Beam Weapons

While the tractor beam is generally associated with Star Trek, beam weapons are a common feature of almost all sci-fi movies and shows. From hand-held phaser weapons to giant planet destroying death stars, a beam weapon has boldly ventured into everyone’s imagination. In 1890, Nikola Tesla showcased a machine that was pretty much a man-made lightning creator; transmitting energy without wires, as a highvoltage discharge. This kind of a discharge is chaotic though, since it can travel to pretty much any surface that has a lower voltage charge. In 2007 though, a US company called Ionatron announced that it had won an almost $10 million contract from the United States Army to create a modern version of that Tesla concept. According to Ionatron, its machine is a far more effective weapon that can disable both people and vehicles—available in both lethal and non-lethal versions, much like setting a phaser to stun or kill. Ionatron’s improvement on the Tesla concept was centered on the addition of a special laser. This laser acts as a guide to the electrical discharge—serving to both speed up the discharge and to precisely control where the man-made lighting goes. In some ways, the design echoes a similar creation by the US Air Force. The Air Force gun however, uses a laser to temporarily blind the enemy. The gun, developed by the force’s Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate and about the size and weight of an M60 machine gun, is called the Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response, (PHaSR). The PHaSR shoots a low-power beam of laser light to temporarily blind an individual.