If you’ve never seen a laser shoot an aircraft out of the sky, the experience can be unsettling. The weapon fits comfortably into the trunk of a car. It makes no noise and emits no light, not even the glowing red beam that’s so familiar from the movies. When a team of Ukrainian soldiers and engineers took me to see their prototype the other day, it seemed easy to use. Almost too easy.

The operator set up the laser cannon on the roof of his pickup truck in the middle of an empty field. It resembles a hobbyist’s telescope with some cameras affixed to the sides. For target practice, one of the engineers launched a small drone, and it flew a few hundred yards away from us, hovering in the gauzy winter sky. The laser swiveled as its cameras followed the target. The operator shouted, “Fire!” Within seconds, the drone began to burn as if struck by invisible lightning, then fell to the ground in a fiery arc.

The Ukrainian model, known as the Sunray, is not the world’s first laser weapon system. The U.S. Navy has one called Helios, which Lockheed Martin developed as part of a $150 million contract signed in 2018. Four years later, the first Helios laser was installed on a U.S. destroyer to defend against enemy drones. The creators of the Sunray, whose existence has not been previously reported, told me they built their laser in about two years for a few million dollars, and they expect to sell it for a few hundred thousand dollars.

O.O

Holy shit! Ukraine has been kicking ass and taking no prisoners with their wartime weapons' development.

I had been wondering why there was no laser based air defence yet, it seems like the perfect system that doesn't take from their always too small stockpile of air defence munitions. I guess we'll have to see if it's actually effetive on the battlefield and if it can take down big drones (shahed) and missiles down as well.