 :::::: You misunderstood me. Ten megawatts is close to the maximum; it’s what they’ve long planned for that 747. I subscribe to Aviation Week & Space Technology and, if I recall correctly, they’ve recently flow around and dumped 1 MW into an on-board calorimeter. Once they get the thing throwing beams away from the plane and get everything shaken out, it’s supposed to be downing ICBMs with 10 MW. A beam flux of 1 megawatt per square centimeter and a four-centimeter-diameter beam equates to 12.6 MW, which is certainly close to this real-world (but exceedingly powerful) laser; particularly since the example doesn’t even mention the 747. The whole point of that sentence is to give readers a much better appreciation of these big-ass numbers like “”; I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if my 4-watt, Inova T4 could have produced that quantity of photons after running its lithium cell down. Base-ten math sneaks up on you quickly.   