemoth (which in turn has aided in its survivability, which is an issue for the proposed mission role) -- but in combination with TSAT, when it can be miniaturized to the point that it can be mounted on UCAVs, watch out.

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