7 thoughts on “I Suppose…

  1. The first cell phones weren’t much to get excited about back in the 80s but things got better.

    and the operative phrase is “keep and bear arms not “keep and bear guns”

  2. The first thought thru my head when I started reading that article was “batteries are heavy and need recharging. Not so great as a field weapon.”

    However, if they would be used as a domestic control weapon, then the portability and recharging requirements would not be as problematic, since the ChiCom police would almost invariably go back to the station at the end of their shift.

  3. No kinetic energy. Easy to counter with, say, dust. Or fog. Rain would be interesting since the droplets would reflect the beam randomly. A countermeasure could reflect it back on the attacker. Shifting the wavelength & reflecting it back would be cool, but shifting wavelength ain’t easy.

  4. back in the 80s DARPA was testing hand held (with huge battery backpacks) CO2 laser “whips” to used by military personnel for civilian crowd control. The idea was if the rioter/protester got an instant, painful, sunburn it would dampen their enthusiasm. Technically the lenses and the mirrors were problematic but the deathknell of the project showed up during the testing. They did their initial field testing on Yorkshire pigs and things were going well until someone brought a Duroc to the party and “sunburns” became 3rd degree burns.

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