It sounds cool.  Northrop Grumman, makers of many fine military technologies, has delivered the first production-line quality laser ray gun to the United States Air Force.  A fine achievement indeed.

At first glance anyway.

The Joint High Power Solid State Laser program is intended to one day deliver a 100 kilowatt cannon capable of all sorts of cool things.  Only it has yet to deliver a final end product, as the production of the electricity to power such a laser gun in any sort of mobile platform involves extremely hazardous chemicals.

So insetad of delivering that, we get the Vesta II, a teeny tiny little 15 kW laser. It’s hard to even classify it as a weapon, in that about all it can really do is hurt a lot or maybe, with enough time, explode exposed explosives.  (Say that ten times fast.)

Still, that we’ve got a production-line quality laser “weapon” at all is a huge step forward … I guess.  I mean it’s better than, say, not having any production-line quality ray guns for our military to play with.  I guess it at least allows all sorts of testing and design and consideration to be done.  It’s a step along the way to something cool, even if it’s kind of a letdown itself.

In a time when national financial stability is so questionable though, it could be the wrong time to trumpet any project that fails to deliver bang for the buck.