DragonFire

Britain's drone-frying laser — DragonFire is a laser directed-energy weapon (LDEW) that burns aerial targets out of the sky at the speed of light for roughly £10 a shot, accurate enough, the government says, to hit a £1 coin from a kilometre away. After a landmark 2024 high-power trial against aerial targets, it won a £316 million contract to arm Royal Navy destroyers from 2027 — Britain's answer to the central problem of modern air defence: how to shoot down cheap drones and missiles without spending a fortune in interceptors each time.

Overview

DragonFire is a high-power laser weapon developed for the Royal Navy by the UK DragonFire consortium — MBDA UK (lead), Leonardo UK and QinetiQ — with the Ministry of Defence's defence-science arm (Dstl). It is a counter-air and counter-drone system: a precisely-aimed laser beam that delivers enough energy onto a target to destroy or disable it, with the headline advantage of cost. Where a surface-to-air missile costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, a DragonFire shot costs on the order of £10, and the "magazine" is limited only by the ship's power, per UK government. That economics is the point in an era of mass drone and missile attacks, and it places DragonFire alongside Israel's Iron Beam as one of the leading near-fielded laser air-defence weapons in the West.

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