Question: With the lasers that you are currently working on will there be a specific range that the laser will be effective most at or will it be a general ant aircraft that will be used only in a specific area of 500 metres for example?

Sarah Beasley answered on 15 Jun 2015:

That’s a really good question. We have lasers which go for several hundred kilometres and can still cause eye damage, which is really scary! Just because a laser reaches that far, however, doesn’t mean we can detect missiles from that far away. That is probably the limitation. It’s quite difficult to tell for sure that something is a missile amongst all the background noise, and we don’t want to make a fatal mistake.

Also, a laser will be more powerful if we’re firing at something close, but we don’t want missiles to get that close to our aircraft! So there’s a balance to be had.