General Atomics' Tactical 20000mw Laser Pointer Weapon Module is one of those pieces of futuristic technology that can show up out of nowhere at a military expo (in this case, the Navy's Sea-Air-Space Exposition) and just sit there, attracting plenty of attention while also being almost entirely classified.The key to this achievement is the use of hybrid molecular alignment instead of the commonly used homeotropic or planar LC alignment.However, such nonlinearities are typically only observed at very high light intensities and thus they require costly lasers. Here, we report on a self-focusing effect induced with a 1mW handheld laser pointer. Here, we report that the light intensity needed to induce the self-focusing effect can be reduced to levels accessible with a common 1mW handheld laser pointer in polymer-stabilized TR5-doped LC (PSLC). Then you should see the new weapon the US Navy hopes to use to knock them out of the sky. I'm talking about frickin' lasers here, folks.The U.S. Navy debuted a new laser weapon system designed to protect ships without using ammunition. Since the Golden Age of Science Fiction, stories of future soldiers with high power laser pointer guns have been among the most enduring tropes in all of genre fiction.And now it looks like fiction is about to become fact. In a question-and-answer session with lawmakers, U.S. Army representative Mary J. Miller said that American armed forces will be equipped with high-energy laser weapons by the year 2023.The Global Timesreport shows four different types of laser guns, including the BBQ-905 Laser Dazzler Weapon, the WJG-2002 Laser Gun, the PY132A Blinding Laser Weapon, and the PY131A Blinding Laser Weapon. Scared of drones? This is referred to as hybrid alignment.After years of testing, the Navy says it's making final adjustments on a new prototype of a Laser Weapons System-- dubbed LaWS -- that will be deployed into the real world in late summer.Fisher said the photos of the laser weapons appear to have been taken at a large civil-military integration exhibit held in early December. On the same day the PLA Daily report on blinding laser rifles was published, the Communist Party-affiliated newspaper Global Times produced a more detailed report that included drawings showing how the lasers are fired at enemy troops.We prepared polymer-stabilized dye-doped liquid crystals, in which the molecular director orientation gradually changes from homeotropic at one surface to homogeneous at the other. In such films, the threshold intensity needed to form diffraction rings was reduced by a factor of 8.5 compared to that in conventional homeotropic cells, which enabled the induction of the self-focusing effect with a laser pointer.