Lasers

Lockheed Martin has a new laser developed for the military. It works by combining the beams of several lower powered lasers into one very powerful beam, much like the planet-destroying weapon on the Death Star. Other uses have been suggested in the comments:

This also has commercial applications in Earth Based Beam Energy where instead of the huge uncontrolled solar arrays in space that will cost trillions of dollars just to launch, we simply beam the energy from anywhere in the world off a reflector in space to the customer.

Process this work order for a couple of megajoules to be delivered to Mohammed AlJihadi in north-west Pakistan. Push the big red button, and voila! another satisfied, or at least no longer complaining, customer.

Imagine the reactions of the multitudes at the big speech by Achmadimijad as, halfway through the speech, and with no evidence of any outside influence, Achmed suddenly turns in to 150 lbs of well-done steak.

I want one! So the better sort of laser pointers delvers 350mW (.35W) for about $120, which suggests I need about 3 million of them plus a lot of duct tape to bundle them together to get to 1 megawatt. At $360M/MW that's probably no more expensive than the one Martin's making.

Sounds like a worthy project. Bwahahahaha! Fools! I'll destroy them all! Franchises available.

On an equally serious note, Blogger informs me that this is post #1000. Gee, time flies when you're having fun.