Phasers and Forcefields now a reality...

Exciting news in the last month or so, a company has developed a method of channeling electricity through the air using lasers.
I first heard of this type of technology about a decade ago by a company called HSV Technologies, whose website has not been updated for some time.

However in the last month another company (I assume they are not related) called Ionatron has developed a similar device that also uses LASER technology to channel enough electrictiy to incapacitate or even kill.
They have adapted this into a type of force-field device and are developing it into a handheld weapon much like Star Trek phasers.

www.americanscientist.org...

Laser Induced Plasma Channel (LIPC) technology has already been used for a Portal Denial System. The system is designed to be installed as a corridor or passageway denial system that can be employed at either indoor or outdoor locations and can be configured for each individual installation’s security requirement. The system creates a laser guided electric barrier that can be initiated either automatically from an existing customer-supplied computer system that identifies the authorization of the person (similar to conventional keyless entry systems) or via operator command. The system is designed to stop intruders in a passageway or at a vehicle check point, with a lethal or non-lethal electrical discharge.
www.defense-update.com...

www.scienceagogo.com...

The "passageway denial system" application sounds great. Not a force field precisely from sci-fi, since stuff can get thru it (ie won't stop a bullet or protect you from an explosion), but still, pretty damned cool!

I always though that if you had a laser powerful enough to burn just about anything it touched, and if you could somehow fan out its beam you could have a sort of screen.

Originally posted by WestPoint23
I always though that if you had a laser powerful enough to burn just about anything it touched, and if you could somehow fan out its beam you could have a sort of screen.

We can pretty much do that now, a microwave based weapon would probably be better to induce pain. The problem with it though is that it just keeps diverging out and you can't make it terminate at a specific point.
With this you can literally make a virtual wall.

Actually,

The most interesting and potentially awe inspiring device is the Crater Coupler.

If they are able to penetrate an FO cable without signal loss in either an (alarm belled) conductive sheath or the light bearing fibers, simply using some kind of connective trigger factor between an electromagnetic circuit and light, we are talking orders of magnitude level advances in quantum mechanics and RF theory as we know it.

Even as the notion that the U.S. Fed is tasking submarines (of which I believe there is only one dry-deck special mod) to go hunting seabottom commlines, even if only with ROV, is particularly scarey because property and particularly _intellectual_ property ownership is one of those elements which drove the founding fathers to make such inclusive and extensive constitutional provision guarding against undue 'emminent domain' exploitation of man by the body politic.

It is effectively like a Men In Black scenario in which WE take espionage steps to shore up a faltering social system by reverse engineering 'CDs and Walkmans' as a function of nationally sponsored industrial fraud.

Such an effort not only stifles local innovation but it is ultimately doomed to failure by the notion that 'only those elements of existing design worth stealing will be noticed and developed' by our own (increasingly militaristically focussed) government.

Where man's excellence as a Darwinistic force is based solely and wholely upon the our nature as a tool user, you cannot default and close down a societal growth path through limitations of competition and diversity.

Ol' man Chucky would call that root disruption of the diversity tree branching methodology by which a discovery must first be made 'randomly' to induce a proper environmental condition if not codifier by whch to determine relevance for competitive exclusion.


KPl.