Well, it’s not exactly a surprise, as they’ve been working on it for years, but Boeing just had a successful firing of their aircraft based military laser. So successful in fact, they managed to blow something up.

While not exactly portable (it’s mounted in a C-130) the laser certainly is powerful. The chemical laser consumes as much energy in a 5 second burst as is needed to power an american household for an hour. That’s a whole lot of pew-pew. The system has been in development since 2008, at a cost of approximately $30 million. Good to see that it’s finally been successful.

I wonder if you can use it to make popcorn.