Hilariously full of cope article from an irrelevant former power.
According to Grant Shapps, the weapon could have "huge ramifications" for the conflict in Europe.
Press X to Doubt.
The laser was originally expected to be operational by 2032… ….the defence secretary told reporters while on a visit to Porton Down military research centre near Salisbury that he wanted to speed this up even further. "Let's say that it didn't have to be 100% perfect in order for Ukrainians perhaps to get their hands on it," he said.
Very funny assessment of the readiness and efficacy of this Wunderwaffe.
Any suggestion that UK lasers could be sent to Ukraine to take out Russian drones is optimistic.
Ahh the admission in the article that the whole notion of uk made laser weapons being used in Ukraine is just a nato fantasy.
In the same vain I’m looking forward to future BBC articles about how the uk is sending a battle ready gundam to Ukraine next week
The main thing with those is just that there's not really a reason to use them over conventional firearms. Like gunpowder is ridiculously easy to mass produce and an extremely energy dense propellant to the point it doesn't really make sense to switch to less energy-dense batteries to launch slugs electromagnetically.
Railguns on the other hand seem to offer the potential to get projectiles moving at much higher velocities than the expansion of gunpowder would allow, if given enough power. The problem is that that would require a huge store of rapidly usable power and also getting velocities that a normal cannon can't do causes friction/arcing and oxidation of the rails after just a few rounds, meaning actually firing it totals the barrel in short order. So they have this theoretical "maybe this could replace over-the-horizon missiles for some tasks, if it could be worked out" but there's not much motivation to do that because the missiles are still cheaper and more accurate than a railgun would be and despite being a logistics hassle they're less of a logistics hassle than "this is the gun you get to fire like once and then replace the whole thing, we've got a few spares for that" would be.