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Laser-equipped 747
omnirealm writes ""Engineers are making plans to change the gentle giant (Boeing 747) into a hot-blooded killer with a swiveling nose-cone laser beam theoretically capable of destroying enemy missiles hundreds of miles away." Of particular interest is the fact that "No human finger will actually pull a trigger. Onboard computers will decide when to fire the beam." I find this to be a bit disconcerting. " Somehow I feel as if we had posted this a while ago - no search found it. i do remember that this has been talked about for quite some time, tho'.
Nope War Heads are only ignitioned if they reach their destination.
Military is very concerned not to hit the wrong target, especialy as a long range missile goes for a long way via neutral zones.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Mirrors are not effective. A megawatt+ laser would blast right through them. Read here, why this is so
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There already exist, out in the field, systems that determine whether an object is a missile based on the plume. The system 'looks' at each object, detects whether or not a plume exists, and then categorizes which tier the missile is in based on that plume.
The creation of the database is not the expensive part though, the amount of regression testing they use is.
-- toolie
"If you look out the left side of the aircraft you can see the beautiful Grand Canyon. To the right of the aircraft is an ICBM that we are about to destroy."
But now, Dubyia thinks that some major contributors of his campaign must make some bucks building an eighties-idea with new-millenium technology and Daddy's advice.
However, this thing has been in development during Clinton's administration (he's still president, at least for a few more days) so "Dubyia" has nothing to do with it yet.
That still doesn't change the fact the George W. is an idiot, but I can't say whether we'd be better off if Gore had won... it was pretty much a no win situation :(
So that is what the klaxons and flashing lights were on the stealth bomber.
I think one of the points of the article was that the equipment has only just been miniaturized to the point at which it can fit inside a 747 at all; it still takes up the entire plane. So there won't be any way of "sneaking" it around covertly on a flight disguised as something else.
And as others have pointed out, any plane dedicated to this purpose would be easy to recognize.
Did you ever hear about the flight sim environment demoed in australia where the programmers put new images on ground troop objects to represent kangaroos? The aircraft flew over the kangaroos, they scattered, regrouped, and launched surface-to-air missiles and took down the aircraft!
--
Reminds me of playing Sierra's old "Red Baron" on a 386 and taking out the zeppelins. Everything old is new again?
--Robert
Excuse me? How many passanger 747s, or ANY passanger planes do you see flying in and out of US war zones?
None.
Later,
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Putting civilian aircraft to military use is very dangerous to civilians. Use a c-141 or another heavy lifter.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
are you sick of stupid drivers? well gun down their wheels so they roll into a ditch. now thats what I call road rage..
I don't think the system is intended to shot at ICBMs.
Its intended as protection craft which flys in a small wing of fighters and protects the fighters against ground to air and air to air missiles.
At least this was teh concept 15 years ago when I heared first about it.
Regards,
angelo'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
One of the responses indicated that they thought there really wouldn't be a human operator. I can tell you with the confidence of someone who has been briefed on this project that their will indeed be someone who pushes a button to fire the lazer at a target or a series of targets. The plane itself will not detect launches, that will be done by some (very good) sats. The information will be relayed to missile command and the plane, whose pilots will recieve immediate guidence on where to put the plane in optimal firing position (though the laser has a remarkable field of fire) An operator will then essentially "start" the laser, which will lock and destroy the target(s) it's been given.
Interestingly, the AF believes that if necessary the ABL could defend itself against incoming hostile aircraft (and even some of the larger SAMS) if necessary. I'll believe it (and be impressed) when I see it.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal...
Morover, the POINT my dear flaming troll, is that you want to destroy the damn things over the country that launched them, not the friendly neighbors, and not over your own soil. Why you have to engage in tangent discussion for any reason other than you own pathetic need to be heard is a mystery.
Can we all get along now?
probably 1901 when they called Airplanes a good idea. (of course that could be removed because the next line was "but highly impractical, and never would be mass produced..." Just trying to keep a smile on your faces.
I know this is very fuzzy math, but when the Concorde has crashed one time in 4000 flights while a normal jet crashes one time in 12000 flights, the safety isn't really all it sounds like.
Don't tell me my math and/or data are wrong, because they probably are; but the result is correct.
By the way, insulting the 747 by calling it an Airbus is pretty funny since it was designed 30 years ago and is still the most recognizable and maybe the most widely used widebody jet on the market. Airbus makes a good plane (check out the Super Guppy when you get a chance, I love it), but until their planes last as long and as well as the 747 you can't really disparage it.
IANAL, but I play one on
How long do you think it'll be before regular jets start mounting these systems? Now that the military is using them on jets of the same size, it's only a matter of time....
Hi, The article states that this weapon only has to "weaken the missile's exterior" and the velocity/pressure will take care of finishing off the missile. This sounds like the missile will break up once the outer shell has been weakened. This may not be a big problem with explosive warheads but what about chemical or nuclear? I don't really see how spraying anthrax or plutonium across the countryside is really an acceptable solution.
2) These 747s are being used to develop the technology, if I understand correctly, not necessarily to roll it out on a mass-scale. They might decide to use C-130s, once they know it works.
3)Even IF they still used 747s in production, AND they also had to take off from civilian airports (instead of the higher security military bases), this rougue state would STILL have to know a) what airport the plane was taking off from b)what time the airplane was taking off c)what runway the airplane was taking off from, and be successful in having the person right there right at the right time WITH the stinger missle in order to take the 747 out.
4)This would require some really good coordination for the rogue state to have this guy in the US at the exact runway and coordinate the timing with the launch of their scud missle from "back home".
Good point and I was thinking of that when I posted my comment.
Which won't stop someone from trying innovative ways to try to defeat the system. Passive means, launch in bad weather, attack the aircraft (see Tom Clancy's <i>Red Storm Rising</i>, <i>Hunt for Red October</i> and <i>Debt of Honor</i> for ways of dealing with AWACS-style aircraft), ground infrastructure,....
USAF really wants to do this - they've been squeezed out of theatre missile defense and this is their ticket back in for the R&D and procurement dollars. And not every potential theater can be defended from ground (Patriot and successors) or sea-based (Ageis) systems.
Here's a report from 1999 on the status of the project.
wouldn't mind if it misfired and took out the Microsoft campus... If its using M$ software, shouldn't be that hard to hack!
Brielle
This laser system is not intended for ballistic missles. An ICBM from China would only take roughly 40 minutes to reach the US. That isn't enough time to get a 747 airborne and in place to destroy. The 747 with the laser is intended for defense against the slower cruise missles, which would take several hours.
BigCat79
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
I hope this isn't true. We are arming our commercial jets with firepower more powerful than what our fighter jets use? That doesn't make any sense. Then again, when was the last time the government made any sense?
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
"No human finger will actually pull a trigger. Onboard computers will decide when to fire the beam."
the AI in the matrix killed everyone and began ingesting humans? =P echo "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" wonder if it's AI has better grammer...
No, you forget - Evil will always win, because good is dumb!
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Aircraft and ships are constantly being tossed around by the fluid through which they travel.
Fixed-trajectory munitions will miss unless the roll, pitch and yaw are compensated for. Hitting a 10 ft target at 100 miles isn't easy.
What will probably happen is a target is locked into the fire control computer, the operator presses the fire button, and the computer waits a few milliseconds until the weapon is on target (after compensating for aiming offset, refractive index gradients, target movement, etc).
I'm sure the big 16" guns on US Battleships have very sophisticated firing [delay] systems. Just so they can hit the broadside of a barn at 15 miles. Otherwise, they could miss the broadside of a mountain!
Now all we need is an orbiting mirror and our Saddam Hussein problems will be history...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The Army has flown big lasers on a 767 since the 80s. The 747 is just a larger platform with more capacity. I haven't read the article yet, but some posts about 1 or 5 megawatt lasers were just laughable. We used to blast paint off plywood at close range to test a 1 megawatt lab laser. Not very dangerous! If you find some material on estimated output of modern lasers in the 10,000 pound class, I think you will find much higher numbers. As for confusion between civilian/military aircraft, airframes have been shared since the 1920s, no big deal. Some people still think the 707 was developed and financed by the military (the KC-135 is very similar). Given this oh-so scary news story, I think we will soon see the movie Air Force One II with Harrison Ford swooping in low over Iraq to blast that bad boy off the face of the planet for good, using his trusty 747 laser gun. The article probably came from Hollywood just to promo this pic!
all jets fly with a system that sends out information on what type of plane it is, and other identifying info. the radars are tuned to those signals and effectivly see the sytstem that's sending the signal and not the airplane itself.
"Leave the gun, take the canoli."
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
Start labeling these bombers as American Airlines planes, and every real American Airlines plane will be a legitimate target for all the terrorists and rogue nations in the world. I don't think that even the U.S. military is that stupid.
OK GOD... Lemme have it!!!!
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
747's that can shoot down incoming missles. That's what this world needs.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Are there countermeasures to an antimissle laser? Sure. But that's not the point. All current missles that do not already have countermeasures will either have to be discarded or will have to be upgraded to anti antimissle laser technology. Either way, it costs money and that, in the end, *is* the point. Are there countermeasures to stealth aircraft? Sure, but they cost money. About the time the Soviets finished up their country-wide integrated defense system, the Americans came up with aircraft that could fly through newly-exposed holes in that system, essentially negating that huge, multibillion dollar investment. The measures needed to counter stealth was going to cost billions more. About that time, they gave up, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the cold war ended. Military planning is a constant measure/countermeasure game. It won't end. There are tanks and anti-tank weapons. There are aircraft and anti-aircraft weapons. Submarines and anti-submarine weapons. Missles, and now, antimissle systems. Whoever spends the most wins.
This weapon system is essentially a Theater Defense against high-speed strategic ballistic missile attack. It doesn't have enough range to do anything but cover a city, a landing beach or a tightly-packed missile range, so it's not going to be an effective ABM system for national defense purposes. Rather, it will be used to protect expeditionary forces such as Gulf War ops, and to protect embattled allied nations such as Taiwan or Israel. It could also protect AWACS from very-long-range SAMs, so the two planes may be needed to mutually support each other.
This system will buy us 10-15 years of temporary theater ballistic superiority until such time as more powerful ground-based lasers or cheap long-range SAMs are deployed.
In looking long-term at the entire ABM issue, I have come to conclusions which displease both pro- and anti-ABM people.
ABM systems cannot protect cities from van/suitcase/cargo container nukes for the reasons so often cited in earlier posts. The idea that the citizenry would be directly protected by such systems is a mockery of the truth.
On the other hand, ABM systems have a reasonable chance of protecting a few specific patches of land, such as say an ICBM base or a C3I facility. Since such high-value land can be protected by security forces on the ground from the suitcase bomber, China, Russia or whomever would have no choice but to attack that land with a missile. If an ABM system works properly, the missile will fail and we will be able to direct our retaliation effectively.
A key element of missile targeting that is not often noted by the press or hysteria-mongers is recon, especially post-strike. You have to know where to attack in order to fire a missile, and to know whether you need to 'revisit' a target. LA may be hard to miss but it's a bit more difficult to attack moving ground forces or missiles. Space warfare in the form of ASAT weapons is a very key element in effective ABM warfare.
Incidentally the ABL-747s greatest strategic effect may be in ASAT warfare.
Bottom Line- ABM can ensure MAD and thus deterrence, but can never protect us. ABM should be pursued to keep our deterrence up and allow our conventional and special operations to function, but we should not destroy our nation's treasury or diplomatic position to pursue a chimerical level of protection that we will never acheive.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
>Why do all the arab nations hate us?
:-), but it seems that most arab nations would be happy for the US to just butt out of their affairs, and that would be the end of the whole nasty business. 'Course, as long as US citizens demand the right to drive gas guzzlin' SUVs, butting out ain't likely. And as long as the US keeps giving Israel all the weaponry and support it wants to paint the desert with arab blood, same thing. But if the USA were to genuinely treat other nations as sovereign entities, the problems would evaporate within a generation (or possibly two).
Not enough space here to list all the grievances they have against the US. The US has screwed them over so many ways it ain't funny. But they (seem to me) to give every indication of not hating - sure, there are hardliners & religious fanatics (probably no more than there are in the USA
If your wife was killed by US missiles, working at phamaceuticals factory that had nothing to hide, and all indications suggested that the reason it was bombed was because the US president needed a target NOW to distract his citizens from his own mistakes back home, you have one HELL of a grievance, and it is entirely justified. Now take a hundred people who have similarly had their lives unjustly destroyed by USA for no reason, and it would astonishing if a small percentage of them didn't harbour thoughts of revenge. Cease fucking up peoples lives, and it doesn't occur to them that they should make great sacrifices in order to fuck up yours. Even the religous hardliners would remain obsessed with more mundane and visible blasphemies closer to home if the USA wasn't so visible as the motherlode of injustice and evil in the world (which is how it is likely to appear if you live in a nation or area that is constantly at the receiving end).
Other countries have found other methods of getting most of what they need, and trying to not pursue "Strategic Interests" likely to cause long-term problems. In comparison, the US approach of "We're the greatest so screw you - we'll do as we please" does not seem so smart, even if it does bring better oil and coffee (and who knows what else) prices in the short term. I can't see anything changing though - it doesn't matter that it's unnecessary, it's part of the US culture and mindset now.
Pretty much right on with everything I've mentioned so far. It is refreshing to see someone else on
A falling warhead will not detonate? They are DESIGNED to detonate while falling. An airburst increases the effective radius of a nuclear blast, and a number (if not most) designs use altimeters to trigger detonation.
Yes. They are also designed not to arm themselves until they are near their targets... They do not detonate on impact, they detonate via a computer-controlled triggering mechanism.
Josh Sisk
Not only did I read the article, but I read the post I replied to also.
I said "I find it hard to believe that it CAN'T".
I don't care what the article says, this laser shooting down a missile at 400 miles will only weaken the metal. A 1 megawatt laser shooting down a missle at 10 miles will do physical damage.
No need to get snotty about it.
Later,
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
What you assume here is that the shells travel in a purely ballistic trajectory, as distorted by variations in air pressure, temperature, etc.
However, this is not true. Modern naval munitions are self-guiding; ballistic shells self-compensate to hit the target. There are reasons for this except the one round, one kill mantra; the foremost is that several current launcher detection systems use reverse calculation of the shell trajectory to locate the firing vessel; this locationing is effectively negated by self-guiding munitions. In addition, natural defenses such as cliff walls can be negotiated by these kinds of munitions, in cases where a nonguided ballistic shell would either hit the protecting mountain cliff or overshoot the target.
1. Some evidence of political stabilization means nothing. Countries like North Korea, the People's Republic of China, and Iran as well as all other Muslim fundamentalist nations will always be a threa to the US, and it is only a matter of time until they all develop the technology to hit us with an ICBM. N. Korea and China are already getting very close. An SDI system (the Boeing is a TMD system, not SDI, btw) would basically invalidate all of their nuclear technology while ours would remain viable, putting them at a large strategic disadvantage and ensuring we never have a MAD (mutually assured destruction) scenario again.
2. Taking the US on in any military theater is suicide, but that didn't stop Saddam Hussein or Milosevic, and there's no reason to believe it will necessarily stop others, particularly when in some cases you're dealing with fundamentalist countries where logic like that is irrelevant. Also, an attack of one nuke probably wouldn't be answered with an overwhelming nuclear holocaust, rather we'd probably make a brutal assault with conventional forces.
3) How will nose mounted laser deal with a missile heading for it's lower back end?
The laser system isn't designed to shoot down air-to-air or surface-to-air missiles, it's designed to provide a TMD, a theater missile defense for our surface forces. It would most likely be used to target cruise missiles like the SCUD and similar weapons. As for suitcase bombs, they aren't nearly as large of a threat to the nation as ICBMs. If we had developed nuclear weapons without ever developing a real delivery system (strategic bombers, ICBMs) they would never have become as large of an issue. While it's still technically possible that a warhead could be smuggled in and then detonated, it isn't a very reliable delivery method, and also one nuke is nothing compared to a shower of dozens of ICBMs all delivering MIRV warheads with close to a dozen independent nukes each.
4) The only way a missile shield would be a dangerous thing is if another country had one that might use it to launch a nuclear attack while staying mostly safe from any counterattack. In the hands of the US, while it might cause other nations to worry, it would not be a security issue. Keep in mind that there was a period of time when only the US had the nuke and no one else did and could have essentially taken over the world. How many other countries could have resisted temptation like that? Not many.
5) $60 billion is not much to pay for security from nuclear attack. Also when you consider how under funded the military is at the moment and how much we pour into our worthless and redundant public school system in comparison, I think the choice is obvious. Hopefully with Bush in office with Cheney as VP and Powell as SecState, we'll see an SDI program implemented shortly.
Light's kinda weird. It has a small but greater-than-zero momentum (not really mass, but momentum). Momentum must be conserved, so momentum from the laser is imparted to the target, and it's this momentum that causes the damage. If the light is reflected then the momentum imparted to the target is even larger, because it needs to not only stop the light but also impart the same amount of momentum in the other direction. The amount that the momentum imparted causes the target to move or deform can be used to determine the force imparted. Since the area that the force is acting over is known, you can find the pressure. Thus, light has pressure. For more info I recommend Eri'c Treasure Trove of Physics. Try starting here.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
There was something about this in PopSci a couple years ago: http://www.popsci.com/features/bown/bown98/science _tech.html
-thz
Unfortunately this would have randomly killed cleanup crews at the crash site.
--Clay
Not really. The 777 can easily gooefy a flock of frozen chickens traviling at 250mph. It will also keep on going while pulverizing 2" sheets of ice, small rocks, a flash flood being pumped directly into the engine, and even seperation of one of the titanium blades. (That last one is simpley amazing to watch in slow motion. The rest are just interesting.) The 747 has similir engine design. It's rather unlikely that a flock of birds will be able to take down a 747.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Yeah. But they could equip the plane with freakin' railgun and they would have an army of freakin' quake deathmatchers volunteerily guard the plane. :)
It is a good day to die.
Lo Wang, Shadow Warrior.
All you have to do to put the 747 out of commission is attack it, really - all you have to do is slow the thing down so it can't reach the target and destroy the missile. Engaging the 747 could be enough to prevent it from completing the mission - let alone finishing it. AWACS can turn tail and run if the need arises. If this thing has to retreat, then the city that the original ICBM targetted is toast.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I was looking at the description of this a few years back also. (Can't find the article now either, stange.) The impressive hurdle they had to overcome was getting the laser to actually hit the target.
They had a problem with the atmosphere curving the beam. They were using something new, a mirror that could be adjusted on the fly, extremely fast, it's in the nose. Turbulence is very very slow compared to targeting and firing. The only other thing they mentioned was that it was a chemical laser.
Later,
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
If you look at the B-2, you'll see that the insignia are there. Not to mention that you don't fly in anything like that to fly home and see grandma for the holidays. ;)2 0to%20Remember.html
Check these links for more info:
http://www.andrews.af.mil/89aw/jag/LOAC%20Points%
http://www.asociety.com/geneva1.html
The Russians are too poor to collect taxes right now, let alone build nukes. And the Chinese would rather do business than blow shit up.
What is up with this? Now we're going to have machines capable of shooting on their own? What's this going to do for travel? How's an enemy radar going to determine the difference between planes, are innocent people who use priceline going to be screwed?! It doesn't sound right. A military vehicle SHOULD BE MILITARY and not *COMMERCIAL*.
I remember a contract for this floating around when I was in defense, except the laser was for tracking and locking for anti-icbm missiles... a huge LADAR/LIDAR array mounted (at the time) in the cargo hold, not the nose, somewhere below what would be first class.
Working on ground based LIDAR tracking (on top of a volcano), my employers were naturally interested in this contract. It never materialized...
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
Yes, it is old news, though I do not think it has been posted to /. before. As a former Boeing employee, I knew about this almost 2 years ago.
--
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
25: ten.knilrevlis@wkcuhc
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Only in America do we take old passenger jets, and turn them into a flying laser cannon. I just hope that they program the tracking system correctly. God forbid it locks onto a passenger jet by accident. This weapon must be huge in order for it to require a 747, especially with a crew of 6. Hopefully they engineer in a lot of legroom.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
It dices... it;ll get you to Florida from Laguardia in 3 hours.
Act now and we'll throw in the shammee(tm)
E.
www.randomdrivel.com -- All that is NOT fit to link to
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
They key here is "behind enemy lines". In peacetime, a soldier dressed as a civilian in another country is called a "tourist" or "visitor". Little things, like a declaration of war between two countries, tend to affect how they view each other, and will probably have some small effect on their attitude toward the people (civilian and military) and aircraft (civilian and military) from the country they are supposedly at war with.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Will soon be the 1/16th scale model of these. http://www.boeing.com/special/abl/news/2000/091900 .html
The airframe is a Boeing 747-400F, a standard commercial freighter, with modifications to house the laser.
Testing is slated to begin as early as 2003, with a seven-plane operational fleet in service as early as 2009.
The laser is to be a multi-megawatt oxygen-iodine system. A multi-hundred-kilowatt system was successfully flight-tested in 1998.
The system uses "adaptive optics," mirrors which can be deformed to correct for atmospheric effects such as "thermal bloom," the heating of air by the laser, causing distortion (like looking down a hot road).
The project is run by the Air Force Research Labs Directed Energy Directorate, based at Kirtland AFB, NM, and has been around in some form or other for at least 20 years.
Contractors include Boeing, TRW Space and Electronics Group (developing laser), and Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space (developing beam- and fire-control systems).
Boeing and Rockwell competed for a $22 million concept-definition contract, with Boeing winning that contract, and the $1.3 billion Airborne Laser Program Definition and Risk Reduction contract.
The program calls for destruction of a boosting theater ballistic missile by the fall of 2002.
A follow-on contract of about $4.5 billion to complete engineering, manufacturing, development and production efforts of a seven aircraft fleet will be awarded following successful completion of the initial contract.
t ml. Incidentally, the best description I've ever found of the optical technology can be found in Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin.
There were some really neat pictures of the airplane on the USAF website www.af.mil, as well as a couple of stories, but they've been relegated to the archives. One of those stories, from which most of this information is taken, can be found at http://www.af.mil/news/Jan2000/n20000124_000101.h
An additional note: there was mention that a computer would fire the laser, not a person. This is true, at least after a fashion. Yes, the computer actually fires the laser--this is necessary, as there is no human out there who has the timing to hit an object moving at 12,000 miles an hour. The system must first be armed, though, and this is done by a human. While I do understand the concern about a computer controlling the weapon, in this case, there is still a man in the loop.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
But it seems like, given enough computing power and electricity, a couple of these 747s could blow away a whole bunch of missiles in a relatively short amount of time. And because they are flying and not fixed on our soil, or on soil at all, they don't violate the 1972 ABM treaty either. Since the incoming administration seems very gung-ho about implementing missile defense (which is a very stupid idea... but that's another thread), it seems like this system could be the answer to their prayers, so to speak. I'm curious why more senators & congressmen haven't jumped on board with more funding for this program, or why it has recieved relatively little publicity given that the failure of our ballistic MD tests made international headlines last year.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
engineers hope to create laser blasts capable of exceeding seven minutes, with planes able to fire off 20 to 30 shots before landing
OK, we've got an explosion of light which we know is over a million watts, can be sustained for more seven minutes, and each plane can fire 20 to 30 of them, all this caused by a chemical reaction. Now, I'm no chemist, but when you have 7 * say, 25 shots, you have enough highly volatile chemicals to fire for 175 minutes, at a million+ watts.
Now, logic would suggest if this thing gets shot down, we have 175 minutes of million-watt-chemicals, which they're saying creates an explosion of light(and who knows what else) mixing together in one instant. Has the government gone completely insane or is light the only thing produced by the explosion? (in which case they're just going to blind everyone in a 10 mile radius)
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
You are not going to get that kind of info from the people designing the system. A fire control system of that complexity is the focal point for the whole weapons system. If you tell everyone how it's done it makes it easier to make a countermeasure for it.
Now for determining whether a target is a bird, a missle or a B-2 bomber is fairly easy to answer with common sense deductions. They will probably be using a combination of radar, ladar and FLIR (Forward Looking InfraRed) type system and have a database of know characteristics of many different threats. After all that's what the US Navy does to determine Naval threats. But assuming you're only using radar. Radar can tell you, roughly, the size of the approaching target. A bird will not be flying at more that 100 mph. And generally birds will not be flying above 15,000 ft. Air to air missiles and tactical/stratigic ballistic missiles are supersonic. That makes it fairly easy to determine what the target is. All in all this is a good idea. Costs are finally managable to the point where systems like this will be deployable in numbers.
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
The beginnings of "Skynet".
Again, when will it become self-aware?
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Especially about the gentle giant. 747 is a subject to additional USAF and NATO requirements and all 747s currently in operation are subject to draft in case of military emergency. Which actually happened during the Gulf War. The airlines were extremely pissed off but there was nothing they could do.
It is not a gentle giant. It is a military transport aircraft. It is redundant by the military, not the civil aviation spec (check the engine redundancy and power excess parameters for example). And it was already used in several projects as a carrier for Star Wars weapons (mostly missiles and stuff). So nothing new. Nothing amazing.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
...Is that Microsoft is making the software :)
They'll have all the computers in the world running MS software tied in, and people will get fried for closing "Clippy"...
Neil..............
Got Root?
I used to have a cool sig.
That was a great movie.
Good point.
There can never be a 100% guarantee that firing on an aircraft is what you plan or intend to do. However, when an unfortunate tragedy takes place, those countries (or organizations, in the case of NATO) who follow LOAC will own up to the error and take the necessary measures to determine what punishments - if any - are appropriate.
My comment was particulary aimed at the arguement that "all 747s" are now targets. There are plenty of means to authenticate aircraft (and, yes, I'm aware that IFF doesn't always work correctly) that should prevent the tragic losses that would inevitably take place without those means.
what crash site?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Pressure? What're you smokin', boy? Light is/is almost massless. It has no volume or density and therefore no pressue.
