sprangle

Mr. Mali modified his equipment, adding some L-brackets for more snagging capacity, which turned it into “something like a spear with an awkward sprangle of metal pieces at the end” — this is the Snatchelator.

Another major problem was the atmosphere, says Phillip Sprangle, senior scientist for directed-energy physics at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC.

But that may not matter much, says Sprangle.

When the beam propagated at very high powers, Sprangle explains, “the atmosphere absorbed laser light, heating the air and causing the laser beam to spread out”.

Building on Sprangle's work, the US Office of Naval Research has developed the 30-kW LaWS, which incoherently combines six commercial fibre-lasers.