The Secret History of Plasma Weapons - Popular Mechanics
2022年5月23日 · After decades of promise and failure, a new plasma weapon emerges. Nearly 30 years ago, inside a classified facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory, researchers test-fired a new type of laser....
Directed-energy weapon - Wikipedia
Plasma weapons fire a beam, bolt, or stream of plasma, which is an excited state of matter consisting of atomic electrons and nuclei, and free electrons if ionized, or other particles if pinched.
Plasma-powered cannon - Wikipedia
A plasma cannon (also called an electrothermal accelerator) is an experimental projectile weapon, which accelerates a projectile by means of a plasma discharge between electrodes at the rear of the barrel, generating a rapid increase in pressure.
Particle-beam weapon - Wikipedia
A particle-beam weapon is a type of space-based directed-energy weapon, which directs focused energy toward a target using atomic scale particles. Some particle-beam weapons have potential practical applications, e.g. as an antiballistic missile defense or detection system.
Project MARAUDER: A history of the Air Force plasma cannon
2023年10月5日 · The Air Force Weapons Laboratory sought to “convert stored electrostatic energy into plasma kinetic energy.” As cool as MARAUDER sounds, magnetically accelerated rings to achieve ultra-high directed energy and radiation, it didn’t actually fire any plasma at first.
The US Navy and the Future of Directed-Energy Weapons
2021年9月4日 · Functional plasma weapons, as opposed to lasers, would likely fire bolts, beams, or streams of a highly energetic “soup” of high-energy electrons and ions over distance.
Plasma breakthrough could enable better hypersonic weapons, …
2023年8月16日 · If the method bears out in further research, it could usher in hypersonic weapons with much more advanced electronic guidance and could even enable on-the-ground weapons to evade heat sensors.
Pentagon scientists are making talking plasma laser balls for use …
The laser-induced plasma weapon uses very high-energy lasers at a very short pulse rate to strip the electrons off a gas, creating plasma.
American Scientists Are About to Start Shooting Plasma Guns in …
2019年10月21日 · Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are about to start experiments with "plasma guns" in the hope of achieving controlled nuclear fusion—a source of clean and near...
High-energy laser weapons: A defense expert explains how they …
2024年3月7日 · Unlike traditional weapons such as guns and cannons that have a finite amount of ammunition, a high-energy laser can keep firing as long as it has electrical power.