They’re essentially a lightning bolt. Only straight.
A laser displaces the air between the emitter and the target and an electric current is run through the newly created channel, the discharge essentially becomes a blast of ionized plasma.
Delivers the same effect as a lightning strike only much more controlled.
Not sure anyone else would want to be within a few dozen meters of that thing. Think about the heat and flash: you wouldn't just burn and blind your target, and you'd need heavy protective gear not to get flash-burned yourself.
One of the biggest drawbacks of all of these directed energy weapon concepts is that the waste heat would cause enormous collateral damage. Again, a bullet usually only hits the thing it's aimed at, overpenetration notwithstanding.
Edited by Fighteer on May 15th 2025 at 5:32:09 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I'm just getting this from Wikipedia, but basically you use a laser to quickly heat a line of air between you and your target into plasma, which ionizes it, allowing you to then send an electrical charge through this path and into a target, potentially stunning or killing humans and frying electronics. It's the same basic way a normal lightning strike works, just with lasers. Also, if you fire one into a storm cloud it will zap you.
Clown To Clown Handshake Initiating...
x5 I repeat: a tool of torture, not a weapon.
x4When you add sufficient energy to gas molecules, some of the outer electrons will bounce off free and behave in a gas-like way, leaving the molecule positively charged. This thin soup of electrons and "cations" as they're called is "Ionized gas", a form of plasma. A laser of high enough power, or the right wavelength, can do this. This stackexchange physics
answer gets into the math, but it's not that much energy. This kind of plasma is very electrically conductive.
Normally this plasma won't last long, but it doesn't have to. If you apply an electric charge to one end, current will flow along the plasma in a much longer arc (and with far greater precision) than you'd be able to cross with the voltage source alone. Once the arc is established, some of the energy from the arc itself will maintain the ionization channel. Lower voltage arcs over longer ranges may tend to drift, so if this is a weapon you might get more precise results by pulsing it on and off, creating a new ionized leader for each pulse.
Keep in mind that when you create your electrical charge, you'll need to run the opposite charge somewhere. Perhaps grounded out to the environment? This gets trickier if your opponent is insulated in some way: Basic rubber rain boots will stop grounding to the actual ground with a fair bit of protection, and if they're airborne things get really interesting.
The Cobra Trilogy has some action sequences with this mechanism, if you're interested.
EDIT(S):Multi-
Edited by underCoverSailsman on May 15th 2025 at 4:39:01 AM
Regarding lasers, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident has one of my favorite portrayals: lasers don't do nearly enough raw damage to a ship's hull to replace kinetics or missiles, so they're used instead for causing Subsystem Damage via sniping off the target's turrets and thrusters. Smaller ones are also used as flak batteries for intercepting missiles.
Small target use, last ditch point defense against things like drones, missiles, boats and aircraft is the most likely realistic use case for laser weaponry. The energy needs and outputs are just too out of sync for deployment aboard things like fighter aircraft or tanks or as an infantry weapon.
Plasma weapons may be better suited to that since it requires less energy than a straight laser but even that is relatively niche compared to just packing a high velocity kinetic weapon or some chemical explosives.
Unless of course Technology Marches On and achieves a breakthrough that allows such things to be easily done.
The other element is that a warship is going to be a lot more stationary and will have more predictable (internally) movements, making it easier to actually make laser stick to a target long enough for it to do anything.
For a plane? Both the plane and the laser target will be moving at high speeds the whole time.
Planes have the ability to aim lasers at targets, it's how laser guided bombs/missiles work, so that's not a real issue unless its a small target moving fast, though even that wouldn't be a big issue with more advanced targeting software/AI. Staying in effective range for long enough to do significant damage is going to be an issue though.
Clown To Clown Handshake Initiating...Honestly.
Not really. Compared to strafing runs and weapons like Semi-Active Radar Homing. Lasers are downright straightforward. For aircraft they are line of sight, which is something that is a non-issue when you fly thousands of meters above ground and higher altitude air isn't as cluttered as low altitude air.
You also need to take consideration that for vessels like destroyers a laser would be a line of sight weapon. Which would have very limited range, much lower than ballistic shells and missiles. Since lasers can shoot up to the horizon but ballistics and missiles are over the horizon weapons. But also, have to deal with the simple fact that ships are big, support much thicker workings and unless you target specific components, lasers won't do that much damage to most ships.
Meanwhile aircraft and missiles are sensitive. Even if they are a moving target, it takes a lot less energy and effort to drill a hole on something that shouldn't have a hole in it. Missiles more so, since they are very explosively packed with fuel and ordinance. With gimbals or turreted mounts, most targeting systems don't really have issue tracking fast moving targets.
Inter arma enim silent legesThe major issue with laser discussion on anything is that there is currently a substantial capability gap with lasers for warfare-uses, so it's not very clear if lasers will be useful. If the gap can be meaningfully bridged, lasers could be tremendously useful (yes, even on aircraft) but it's just as plausible that the problem with laser weaponry is just not realistically solveable and then the use-case becomes incredibly limited. As in, great on ships and structures for anti-cheap-drone defense but otherwise functionally useless. if you can make them good enough and efficient enough to strike down missiles, they are good enough on aircraft too.
It's why i would argue that high-efficiency lasers are necessary for military applications. Specifically, high-energy, high-efficiency lasers. the downsides are otherwise just way too great. And the issue is that we simply do not know if this is possible. Physics doesn't prevent it but engineering is more than just theoretical physics.
Related to the ongoing laser debate:
The ZEUS laser lab has just completed a 2 petawatt(!) test.
https://news.umich.edu/the-us-has-a-new-most-powerful-laser/
That’s about 100 times the electricity generation of the planet by comparison.
Regarding the laser goresplosion, it's not like conventional weaponry doesn't have plenty of similarly horrifying effects on flesh and blood.
As far as lasers on the battlefield, there's also plenty of mundane applications that they are already used for, such as communication and targeting. While it's hard to use a laser to blow up a drone or a soldier, it's a lot easier to use the laser to guide a rocket to the drone or soldier you want blown up.
I am fairly certain something like the Airborne Laser would burn through an Abrams with it's 1MW laser. Well it's been cancelled so it can't right now, but it could.
But it burns the equivalent of a pinhole. Devastating to ICBM’s on re-entry. Scratch Damage to a tank in the field.

Again, though, a bullet is very straightforward. You point the gun at someone, pull the trigger, and bang: the fast thing goes towards them.
If you have to hold a laser on a target for several seconds to get the desired effect, it's obnoxiously less efficient.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"