What a Gigawatt+ laser does have is lots and lots of energy! Even if *some* of the energy is reflected, the vast majority is still imparted to the mirrored surface, thus degrading the missle's hull as stated in the CNN article or burning through it altogether.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
EMINEM. That guys a moron and a half.
First, I am constantly amazed at how a technologicaly sophisticated group like /. readers becomes as your average nimby luddites when a technical issue you don't like/don't understand comes around. This weapon WILL NOT fire itself, to run off on that tangent is to put yourself on the level of people who believe that genetically modified corn might become an intelligent super-race.
When targets are detected, an operator will tell it to fire, it will lock on the targets and destroy them. It will not just decide it doesn't like the looks of a passing widebody and bisect it.
Second, all sorts of indiscriminate weapons are allowed under international law - landmines and sea mines to name a couple - no human identifies their targets. That this weapon might be illegal (I'm sorry, ILLEGAL) is no more true than the claim that Geneva convention outlaws the use of .50cal machine guns on people (another old chestnut).
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal...
Seeing as this thing was designed to take out very fast missiles, a big slow jet should be childs play. they say it can shoot 20-30 times as well.... i think it'll be one of the safest places to be in an airwar.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
Time travel things. Now I'm going to have to go back to before I posted this and make sure I get it right...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
From my reading of this, the 747's are designed to take out the missles on the way up during the "boost phase", a far easier targeting problem to solve than during the free-flight phase which occurs after the warhead has separated from the rocket and is hidden in a sea of decoys and countermeasures. During the boost phase the rocket is a huge target (take your pick: radar, infrared, etc.) the only problem is the very narrow time window. This means you have to be close to the launch site to have a prayer of taking it out. This is possible if the threat comes from island countries like North Korea, but not for launch sites protected by hundreds of miles of enemy territory.
It looks to me like the 747 is designed to deal with the getting close enough problem but as others in this thread have mentioned, how do you get a 747 close enough without making all passenger 747's "clear and present dangers" to the "rogue" nation who would be crazy enough to launch a nuclear missle at the US.
But don't get me started on the rogue nation fallacy. Can anyone give even one example of a similarly irrational act ever undertaken by such a nation (Iran, North Korea, Iraq, or whoever else is tabbed presently). They may not have the same values, but why would they launch an easily tracked missle at the US when it would be far easier to smuggle in one across one of the borders?
Excellent. Now the next time we have a war, our enemy has a great excuse to start targeting 747s. I think I'll take an Airbus, thank you.
If you have any info relating to weapon systems having difficulties like this, please divulge.
I do (sort of).
A while ago at Berkeley (might have been Stanford, i can't remember), there was some DoD funded research into using neural nets to recognize (feature-detect) tanks of various sorts. So they cranked out this network trained on a huge library of photographs.
When they demoed this thing for DoD, it failed miserably on photo's that weren't in the testing/training library. Why? Because, as it turned out, all the pictures the network was trained on were taken at the same time of day. The network was accidentally trained to recognize certain angles of shadows! So it failed miserably and the project was shitcanned.
i only heard about this anecdotally from my AI professor, so i have no idea about the veridicacy of these facts.
Never, ever, forget that computers don't percieve the world like we do. Detecting a missile is not trivial.
/bluesninja
They're there, they just don't jump out on that image. If you see one in person, you'll see the insignia.
If you look carefully at the details of the plan you will find that the laser must be used during the accent stage, as the laser only has enough power to weaken the metal, not completely melt/vaporize it. (the weakened metal would then not be able to contain the pressurized fuel, and would explode) This would mean that the 747 would have to be within the 400 mile range of the **launch** of the target. So unless Iraq and all the other nasty little countries want to let us fly this bird over there country all the time... The only use would be in a theater (area) defense of troops, or the protection of certain middle east countries that would pay to have one of these in the air constantly (with the assumption that most of the people who want them dead is within 400 miles, or (travel distance during rocket accent + 400 miles). NET RESULT: Good first start, however unless nuked from Cuba, the USA has no need for flying these in our own airspace. Civil air transport is free from worry unless we are engaged in a war, and the civil 747's fly within 400 miles of the war's air space. {Which I think would be dumb even if there was no laser 747's} The only exception was if someone was trying to launch an attack in the middle east and some country keep some laser 747 in the air at all times... the attackers could just remove *ALL* the 747's. [did the state dept say that travel in the middle east was dangerous] ;-)
mikSkPeAlMse@purdue.edu remove SPAM for mail.
"I don't want to believe, I want to know." --Carl Sagan"
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
No problem. Just build it with flashable ROMs, then the Air Force can download updates from the manufacturer when it becomes necessary.
--==--
Fanatic (n): a person who won't change his mind and can't change the subject.
I don't think he (whoever posted the story) meant that the weapon per se was disturbing, but the fact that it is triggered by a computer as opposed to a human.
That said, I do find this a little disconcerting. Well, not this weapon in particular, but the amount of energy and capital that is expended on coming up with more advanced and more efficient weapons in general. You can't really distinguish between "offensive" and "defensive" weapons, IMO, because either way the result is just that you're encouraging your enemies (and even your allies, probably) to come up with even more ingenious (or maybe really obvious) counter-measures. In the end, you've spent a ton of money, and you're not any more secure. Tell me, are you more afraid of a nuclear launch from North Korea, or some guy with a mini-nuke in a suitcase that just snuck into mid-town Manhattan? Personally, I'd feel a lot more secure if we tried to be the kind of country that everybody didn't hate so much.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
I'm serious, and stop calling me Shirley.
-p4
(c) All Rights Released.
Schweet... how long will it take before someone breaks into the computer tracking system and heats up a giant ball of jiffy-pop popcorn?
http://evoketv.com - TV Listings 2.0
How long until commericial airliners rip out passenger and cargo compartments on 747's and replace them with non-revenue generating missle-defense lasers? I think we've got a while, bunky.
That would be very suspicious - since there's no passengers getting on/off - or any cargo leaving...
BlackNova Traders
I saw a video of this once, where the plane went up into space, flipped over and shot downwards at a nasty terrorist guy. Fortunately some guys got onboard the plane, replaced some of the ROMs and had the laser fire at a big ball of popcorn in one of the scientist's house, thereby notifying a Senator, and thus the free world. Whew!
--Brogdon
This tagline is umop apisdn.
This is ancient news.
I remember it from a Popular Science YEARS ago...
That's not to say it isn't interesting, though.
----
when 747's start dropping from the skies becauses Win2K crashes.
the plane used as air force one, for example is replete with electronic anti-missile systems from flares, to chaff, to infra-red masking systems (a stinger operates off infra red, if you mask the heat signature - and they do this - then the missile will not acquire target or fire)
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If memory serves, the plane that was shot down in this tragedy was a 747.
