No, really. PopSci has more info on the Air Force’s new flying intelligence hub – an airship that uses lasers as fiber-optic cables:
…DARPA will outfit the Blue Devil Block 2 ISR airship with up to two Free-space Optical Experimental Network Experiment (FOENEX) systems. Think of them like optical lasers that move through the air with the fidelity of a fiber optic cable.
…
Blue Devil Block 2 is what’s known as a C4ISR aircraft. That’s Command, Control, Computers, Communication, Intelligence Surveillance, and Reconnaissance. Unlike the Predators and Reapers that are already in the air streaming buckets of raw, uncatalogued data back to intelligence analysts on the ground, Blue Devil is more like an aerial intel hub. It doesn’t just stream back raw data for human analysts to deal with like Predator and Reaper, but rather it crunches and catalogs the data via a supercomputer in real time on board the aircraft….
It’s a big eye in the sky, basically. Or brain in the sky. The eyes send what they see to it to be translated, processed and packaged for analysis. With lasers.