The various militaries have been promoting laser guns for a while. I'm guessing the guns exist and the talk that they don't exist is smoke and mirrors.
The issues with lasers has always been how to generate the enormous power needed to feed lasers with enough downrange energy to make them worthwhile. This is why they are showing up in shipboard and vehicular form first. We are nowhere near any sort of man portable power source that can provide enough power to drive a hand held laser. Power armor has the same problem, we can build power armor right now, but the suits only work when wired in to external power sources, there isn't anything portable enough to power one right now.
The issue with energy weapons isn't that they don't exist but that for the most part they haven't been especially practical. In particular it's obscenely difficult to make them man portable.
This is not a secret. There are public demos of anti-drone laser systems in operation: https://youtu.be/NfPcl6nAlM4?t=397 The same video mentions that the system has been successfully deployed in undisclosed live environments already.
There were also some declassified demos of anti-artillery lasers that were released several years ago. I believe they were 50KW. I can't find the video because it didn't make that much of a splash and it was years ago.
Yeah, last I heard about stuff was 15 years ago. All the claims at the time said it wasn't possible. I remember it showing up at several future weapon systems shows and displays.
The various militaries have been promoting laser guns for a while. I'm guessing the guns exist and the talk that they don't exist is smoke and mirrors.
The issues with lasers has always been how to generate the enormous power needed to feed lasers with enough downrange energy to make them worthwhile. This is why they are showing up in shipboard and vehicular form first. We are nowhere near any sort of man portable power source that can provide enough power to drive a hand held laser. Power armor has the same problem, we can build power armor right now, but the suits only work when wired in to external power sources, there isn't anything portable enough to power one right now.
We have similar problems with lightsabers.
The issue with energy weapons isn't that they don't exist but that for the most part they haven't been especially practical. In particular it's obscenely difficult to make them man portable.
This is not a secret. There are public demos of anti-drone laser systems in operation: https://youtu.be/NfPcl6nAlM4?t=397 The same video mentions that the system has been successfully deployed in undisclosed live environments already.
There were also some declassified demos of anti-artillery lasers that were released several years ago. I believe they were 50KW. I can't find the video because it didn't make that much of a splash and it was years ago.
Yeah, last I heard about stuff was 15 years ago. All the claims at the time said it wasn't possible. I remember it showing up at several future weapon systems shows and displays.