The NATO forces were purportedly running Cobra Ball surveillance runs in the area in question that night. Cobra Ball planes are made out of Boeing RC-135 airframes, which are derivatives of the Boeing 707 and look like a large 707 in profile. While they're obviously different in profile, someone could accidentally mistake one for the other in the heat of a tense situation.
This translates into a dangerous in the dark situation where someone in a combat plane might mistake a civillian airliner with a military plane and shoot it down- which is what aparently happened in the case of KAL 007.
Now this takes into account the prospects of a situation where the countries and the people involved are aware of the "Law" of Armed Conflict (which really isn't a law but an agreement between most of the potential combattants in a conflict- that's usually honored). What about the others that aren't in on the agreements or just don't give a damn?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You know, reading these comments i kept thinking of C&C: Red alert 2, and reading this one really clinched it- the game *IS* essentially presision (chrono leigonares, bombing runs) vs mass destruction (nukes, dynamite, etc.)
Mostly, though, this reminds me of the Allied side's "Prism" technology- essentially lasers. You can have prism towers for defence, and if you have more than 1 they can reflect off each other, it's rather interesting.
I think this should be called a "Prism Jet"- cuz that's basically what it is.
----
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
The US already uses aircraft based on civilan models, such as the E-3 AWACS, the JSTARS, and the KC-135 all of which are based off the popular 707 aircraft. Having 747s wouldn't add to the problem, they have to have prominent military marking on them, and civilan airliners route away from war zones anyway, so they are unlikely to be mistaken for a ABL and shot down.
I don't know the details of this system, but I can make some guesses at the types of problems they've had to work through:
:)
- Powerful lasers can ionize the air along the path, creating a plasma barrier that subsequently stops/hinders the laser beam. General workarounds include pulsing the beam to "beat" a path through the atmosphere or using a large enough beam so the total energy is high but the power at any given point is low.
- A temperature gradient in the atmosphere results in an index of refraction gradient. This will cause the beam path to deviate from a straight line. (This is the cause of mirages - hot road, cool air == large temperature gradient). If the gradient is large enough or the beam distance far enough, the beam could be moved significantly off-target (according to a straight-line estimate). I'd guess this is not an issue for this system, but I don't know.
- Scattering. If there are clouds, then there are water droplets or perhaps ice crystals, which will scatter and absorb the laser beam to various extents (depending on the wavelength chosen). Then will reduce or eliminate the laser's effectiveness. Solutions include selecting a wavelength that is not scattered or absorbed strongly by water, and praying for good weather
- Maintaining laser alignment. The mirrors in a laser (assuming it isn't a solid state laser) have pretty low tolerances for their position. Maintaining the alignment in a hostile environment (e.g. loud, bumpy 747 ride) might be a challenge. But, feedback-based stabilizing systems have been around for years, so this was probably dealt with pretty readily.
Anyhow, just some thoughts from an optics geek.
And remember, do not look directly at the laser with your remaining good eye.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
It's only one sentence in the article, but the important thing is that it targets missles IN THE BOOST PHASE ONLY. That is why it's computer controlled. Like the article says, the weapon only has about 18 seconds to identify, target, fire on a missle. One other thing, YES it fires on ballistic missles, but these would be SHORT RANGE ballistic missles, a la SCUD missles, and tactical nukes, Indian and Pakistani bangers, etc. ;) These planes will probably NEVER be used as a "national defense" system. Lasing a MIRV would be next to impossible and probably wouldn't do a hell of a lot of good anyway. There was an article on these in Scientific American a year or two ago I think.
"I'm about to drop the hammer and dispense some indiscriminate justice!"
Because the six fast moving sidewinders fired from 100Ms that's locked onto one of the port engines is a fair bit more manueverable than the single IBCM that's heading towards downtown Washington DC.
The only thing that'll be able to get within 100 miles of one of these cap ships is a stealth fighter.. Who else is fielding one of those?
Don't doubt that these won't be considered as critical (and as well defended) as an aircraft carrier.. Think center of a battle group, coordinated by AWACS..
Your Working Boy,
5) The Stinger missile would have to work.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Too look at things from another side, the day after the Concorde crashed I received a tech-support phone call from the flight control center of Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport. They needed an exchange for one of their monitors...
Disclaimer, this is not a joke, this actually happened. That's the scary part.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
the real damage done by high power lasers isnt so much from the light itself, but the PRESSURE which the light hits the object with. If you fire one of these lasers at a normal mirror for instance, it'll blow the thing to smithereens. Chroming a missile would have no effect because the raw energy of impact would melt and ding the material suffciently to destroy it.
-
Now a 747 cruising around blasting VW bugs would be cool...
Dude. Nuclear LAND MINE...
-- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"
Recognizing a missile that is in the early stages of a launch is not that hard to do. Those things accelerate much faster than any manned aircraft (the pilot would pass out or die) and they have a huge rocket plume that is very easy to identify by infrared. Good luck thinking of something that would confuse the computer, because I can't think of anything. The big danger I see is in the sensor equipment, not the code. That's a whole different bag of monkeys, though.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
No mirror is perfectly reflective even at low power levels, and sufficiently high power levels will rip electrons free of the surface no matter what it's made of. This leaves two methods for destroying missiles, mirrored or not:
- Throw enough energy at them to thermally damage them with whatever fraction is absorbed.
- Throw the energy in short enough pulses, focussed on small enough areas, that the surface explodes into a high-pressure plasma and acts like a bomb going off against the skin.
The first requires a highly reflective, well-cooled mirror (to avoid overloading the optics before killing the target), the second requires very precise optics and a large mirror area to keep the transmitter well below the power/area limits while achieving the critical power/area at the target to flash the surface into plasma. The accounts did say that the laser was the easy part; I believe them!--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Also, the Iranian jetiner shot down by the USS Vincennes (not sure on the model, but definitely a civilian aircraft).
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Probably an operator will not be involved, at least not in the plane.
When intercepting ICBMs, there is a very narrow window of time where it will be feasible (considering the potential limited range the weapon will have).
This plane will likely be part of a large system, connected to ground computers, and radar stations all over the world. When the SYSTEM detects a missile, and determines what it is, and where it's headed, and calculates which flying laser platform would be in the best position, THEN it will order the laser to fire, probably within a time window of a few seconds. It's not likely a human will be involved in any decision making process other than initially turning the system on.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Hello?? Did you read anything about this? ... weakening the metal," said Capt. Eric Moomey of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. "We intend to cause a rupture from within the rocket."
I know I am only a AREO student... but take a look at this QUOTE:
"The laser doesn't have to melt through an enemy missile's metal skin to kill it. The beam only has to weaken the missile's exterior, the Air Force believes; the projectile's speed and pressure exerted on it should finish the job...."
