A while back a 1987 press image was posted on ebay showing a McDonnell-Douglas full scale mockup of a Neutral Particle Beam weapon system. This would have been an experimental system, not an operational weapon; details on full-scale NPB weapons are *very* hard to come by, but the smallest NPB weapon system that I’ve seen anything remotely resembling hard data on would have required a non-trivial number of Shuttle-derived heavy lift launch vehicles to put into orbit a piece at a time. Some references – extremely vague ones – have even made mention of dimensions for the full-scale weapons being measured in kilometers.
The purpose of this system would likely have been to simply show that a neutral particle beam could be reliably generated and directed at an orbiting target some decent distance away. While it would likely be very unhealthy to be int he way of such a beam, it’s weapons potential would doubtless have been low… thus the need for vastly scaled-up operational versions.
