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The British military has tested the DragonFire long-range laser-guided energy weapon. Prior to that, the ability of lasers to track a target and hit it was tested by a team of specialists from the developer company. The new tests included hitting targets at various distances.
On November 8, the Government of the United Kingdom claimed that the trial on the DragonFire long range laser directed energy weapon (LDEW) was hosted by the MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) at Porton Down.
The DragonFire demonstrator fired at a number of targets over a number of ranges, demanding pinpoint accuracy from the beam director.
“These tests improve the UK’s understanding of how high-energy lasers and their associated technologies can operate over distance and defeat representative targets. The ability to deliver high levels of laser power with sufficient accuracy are two of the major areas that need to be demonstrated in order to provide confidence in the performance and viability of LDEW systems.” the report reads.
DragonFire was first unveiled to the public in 2017 at the DSEI conference in London and is being developed by UK Dragonfire, a consortium consisting of MBDA UK, Leonardo UK, Qinetiq and Dstl. Its combat tower is used to generate a laser beam with a QinetiQ emitter. The fiber laser has a 50 kW output according to the 2019 tests. Laser will put a focused beam the size of an English penny 5 km away and will possibly be equipped onto warships, ground vehicles and probably future combat aircraft.
Initially, it was stated that the tests of the new weapon should be completed by 2019.
The project was funded by significant joint investment by the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) and industry over a number of years totalling around £100 million.
All this hype for new weapons and what do they acually do?
The only innovation which really had an effect on the battleground in the last decade was the loitering amunition and thats not exaktly high tech.
Still waiting for those US Zumwalt Class (Star) Destroyers with rail guns to show up. I think they build one of them or two and no rail guns at all.
Most of them aren’t effective on the real battlegrounds but they don’t care, they are selling shit and making stupid amounts of money.
I’ll tell you… THEY DON’T WORK!… And when it is put to the test they will need a maintenance contract that is triple the size of price of the laser to rip off their own government.
Rin$e and Repeat Pox Americana!
It’s meant to drain the public treasury. Lasers are defeated by two simple things. One is atmospheric conditions since light, collimated or not, scatters as it finds scatterers in a medium. The second one is reflective coatings. Yes, mirrors.
An entire Russian battalion was slaughtered yesterday!
Do you have a real source for this. I just read it here in the comments but still no real report. Especially interested if this letter of the survivors is valid and if there was a reaction to it.
This would be a sign that russian command behaves similar to ukrainian and it did not look like that until now.
Its my opinion ..This laser gun will not work.. they are only stealing government money.. after 111 years maybe this laser gun can start working
Just send missiles when it’s cloudy or foggy.
This is a world game changer. From London we in US can now hit Moscow with a cheap direct energy beam!
“Cheap”.?! 🤣 You cannot sell French fries in Moscow anymore because you could not afford the prices of gas to travel so far 😅.
So basically a light-pen.