At 09:05 PM 4/25/96 -0700, Bill Frantz wrote:

...

Moreover, a laser shot costs $3,000, compared to several million dollars for a missile. Army officials envision the Nautilus would be beamed from a truck capable of firing 50 shots before requiring more laser material.

Does anyone have any idea what "more laser material" means?

It means that the laser burns itself up when fired. Either they are pumping gas into the laser and eventually run out or they are using something that is solid or semi-solid (yes, you can make a laser out of Jello!) that becomes non-functional after a certain number of uses. The plans I have for a somewhat high powered laser (10 watts) requires nitrogen pumped through the tube. Run out of nitrogen and you run out of laser... The problem with laser based weapons is they are weather dependant. Try using a laser in the rain and see how coherent a beam you get. What this has to do with crypto, I have no idea... (Maybe they are going to try and etch RSA in four lines of Perl into the side of the whitehouse.) --- Alan Olsen -- alano@teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction `finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon