Laser Defense: Boeing's MATRIX high-energy directed weapon knocks a UAV out of the sky. U.S. Air Force Research LaboratoryFrom Popular Science:
Boeing has just announced it successfully tracked and shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle with a laser weapon. Actually, it shot down five UAVs at various ranges with the trailer-mounted Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments (MATRIX).
Developed at the request of the Air Force Research Laboratory, MATRIX integrates with standard test-range radar, focusing a single energy beam on moving aerial vehicles and blasting them out of the sky. It's the future of aerial seek and destroy, defending against always-orbiting unmanned craft.
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My Comment: Interesting .... but we are probably years (if not decades) before we have a workable prototype that can be put into a battlefield situation.