"What we're out to accomplish is
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/01/12/airborne.laser/
RUPTURE... hmm... from a fuel tank??? --
"I don't want to believe, I want to know." --Carl Sagan"
As someone who knows of the original project, I can tell you a couple of problems with it.
One, do you wonder why it's in a 747 as opposed to a F117? Because it needs a megawatt power supply. It also required a MASSIVE cooling system. It uses a chemical reaction which can be used for 7 minutes.
A system like this has to get rid of a LOT LOT LOT LOT LOT of heat. The typical way is to use oil, and pump it back to a storage tank.
Guess they're gonna need alot of oil. Plus, the chemical reaction is non-reversable. H2O2, Iodine, and Chlorine sound really bad together. (there are a bunch of really nasty chemicals that come from clorine and iodine.)
People that pilot this plane are going to need an escort. If you only got seven minutes of defence, you havn't got enough.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
I'd love to see the Zucker brothers make another Airplane! movie based on this story. I'd go see it.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
And where exactly would one find one of those these days?
with humpy love,
with humpy love,
humpmonkey
your forgetting something else too, lets say it does take an extended amount of time for the plane to take down a missle using the laser, well if your in that fighter jet and the laser targets you and fires for even a second you will have been blinded most likely cause remember you are traveling towards on another at this point, so now that you've been blinded you can't control your jet, and don't say what if you have your visor down on your helmet cause that might protect from the sun put not from a concentrated 1 megawatt laser beam. so no matter how long it takes your screwed anyway. a bugg
This is what upsets me about any missile defence program dreamed up by the US Military:
1. They are designed to shoot down missiles from "rogue states", all of which are showing increasing signs of political stability (Iran and North Korea are often quoted).
2. Launching a missile at the US, regardless of the choice of device in the tip, is suicide. Send a scud, and all your launchers will be destroyed. Send a nuke, and say goodbye to your country.
3. Does the high technology match the threat? In Somalia, high tech was no match for a pickup truck with a machine gun mount in the back. Recently, in Yemen(?) a destroyer was almost sunk by a small boat packed with explosives and guided by suicide bombers. How will missile defense deal with a suitcase nuke? How will nose mounted laser deal with a missile heading for it's lower back end?
4. Why risk scrapping nuclear anti-proliferation treaties which forbid the development of missile killers such as a missile shield or a laser-747? The last thing the world needs is the renewed nationalist and isolationist tendencies that would result from an arms race. Both Russia and China have made great strides towards the open market, and towards more equitable treatment of their citizens since those treaties were signed. It makes sense: if you're not using most of your resources on defense/offense, you can better your society.
5. Most importantly, this is incredibly expensive. $60B for a missile defense shield, $1.6B for the 747's ... Wouldn't the American people prefer improved schools, healthcare, or even tax cuts? All of these pay a much higher social dividend... unless you're a company/person involved in military R&D.
I apologize if this seems like a rant, but the above issues never seem to be addressed by the proponents of anti-missile systems... and darn would I ever like an answer!
Obviously you didn't read the whole article. It does have a reason, shoot down missles over a battlefield. It would have been real useful around 10 years ago.
I think the disconcerting part was the fact that it won't have a human making the decision to fire the weapon. It has a Wargames-y feel to it. Personally, I tend to agree. I always get nervous when they talk about replacing soldiers with robots and planes with drones. When you take the horror out of war, what incentive is there to avoid it? (Remember that old Star Trek episode?)
FP
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
If we can do this, And I belive there was another device that could use a laser to destroy inboud missles from the ground (it's being used in Israel) then why do we need to have orbiting satalites that in my understnading are going to have explosive weapons rather than lasers?
What about putting weather information gathering pods on commercial aircraft? I know that we get a lot of weather data from satellites and ground stations, but would it be helpful to be continuously gathering and transmitting data from 30,000 ft. over long distances and time spans?
I don't know how significant the weather is at normal cruising altitude, but I'm thinking that a massively distributed data acquisition net could yield some pretty reliable data. How effectively that information is used to predict future weather I'll leave to another discussion... :)
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
Why do you think that if the laser can shoot for seven minutes, it MUST shoot for seven minutes to do any damage? Where did you get this info? Nowhere in the article does it say this, in fact it DOES say The laser has about only an 18-second "kill window" in which to lock on and destroy a rising missile, said Wills
Wow, I found something to support my argument, your turn.
And just like AWACS, it's a valuable target - in a real air war, AWACS would be a strategic target - the enemy would fly sorties against AWACS, presumably enough to take out the surrounding guards as well.
I apologize that all the conflicts the US has gotten into haven't been 'Real' enough for you. The reason the enemy hasn't been able to fly a sortie against them is because the CO does his damnest not to let them. I'm still curious on how you're going to shoot this thing down.
Again, I stay over the horizon (out of your LASER range) and fire my AA missiles at you. I don't know the official range of AA missiles, but it's more than enough for me to fly behind you and not actually cross the horizon and be in the line of sight of the laser. And I can do a quick 180 vertical loop and then rotate level and hit the afterburner to get away after the missiles are away.
Ahh, more "Wing Commander" tactics. Last time I looked, an Over the Horizon Missile required an AWACS to operate. I don't believe any other country besides the US even has the tech, for the missile. Lets assume you're a fully supported rogue pilot, for the sake of argument. You're directly behind me, beyond the range of my weapon, and you fire off your missile, which has the range to hit me.
ASSUMING, this new pride and joy of the Air Force has ABSOLUTELY no Electronic Warfare gear on it and
ASSUMING there is no friendly AWACS in the area to warn me of incoming fighters and
ASSUMING that this Anti-missile aircraft is the only one within 400 miles.
What would happen is this, the missile would be picked up on infra-red, I turn the plane, say, 90 degrees, shoot down missile. Yawn.
I have no idea how fast your missile is going, lets be generous and say 10,000 mph. To cross 400 miles it would require 2 minutes and 24 seconds (Ignoring acceleration time) leaving me plenty of time for me to turn my plane.
(Most counter-measures rely on the craft being smaller and being able to move rapidly away from the counter-measure - I'm not sure how much flares/chaff would help a 747.)
Flares? Chaff? How cute. I was a EW tech in the USAF. The stuff that goes on big planes can scramble missile guidance pretty easily due to the MASSIVE power supplies available to it.
To sum, you're shooting a missile at a plane DESIGNED TO SHOOT DOWN MISSILES, how can you think this would be an easy kill?
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
And jets have this annoying tendency to A) fight back and B) fly evasive patterns.
