http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/lasers-versus-pirates
Now we know what the Navy plans to do with its experimental hybrid of laser cannon and machine gun: zap pirate ships.
Two defense giants, Boeing and BAE Systems, announced late last month that they would team up on a $2.8 million Navy contract for a prototype version of BAE’s Mk-38 25-mm machine gun with a little upgrade: a death ray. As the companies excitedly explained, the new gun would protect surface ships from pretty much everything, from enemy boats to small drones.
What the companies weren’t letting on was that they had already tested the machine-laser-gun a month before the announcement. And in tests that BAE — hardly an uninterested party — claims were successful, the new Mk-38 took on its most likely adversary: pirate skiffs.
In late June, the waters of the Choctawatchee Bay near Florida’s Elgin Air Force Base stood in for the Gulf of Aden, as ersatz pirate ships “swarmed” amidst dense “civilian” maritime traffic to harass a mock Navy “platform” armed with the laser gun. The enhanced version of the Mk-38 used its lasers to fix the enemy targets for bursts of machine gun fire, before switching up to laser mode to “defeat the targets” with a “high beam-quality 10-kilowatt laser,” BAE spokeswoman Stephanie Bissell Serkhoshian told Danger Room.
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