Anti-Pirate Laser Beams – We Have These Now!

Note: This is not an actual pic of the laser... eish

Do you know how long I have had to put up with people telling me that weaponized laser-beams were the things of science fiction? That the closest I’d ever get to owning a death-ray would be taping a laser pointer to a magnifying glass? That the Death Star was a model, filmed against a green screen on a sound stage? Well, suck it, haters! The laser-beam is here, and we’re using it to set fire to pirates.

How do you make this any cooler? Well, you bolt it to a 25mm machine-gun cannon, of course.

It’s a fair fight

Last month, Boeing and BAE Systems, two defense giants dedicated to putting things in the air and then systematically blowing them out of it, announced that they would be partnering on a $2.8 million Navy contract to develop a deck-mounted MK-38 25mm machine-gun slash death ray, able to explode the shit out of anything from an enemy vessel to an airborne drone.

What they didn’t tell anyone was that they have built and tested the damn thing already!

Cue conspiracy theorists…

This multimillion-dollar chunk of awesome uses the laser to lock onto anything from enemy boats to bedazzled, celebrity strollers, delivering pinpoint accurate blasts of eviscerating machinegun fire. And if this isn’t enough to dissuade continued visual offence by whichever C-grade reality star is currently dragging their awful spawn across the boulevards of a Hollywood beach (or, you know, pirates somewhere) the beam gets switched to ‘kill’, delivering a “high beam-quality 10-kilowatt laser”, or, as we prefer to call it, a super-beam-explode-your-pirate-face-death-ray-gun-laser!

The name may need work

This is enough to incinerate the crap out of any smaller vessels that wander within small arms range of a Navy vessel with a mounted, 25mm cannon, which, any way you look at it, is basically asking for it. Sure, it’ll be several years before every worthy ship is equipped with a SBEYPFDRGL, but it’s here and it’s happening. Who knows what other exciting crap the future might hold?

Fuck YEAH!