I'm surprised that this phenomenon has only recently been confirmed. Electrolasers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ele

I'm surprised that this phenomenon has only recently been confirmed. Electrolasers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser) have been thought about for 30+ years. The idea if you create a laser-induced plasma channel for the weapon's energy path. The same idea seems like it'd work with lightning. In fact, it seems like some research for guiding lightning with LIPCs has been done since 10 years ago (https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.3690961 https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.3690961).