Airborne laser mothballed

[///ajd]

No great surprise I suppose

[Eric Mc]

Which one?

[eharding]

I presume this one.

Shame - could have been put into service discouraging with extreme prejudice the little scrotes who think it funny to shine lasers at the cockpits of airliners on approach to land....

"No sonny, that's not a laser. This...."

<Kerzzzaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap>

"...is a laser"

[Magog]

I wonder how much of the funding for this really went on 'black projects'...

[RobDickinson]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uV1SbEuzFU&fea...

[scubadude]

Its not just the British goverment that do 95% of something before chucking it in and starting another thing from scratch then....

You do wonder how much more money/work it would have taken for it to be usable, or how early they should have realised it wasn't going to be economically viable, somewhere between those two points they spent several billion dollars and several years of work- bonkers.

Did it ever manage to shoot anything down as promised?

[PAUL. S]

All they needed to do was watch a few episodes of Star Trek or Star Wars, its obvious even a few centuries later than us they still coudnt hit a barn door at 30 paces with a laser

A fella hanging out of a Sopwith camel with a Lee Enfield had a better strike rate

Edited by PAUL. S on Saturday 3rd March 09:59

[Eric Mc]

Could have told them it was all a load of rubbish back in 1982.

[Brigand]

Shame, I remember seeing a lot of the artist's impressions of the programme as a kid and enjoyed seeing big lasers coming out the top of Jumbo Jets.

The article shows a version with a nose-mounted laser, wasn't there a version with the laser mounted on top of the fuselage?

[anonymous-user]

Eric Mc said:

Could have told them it was all a load of rubbish back in 1982.

True, even a trainee Evil Genus should know that you attach lasers to Sharks and not to Jumbos...........

[Conian]

So how come the lasers on the space shuttles worked so well?
I saw a documentary once with Roger Moore about it.

[magpie215]

Brigand said:

The article shows a version with a nose-mounted laser, wasn't there a version with the laser mounted on top of the fuselage?

[Brigand]

Seems they mounted the lasers on alsorts of testbed aircraft, I always thought it was just the Jumbo.

Laser fact for you, (if memory serves and I haven't double checked on Google) laser stands for:

Light Amplification by Stimulated Emissions of Radiation.

They also have MASERS that use Microwaves instead of Light.