Official News page 6

REAL LIFE CATCHES UP TO FED: LASER GUNS

by Hazed

Laser guns have been a staple of science fiction for years, and of course they were used for ship fighting in classic Fed - but they've been slow to become reality. But that may be about to change.

The problem has been that power and size limits have made them impractical; they certainly can't be made portable for individual use, so we haven't yet seen soldiers wielding laser rifles.

But Lockheed Martin have come up with a way to solve many of these issues, using an inverted prism. The laser they have developed produces 100 kilowatts or more of power, and uses fiber optics to produce near perfect beams. Maintaining the beam over long distances has always been a problem but now, using the inverted prism, "lasers with slightly different wavelengths enter a combiner, and the result is a single, focused beam. It's called Spectral Beam Combining."

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