Scott Kellogg writes:
>No, I have'nt seen any Spinal mount partical accelerators in the
>world today, nor 250MW laser batteries, nor man portable laser
>weapons that can kill.
As readers of old issues of Aviation Week & Space Technology may know,
the U.S. military has been playing around with lasers and particle weapons
for years. Back in the early 70's sometime the Navy was researching ship-
mounted particle weapons for point defense -- and then someone came along
and showed how you could do a better job with phased array radar and a
very high rate-of-fire gun --> Phalanx. The U.S. Army once looked at
lasers as anti-tank weapons; and we all know about SDI lasers and particle
beams (i.e, "whadda you mean they don't have laser batteries!" as the
detonation laser vaporizes your powerplant...). Except for SDI, the
energy weapons programs have either been abandoned because, (a) as Classic
Traveller originally proposed, slug-throwers and explosive warheads are
far more cost-effective and efficient, or (b) have disappeared under a
layer of secrecy because they really are getting somewhere...
I also note the existance of surgical lasers first used in the late
70's for removing cancer, etc. that literally vaporize the offending
tissue.
The problem with man-portable laser weapons has never been the laser, but
the battery for the damn thing... And we could probably solve that problem
if we wanted to -- but bullets are cheaper and just as deadly, so why
bother?
As far as I can tell, we (the so-called First World countries) are
quite definitely in the TL8 range. Just because we toyed with a technology
and then decided not to build it because of economic or political reasons
does not mean that we CAN'T build it... The first (and last) working
NERVA (== Hard Times' Nuclear thermal Rocket) was built in the early 60's
by
the U.S. Air Force..
--- Cynthia
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