>They'd probably have better luck with a maser over a laser, it's less affected by atmospheric divergence, has deeper penetrating power and is usually cheaper to build. I have had some discussion about masers and their use as directed energy weapons here on Poal and formerly Voat. Masers are great for use as electrical disruption weapons, but they have some additional challenges as fire starting weapons than lasers do. Masers output a travelling wave microwave energy that is coherent and relatively collimated. Travelling waves can do some good damage on electrical devices by inducing high voltages that are going to generally be outside the operating limits of the equipment causing failure. But, to generate heat in sufficient energy levels, a maser would need a standing wave resonant cavity such that the constructive interference nodes would cause more local heating than a travelling wave ever could. The problem with standing waves is that the constructive interference nodes do increase in power, but at the cost of the energy decrease in the destructive interference nodes. Energy is conserved (mostly) in the system so you don't gain more output energy than you started with. Simple physics there. At ~2400 MHz, the node spacing only would be about 12 cm apart, which wouldn't be close enough to collectively amplify the localized heating. Higher frequencies with shorter wavelengths would not necessarily induce heating in the materials they pass through. This would put the effective operational frequency into a rather narrow band which has too many limitations to be used as effective incendiary devices, not to mention there is no way to setup a resonant cavity anyway. Microwave energy also tends to be affected by atmospheric water vapor, which is how weather radar works. That would cause stray microwave energy to be directed in all directions which would be very noticeable to any ham radio operator in the are or further if the energy levels are great enough. Somebody would notice that. Additionally, the notion of "microwaves heat from the inside out" is totally wrong. That's not how high frequency EM radiation works. The higher the frequency, the greater the Skin Effect which would make the wave travel on the outside parts of the material it encounters. That's the opposite of inside-out. Not very effective as a weapon with these various issues involved. Yeah masers could be weapons, but just not this kind of weapon.