Come Get Some

Military Weapons Developers have some pretty cool jobs.  Ionatron invented what it believes is to be a “lightning” raygun.  It apparantly works by using a charged particle laser to create a virtual channel through which a large electrical charge can travel.  Essentially, a directed energy weapon with lethal results.  Cool.

From the Reg here:

The US Navy will put nearly $10m into development of “man-made lightning” blaster weapons.

In a release dated yesterday, Arizona-based company Ionatron announced that it had won a contract worth $9,839,094 to develop its Laser Induced Plasma Channel™ (LIPC) technology.

Ionatron describes LIPC as “man-made lightning”. It notes that electrical air-gap spark discharges are nothing new, but until now it has been very hard to make them travel any distance or point them at a target. But the firm’s engineers reckon they’ve potentially got the problem cracked, using precursor laser pulses to burn a conductive tunnel through the air down which an electrical charge can easily jump.

The technology could be applied in a number of ways, perhaps most obviously as an improvement on existing Taser cattle-prod dartguns.

But there’ll be no need for plods or soldiers of the future to give up on killing people altogether. “Lethal configurations are also available,” the company assures us.

You know what the defense against this is?  A particle-charged field that negates the charge of the gun.  Yeah, I’m talking force fields.