The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working with Lockheed Martin to test “a new beam control turret… to give 360-degree coverage for high-energy laser weapons operating on military aircraft.”<\/p>\n
In other words, it stuck a primitive “Star Wars”-style laser cannon on a fighter jet and flew it over Michigan eight times.<\/p>\n
“These initial flight tests validate the performance of our ABC turret design,” Lockheed’s Doug Graham said. in a release.<\/p>\n
That ABC stands for Aero-adaptive Aero-optic Beam Control, which is designed to allow high-energy lasers to fire on enemy aircraft and missiles from a full 360 degrees — above, below, and behind the aircraft.<\/p>\n
The test flights demonstrated the airworthiness of the turret, but it doesn’t appear that anyone or anything in the Great Lakes region was actually zapped as part of testing.<\/p>\n
Still, this represents a significant move toward the inevitable merging of the “Star Wars” universe with our own so-called “reality.” We’ve already seen the Navy’s laser weapon that’s set to deploy, and science has discovered how to create a real-life lightsaber, so perhaps it would be wise to start scanning the galaxies not just for potentially habitable exoplanets, but for planet-size super weapons as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working with Lockheed Martin to test “a new beam control turret… to give 360-degree coverage for high-energy laser weapons operating on military aircraft.” In other words, it stuck a primitive “Star Wars”-style laser cannon on a fighter jet and flew it over Michigan eight times. “These initial flight … Continue reading “DARPA testing planes with laser cannon”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[9983,9980,9981,9982],"class_list":["post-15946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-aero-adaptive-aero-optic-beam-control","tag-darpa","tag-laser-cannon","tag-star-wars"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15946"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15947,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15946\/revisions\/15947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}