ATHENA Laser 2017

Jerusalem Post is reporting on the progress of the ATHENA Laser Weapon. Israel want one, lol!

There is a thread here that introduces ATHENA back in 2015:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Well the Lockhead Martin developers have been very busy:

www.jpost.com...

They now boast that ATHENA can:

“Our beam-control technology enables precision equivalent to shooting a beach ball off the top of the Empire State Building from the San Francisco Bay Bridge,” said Paul Shattuck, director of the company’s directed-energy systems.

There is a video in the Jpost link showing ATHENA taking out a drone aircraft.

ATHENA is proving effective against drone targets:

In an evolutionary leap in battlefield technology, Defense giant Lockheed Martin has successfully shot down multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using a giant laser beam, the company has announced. During test operations with the US Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command in August, the 30-kilowatt ATHENA laser system brought down five Outlaw unmanned aerial vehicles at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Apparently the laser is very costly to develop, but inexpensive to utilise. The laser technology is a very popular concept with militaries globally. It is very surgical.





Watch out Lil Kim. Trump "The Merciless" has the death ray now.

The tech for targeting and acquisition is amazing IMO.. To keep the beam on a spot for as long as it takes to cut through is very impressive.

It looks nice. 5 seconds isn't bad. Took them years to get from 30 seconds to 5. Just need to get the time down to 1 second. Then we can discuss small sized ground based laser weapons and then the real fun can begin.

a reply to: Revolution9

I've been wondering if one of these could fit in the X-37B space drone. If not, perhaps something similar.

This was the idea of Reagans "Strategic Defense Initiave" back the 1980's. A few British universities became involved, but the SJW's/snowflakes at the time were opposed to anything involving war, even thought it was meant to end the need for ICBM's.

Academics said it would never work as CPU's were too slow at the time to handle target guidance and lasers were too bulky to cool properly, but they took the money anyway.

OOH....this will be great to use on suicide bombers or on rocket posistions.