Well, we can easily make lasers and masers that can sweep a battlefield and cook every eyeball, but such things are inhumane and against the Geneva Convention, the Blackwood Convention, and the Italian System. Which makes me wonder how the Greenpeace ship thinks they can get away with it.

Destructo lasers aren’t as easy as all that. Cloud or two, and they’re NFG. For that matter, I’m not sure how many targets a single 747 can engage, before running out of Schlitz. So, a flood of bogies will probably defeat any currently achievable laser defense.

Apparently it’s not proving so easy to build solid-state laser blasters that might have greater duration, “droop” sets in as you try to increase power. I have some (totally layman) thoughts on the matter, I just hope we don’t wake up some morning and find the Chinese or Russians or whoever have cobbled together some crude laser weapons we turned our noses up at as inelegant.

Heck, didn’t Tom Clancy bring down an airliner with nothing but a spotlight, twenty years ago?