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Directed-energy weapons (DEW) figure prominently in the Star Wars franchise, with the most common type referred to as lasers or blasters.The in-universe description for how these weapons function is that a high-energy gas is charged by a power cell and converted into plasma, which is fired as a coherent energy bolt at the enemy via magnetic bottle effect.
Starfire Optical Range (SOR - Pronounced as an initialism) is a United States Air Force research laboratory on the Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico.Its primary duty, according to the official website, is to "develop and demonstrate optical wavefront control technologies."
Star Wars makes heavy use of blaster and ion weaponry, attributed to laser, plasma, or particle based bolts of light. Characters can be seen escaping, or even dodging those bolts, and the blaster bolts themselves can be seen flying at a moderate-fast speed.
SDI was not just lasers; in this Kinetic Energy Weapon test, a 0.25-ounce (7 g) Lexan projectile was fired from a light-gas gun at a velocity of 23,000 feet per second (7,000 m/s; 16,000 mph) at a cast aluminum block. Historians from the Missile Defense Agency attribute the term "Star Wars" to a Washington Post article published March 24, 1983.
The Zenith Star program was a key component of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as "Star Wars," which aimed to create a space-based ballistic missile defense system. Initiated in the mid-1980s, Zenith Star represented an ambitious attempt to develop and deploy a chemical laser weapon in space.
A 60 kW fiber laser developed by Lockheed Martin to be mounted on the HEMTT that maintains beam quality at high power outputs while using less electricity than solid-state lasers. 2014: Status unknown [46] [47] [48] Free-electron laser: FEL technology is being evaluated by the US Navy as a candidate for an antiaircraft and anti-missile directed ...
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A particle-beam weapon uses a high-energy beam of atomic or subatomic particles to damage the target by disrupting its atomic and/or molecular structure. A particle-beam weapon is a type of space-based directed-energy weapon, which directs focused energy toward a target using atomic scale particles.