Real Genius/WMG: Difference between revisions
→It was a straightforward Happy Ending.
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Hathaway is just about the only person who doesn't get a happy ending. He doesn't have a house, and the government audits him for the money that was spent on the laser project (which, if you recall, he instead embezzled to fix up his house). He probably will also be brought before a board at Pacific Tech, and will lose his tenure and his job.
* Caveat: the accident investigation team taking the laser apart to try and find out why it fired off-course and then melted will find the traces of grease on the lens, which will tell them why it melted. They likely ''won't'' find the cause of the firing off-course, but since there is no hardware fault for them ''to'' find (as it was a deliberate software error introduced by the chip switching), the most probable conclusion for them to reach is the true one; that the targeting failure was the fault of the software. Whether or not they suspect deliberate sabotage or merely the black swan event of a thumb-fingered mechanic who didn't clean the lens after installing it happening on the same day as a major software bug, either way they will rationally conclude that there that the cause of the incident was due to mechanical fault, not inherently flawed design. And given that the dynamite laser clearly ''does'' work in one significant aspect (the laser beam actually is as powerful as advertised), the rational conclusion for DARPA to reach is that its worth at least some more money to put into future testing to try and work out the bugs.
** Especially since the project has already succeeded in achieving the desired theoretical breakthrough; getting 5+ megawatt bursts of power out of a laser in readily weaponizable form. At this point the only thing left is to perfect the targeting system, and that's the easy part. Aiming a speed-of-light line-of-sight weapon is a mathematical and engineering problem an order of magnitude simpler than trying to, oh, hit an incoming anti-ship missile with a 20mm cannon shell in mid-air with virtually zero time to aim -- and that's a job the Phalanx mount on any US Navy warship has been able to do for the past 30 years.
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[[Category:Wild Mass Guessing/Film]]
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