Military To Mount High-Powered Non-Lethal Ray Gun On Aircraft

Love the ending to this article :D.

Don't know about the other projects, but it's pretty hard to run a fire hose from an aircraft :). Also, in many other areas that the military might want to use it.

What the hell would the any military want with a non-lethal "Ray-Gun?" The military specializes in the use of weapons of war, which are made to kill your enemies.

A non-lethal energy based weapon is about as useless as a car phone.

Now energy based weapons that can do more than burn holes into targets within a smaller period of time (say a fraction to a full second; the amount of time it takes for a target to feel the effects of projectile weapsons) is very useful.

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@Pheonix

Actually the military is interested in destroying the enemies capability and will to fight. Killing the enemy is one means to that objective, but actually not always the most effective way.
Enemy surrendering or refusing to fight, also achieves this objective, (which I guess this ray gun can do if it works)

FYI Wounding an combatant is another way especially if two of his buddies need to stop fighting to get him medical attention, which is the reason a lot of anti-personnel mines only blow off a limb, and don't vaporize the unlucky person who steps on it. Cost is another factor but that is beside the point.

If a non-lethal ray gun flying is awesome. Then the writer must think coffee flying at 500 is awesome also! Build a ray gun that will take down other planes and kill our enemies, now that would be awesome to me and my country! Spend the money on such weapons or my soft kill weapon. It blankets a large area. The energy is terrorized for days with no sleep. If you try to leave, it will kill you. It deactivates when we march in, and our opponents can do little more then stand.

use a hi powered laser to heat up a pocket of ionized argon, turning it into plasma and shoot that at a target. difference in polarity from the gun to the target should create an arced beam of plasma that could be lethal enough.

idk im just fantasizing

To me, torturing people with an electromagnetic weapon is not "cool."

How about securing our energy future here at home instead of coming up with new torture weapons?

Non-Lethal or even lethal ray gun on aircraft isn't too practical maybe it's good for Hollywood films. Today's aircrafts need good missiles.

Aircraft electrical systems technician
dordor77@netvision.net.il

The military doesn't just kill people, that's ignorant and the way that Hollywood portrays it so I would not expect to see this in any Hollywood movies.

i could be mistaken but i do believe that one major use of the ray gun on a aircraft could be to destroy land to air or air to air missiles to protect the aircraft, or any other target the missile could be aimed at

The space necessary to house a laser strong enough to destroy (or burn) a missile in flight is more than any current helicopter or fighter aircraft has at the moment. The USAF is already working to switch from chemical lasers (which are large and cumbersome) to something else I can't remember on their flying "ballistic missile" laser systems. The laser seen in the caption above is probably only strong enough to work on organic tissue (which is a lot less tough than say, steel or aircraft aluminum or whatever it is bombs, missiles and other fighters are made up of).

two questions, how can i get one, and do they hurt?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUWrj7SyPk

@timias

Admittedly destroying the enemy's will to fight is the politically correct term. But, if you look beneath the surface at the nature of warfare (i.e. kill or be killed; on the battlefield) a landmine is not meant to dismember somebody (although they may often do just this). They, like many other weapons of war, are made to kill our enemies in combat (also an injured warrior can still effectively kill many of his enemies).

In warfare the humane (and often logical) objective is to destroy the enemy's will to fight, but that doesn't mean that in warfare no one will die. Death may not destroy an enemy's will to fight (it sure hasn't stopped Al Qaeda and the Taliban). If weapons are to be devised they need to be precise and lethal if used for war (all other functions for weapons should be non-lethal, especially for law enforcement; I've always believed this).

A non-lethal weapon with the potential of everything instead of killing your enemies could be construed as a weapon of terror meant to strike fear in the heart of your enemy. This would definitely kill the will to fight, but it is also the very thing that the U.S. military is fighting against in the Middle East right now.

Does that seem right to you?

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