Royal Navy lookinf for a laser gun
Only part of today's Sunday Times Article
THE innovative technology of the Red Bull Formula One car driven by the world champion, Sebastian Vettel, is to be used by the Royal Navy to power laser guns on warships.
The navy wants to adapt the kinetic energy recovery system (Kers) used in grand prix cars to develop an "energy magazine" for a shipborne laser weapon.
Admiral Sir George Zambellas, the first sea lord, visited the F1 team near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, to discuss the project with Adrian Newey, Red Bull's chief technical officer. Kers works in cars by harnessing waste energy created from braking, which would normally be lost in heat, and transforming it into electricity. This can be used to give an extra power boost when the car is accelerating.
An adapted version would allow warships to build and store energy to fire the laser gun. "Such is the power associated with these weapons that only a ship can host them, given their weight and size, not an aircraft and certainly not a vehicle ashore," Zambellas said in a lecture last week at the Royal Academy of Engineering.
"So we need to create reservoirs of energy, pools of power, and we need innovation to do this. [The] Defence Science and Technology Laboratory is funding the development of an energy magazine ... based on Formula One Kers technology."
The lasers are not intended to replace warships' large guns or missile systems but would be used against enemy drones, small boats or possibly missiles at a range of up to a mile. They can be used for a "hard" kill on smaller targets, by firing enough energy at the object to set it on fire or detonate fuel on board, or a "soft" kill, where the laser would "blind" a drone or missile's imaging sensors.
Unlike a lot of new military hardware the laser guns have one great advantage: they are cheap to use. The Americans estimate that a laser weapon system which they have installed on one vessel for tests will cost $1 (63p) a shot.
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Got them at the toy store. They went bzzzrt- bzzzrt. 
