"The drone caught fire in seconds". Ukraine developed Sunray laser weapon, says The Atlantic

Ukrainian developers have created the Sunray laser weapon for air defense, said journalist Simon Schuster in an article for The Atlantic.

"If you’ve never seen a laser shoot an aircraft out of the sky, the experience can be unsettling. The weapon fits comfortably into the trunk of a car. It makes no noise and emits no light, not even the glowing red beam that’s so familiar from the movies. When a team of Ukrainian soldiers and engineers took me to see their prototype the other day, it seemed easy to use. Almost too easy ," the text says.

The journalist describes that during the demonstration, the operator mounted a laser cannon on the roof of his pickup truck in the middle of an empty field, and the weapon itself looks like an amateur telescope with two cameras attached to the sides.

"For target practice, one of the engineers launched a small drone, and it flew a few hundred yards (1 yard is ~0.9 meters – Ed.) away from us, hovering in the gauzy winter sky. The laser swiveled as its cameras followed the target. The operator shouted, "Fire!" Within seconds, the drone began to burn as if struck by invisible lightning, then fell to the ground in a fiery arc," Shuster said.

The Ukrainian Sunray model is not the first laser weapon in the world. The U.S. Navy has the Helios system, which was developed by Lockheed Martin under a $150 million contract signed in 2018. In 2022, the first Helios laser was installed on an American destroyer to protect against enemy drones.

The creators of the Sunray, which was not previously reported, said that they created their laser in about two years for several million dollars and expect to sell it for several hundred thousand.

Pavlo "Lazar" Elizarov, deputy commander of the Air Force of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who is in charge of the small air defense system, believes that this price difference is a consequence of the Russian war.

"Many American companies are driven by money. For them, it’s a job. They do it. They get paid. We have another component at play: the need to survive. That’s why we are moving faster," the military explained.

Shuster writes that exotic weapons such as Sunray are part of the Ukrainian analog of Israel's Iron Dome against Russian drones.

• In April 2025, the then commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces showed the first video of another Ukrainian laser weapon "Tryzub".
• Different countries invest in laser weapons, which cost up to $5 per shot (several times cheaper than missiles). There is a large text at LIGA.net about how new technology will change the battlefield.