Weapons-Grade Electrically Powered Lasers Seem Near

The dividing line is 100 KW, and it looks like we will be seeing this in the next year or so.

Basically, they are focusing together multiple "strings of solid state lasers in order to boost the power of the beam.

This is far more useful, and much less expensive, than the chemical lasers that have been tested by the military previously, which typically involve the use of exotic, expensive, and highly toxic chemicals to achieve the necessary results.

Northrop-Grumman is claiming that they achieved 30 KW for 5 minutes continuously recently.

One other technology that might benefit from this is advanced capacitor technology, as to get the desired 100 KW, you are looking at putting in at least 500 KW (about 670 hp), and when one considers the power required for cooling and other issues, you could see the total power requirements during firing be in the 1000 KW range, which is a big generator, but storing the energy in capacitors would eliminate much of that problem.

I would expect the the first military application to be something like a laser to intercept things like mortar rounds and Katyusha rockets.