Double Zero wrote;
The military had the idea in the 1980's to use powerful ' pilot incapacitating' lasers (PIL) - during the Falklands war a ship fitted with 'Flasher' was sent down, but the official story is it wasn't used in combat.
Spent a happy couple of weeks running out of Gibraltar in the early eighties, doing tests on a British PIL, seemed very hush hush at the time.
They werent really supposed to incapacitate/blind the pilot, they were mainly designed to dazzle and interfere with the HUD and force the pilot to look down at his instruments at a critical phase of his attack, (at low level that could be pretty hairy
)
I remember one ship a year or two later visited the City of London forgot to cover up the aforementioned laser projectors when the ship was opened to visitors. Someone got a major b*****king for that
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