Boeing launches flying Laser plane Of Doom

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Lasers produce so much waste heat because until recently (as in, last couple of years) no one was seriously looking at them for anything other then science experiments and pie in the sky projects. No one gave a damn if it was only 1% efficient - there is no physical limit making them blast furnaces AFAIK, but there was no motivation to make them better either.. Now that they are coming closer and closer to being practical weapons though, expect a large focus on increasing energy efficiency and cooling efficiency.

Right now, they are working on arrays of lasers and combining them together and trying to get the combining efficiency to 100%, i.e. all the power output is combined into one beam with no loss. As for improving cooling efficiency, I'll leave that to the mechanical engineers to figure some cooling system, but at the moment, most of the designs are quite optimised for cooling efficiency. The issue is finding a lasing medium that has fairly good heat tolerance, while having few nonlinear effects that affect the quality of the beam.