How else would I interpret it? As an interest-building tagline which only propagates the meat of the story, which is as I said an authorial technique taught at least as early as fourth grade here. I guess I got it right, because not once during my reading of any article relating to this story did I think, "Oh, hey, this must be almost ready for production!"Captain Seafort wrote:Really? How else would you interpret that statement in the absence of running the numbers to realise that the required dwell time is far too long for an operational system? Even if you're being charitable, the tone of the article is that the next step is to go from prototype to operational model, rather than scaling up the proof of concept rig to something that can get the job done in a reasonable time (which I'd guesstimate as at 100+ kW). This is certainly an important step forward, but no more than that, and certainly not enough of one to say that anti-vehicle lasers are "here".
EDIT: OK, I see what the problem is here. Sorry, my choice of title for the thread was just a pithy joke relating to Peter Cushing's line about the status of the Deat Star in Star Wars: A New Hope, rather than a statement of fact about the status of Lockheed's design. I didn't mean to state that the Lockheed model was ready for operational deployment, I just thought that with the Sci-Fi bent of most of our members here, the joke would have been more obvious.
