Defense contractor Northrop Grumman is promising the Pentagon that it'll have weapons-grade electric lasers by the end of 2008. Which means honest-to-goodness energy weapons might actually become a military reality, after decades of fruitless searching.

Northrop's system combines a bunch of smaller lasers into a bigger one -- Death Star-style, sorta. In March, the company announced that it had completed the first of these eight "laser chains." Yesterday, the company said it had joined two of the chains together. What's more, the beam combo ran at peak power -- 30 kW -- "for more than five minutes continuously and more than 40 minutes total; and achieved electrical-to-optical efficiency of greater than 19 percent."

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Probably not the kind of weapon some imagined that destroyed Atlantis or is wrote about in Science Fiction. Now where are my crystals. :-)