Japan Fires Most Powerful Laser In The World

Scientists in Japan have test fired a new laser capable of a 2 petawatt blast. This is equivalent to 2 million gigawatts (2,000,000,000,000,000). As Wing Commander fans are well aware, the TCS Behemoth was capable of directing 500 million gigawatts to one lancing point. Though it sounds like we're already surprisingly close to 2669's premier levels of destruction, our current technology could only maintain the burst for a trillionth of a second, so there is still quite a bit of room to mature the gun before we're vaporizing planets. The version in Japan also lacks keel mounts and laser turrets, and we all know how that goes...

Scientists in Japan have set the record for the most powerful laser ever fired, producing a 2 petawatt pulse - that’s 2 quadrillion watts - using a device known as the Laser for Fast Ignition Experiment (LFEX). While they could only sustain it for a mere one-trillionth of a second, the team claims it had a concentrated energy equivalent of 1,000 times the world's electricity consumption.

Located at Osaka University, the LFEX laser projector is about 100 metres long, and combines four carefully positioned glass 'lamps' to amplify a laser beam over and over as it travels along the length of the device. This set-up allowed the team to produce an incredibly concentrated amount of power while consuming only a couple hundred joules of energy, which is about as much power your microwave uses in 2 seconds.