>>5135139 lb

Combination. Links I drew between old sauces going back nearly 15 years ago. The fun thing about particle beams is that, at high enough energy levels, they tunnel through matter and dump their energy in a volume defined by their wave function. This is used in "proton radiation therapy" to tunnel radiation into a very small spot within the body, so that only that area is affected.

"A 3d laser pointer", if you will.

Since you can use magnetic deflection to sweep this through the sky (or wherever), the effect is a light that will seem to appear (and the plasma will reflect radar) and can be moved as if it is a massless vehicle. I do not think the intent was to create UFO theories - but it certainly helped to distract from the program's true nature.

What we called "The Aurora" was likely a primary stage vehicle for delivering payloads to orbit. Use an air-breathing, high altitude engine and then use a much smaller hydrogen rocket to put payloads into orbit. Very effective for avoiding satellite surveillance of launch platforms. These are covered in Dale Brown's series of books as "NIRTSats." The Aurora has since been replaced by a magnetic catapult and specialized rocket or jet boosters. Large airframes capable of Mach6+ would be hell to maintain and keep safe compared to booster sections.

If I had control over the U.S. black budget - that is the course I would have pursued. The linear accelerator is the harder part to work out, but heavy ions are difficult to work with in synchrotrons, so a large linear accelerator would be very novel for acceleration of large masses of heavy particles, and it isn't clear if plasma wakefield acceleration was a novel discovery several years ago, or if this phenomenon was harnessed much earlier than the public record stumbled on it.

As for why such a thing exists - I would hazard a guess that one of its potential uses was as an ABM shield. A megawatt rated "laser" that can tunnel through re-entry plasmas and heatshielding to melt a warhead's nuclear fuel makes a lot of sense, especially when you figure the thing can turn into a disco in the sky and can intercept hundreds to thousands of incoming warheads.

You use a single primary accelerator with deflection at the end to split to multiple output locations where the beam can be used to form an extremely powerful ABM system.

Now… Here is the really fun part - was this kept classified even from most Presidents? If it was handled by NGOs… And secured through certain funding channels, do they have to tell the government?

If you knew what was planned and had access to nearly untraceable and nearly unlimited amounts of funding… hell - even with just a few billion; chump change in the world of government and megacorps, you can mobilize a lot of manpower and material. Know who to hire and how to make use of their talents, and you can build very advanced things at a discount compared to what it would cost to contract that development.