The price for freedom is eternal vigilance, and if you happen to share Tony Stark’s sentiments in the first Iron Man movie, then surely you would be more than happy to own the biggest, baddest weapons in your backyard so that enemies will think twice, nay, three times before they decide to go for your jugular. The US Navy figured out that a better offensive/defensive mechanism on their seafaring ships would be merging machine guns and lasers into a single turret.
The honor to flesh out this concept falls upon BAE Systems, a British defense firm, and while the company already rolls out huge machine guns which are capable of protecting warships from approaching watercraft, the latest idea would include working on a solid-state laser that would be added upon the previously mentioned weapon to improve its potency further.
This project will be a team up between BAE Systems and Boeing, and the final result ought to be powerful enough to scare off anyone who wants to mess around our country’s warships. After all, this unique laser machine gun hybrid is (supposedly) the perfect countermeasure against tiny drones, small boats and basically any other physical object that approaches too close for the Navy surface vessel’s comfort.
Editor’s note: in general, good old bullets can take out small moving targets such as boats or even torpedoes. The laser may be more appropriate for a fast-moving target such as a missile or a plane. The downside of the laser is that it can lose some efficiency if the atmospheric conditions are bad (rain, fog… ) in which case, the usage of radar+gun would be more appropriate.
Filed in . Read more about Boeing, Laser, Military and Navy.