(Plus, based on the current design, coming in at the tail would be a nice, fun, happy tatic to make actually taking out the enemy plane much more difficult.)
Also, as stated, this would be a high-value target - meaning that you wouldn't launch one plane at the thing, you'd launch several. And these planes would almost definately engage the missle-sweeping 747 beyond visual range, over the horizon. Quickly turning a 747 around (since the nose-mounted laser doesn't have a full 360 of freedom) isn't quite possible - and a high-powered laser is definately a line-of-sight weapon.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
When you think about it actually does make a kind of sense... these things don't need to be really maneuverable - and they can carry a pretty heavy payload.
Add to that the fact that 747 are 'commercially available' and it even becomes financially feasible... and you could use commercially trained pilots - rather than expensive fighter pilots.
BlackNova Traders
I dont think it will be hard to detect which target is the missle, it will be the only object moving faster than mach 2 in the sky, unless the Former soviet republic has some kind of 'super' - pigeon we dont know anything about
The original laser 747 is sitting on Boeing Field in Seattle next to a AWACS.
Drive on highway I-5 for a full view.
I see it every day....
Laser-gun jubblies? How'd I miss those? :)
Raptor
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
Anyway, if the only problem with this system is it shoots down pigeons, I think we could put one in the air over NYC and do the city population a favor.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Time for the obligatory: "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these" (guidance computers). Really, in order for accurate laser tracking to hit it's target, you would need a fairly high powered computer on the plane or a cluster of smaller ones doing weather simulations based on real-time weather data to prevent skewing of the beam due to the differences in pressure cells.
Also, did not the US Navy once shoot down a civilian 737 in the Middle East? In today's warfare, you rarely get withing visual distance of your enemy.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
It's disconcerting because it will kick start another arms race. Other nations will develop better ICBMs or find other ways to circumvent this defence like increased espionage and terrorism (prossibly using these now useless warheads). This technology will not make living in the nuclear age any safer.
"You know, I have one simple request, and that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!" - Austin Powers
This is only effective for boost phase intercept, which means the plane would have to be over enemy territory to be effective. any enemy capable of launching ballistic missiles is also going to have pretty sophisticated air defense capability. Survivability of the multibillion dollar system, therefore, seems problematic. A 747 is a pretty big, and slow, target.
.^
^.
( @ )
Soylent Foods, Inc.
And instead of shooting down missiles, it would need to shoot down cars on the ground.
Yeah, but some mischievous hackers will reprogram it to lase the professor's house and make it burst with popcorn..
Your Working Boy,
Your first sentence is wrong. The Laser is used during the accent phase of a missile launch because that is when the missile is most vulnerable. Read any text on "Star Wars" tech.
It's pouring out infrared as it's boosting up to full speed, and because it's not at full speed it's supposed to be easier to hit.
As to whether it is powerful enough to melt/vaporize it, you'll have to ask someone who works with high-powered lasers. Personally, I find it hard to believe that it can't.
Later,
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I mean, this could be real useful when you are in one of those holding patterns trying to land at O'Hare....
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I can just imagine the mess when the plane decides a small biplane is a missle and blows it out of the sky. Does anyone else think this is insane? You decided it would be a good idea to use a commercial aircraft as a anti-missle tactic???
Space Invader... Lurker of the Far and Beyond. Welcome to my Realm...
If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
Doesn't that wreck the whole MAD agreement?
Actually, a weapon to blind enemy soldiers would not be allowed under the Geneva Convention. Of course, so is shooting them with large caliber ammo.
Let the cumputers decide when to fire the Lazer. Good idea. Everyone knows software never makes mistakes.
Deadly weapons operated without human interaction, bad.
I like the idea of a missile-destroyer thing-a-ma-bob, but is it necessary to have it completely automatic? If something goes wrong, who would we blame? And think of the mess we'd have to go through while someone tried to fix it. Perhaps it would be a better idea to let it lock onto its target on its own, and then a human operator of some sort can press the "don't push this button" button, letting the machine do its thing when it's just right.
Not that I don't have faith in our ability to create machines perfect for such a task, but Murphy's Law states that things will go wrong given the opportunity... So I'd rather think that it was simply human error, which is natural, than internal error of some tiny computer parts, which would require time, money, long speeches on every channel by the president... You get what I'm saying.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Now guys that piss me off will get a house full of popcorn!
This isnt just a giant TOY, because if it breaks, then we're all vapor.
Leave me alone, I'm drunk.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
I wonder how long it would be before someone else can develop a type of missile which isn't identified as such by this system? And how much more will it cost them to release a patch?
Having many friends and relatives in the armed forces and a couple in Intelligence fields, I have heard enough to question the 'state-of-the- art" equipment in the military. Take any of the axioms in the tech industry, like Moore's Law, and you have to wonder about the speed at we they are able to deliver new advances to the services. Just b/c it always has taken so long is no justification for to take so long.
There is no guarantee that the content has been read or understood.
747s aren't the most maneoverable plane out there. I would imagine that it is very possible that some missles might cruise higher than the 747 would normally be flying. So as long as the plane is in front of the missile, it can hit it.
Blar.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Um, "Wargames" was a movie. It's not reality. In this world, a Cessna and a missile have rather different radar signatures, as do a Cessna and a jet fighter. Also, a human operator is at hand when the system is working who can shut it down if need be. Lastly, the computer decides when and where to fire only for accuracy purposes. Whether to fire is determined by the rules of engagement, which is decided by humans. This is a targeting computer, not AI.
Virg
Wow.
What I would really like is something like this on the nosecone of an ultralite. And instead of shooting down missiles, it would need to shoot down cars on the ground.
Okay. Maybe I'm a little tired of morning commutes...
All this stuff was well and good when it was a ploy to get the 3CP to bankrupt itself to keep up. Who we gonna use this stuff against? The next threat will be against Harpoon type anti ship missles, short-medium range tactical-nuclear-chemical-bio tips and the proverbial terrorist truck. You can see the logistical problem already. In the field in battle conditions you need one laser hog being directed by one AWACS being protected by a fighter screen being fueled by a KC-10, supported by a ground facility and so on. Why The Fuck do you think that it was easier to fly from Missouri to Iraq and back again in a B-2 than it was to screw around with trying to build a multibillion dollar support structure from scratch?
I bet saddam is having his missles chromed right now. Next we'll have to make a 747 that can take the chrome off a scud.
--toq
The Concorde crash has really shown one thing : American make planes that are so loosy that the bits they loose on the ground can damage other planes... don't forget the Concorde crashed because some lame DC10 lost some parts on the landing track. In 25 years of service, Concorde has had only 1 crash... no other commercial plane can claim that good track record.
747... isn't that some kind of tiny Airbus A3XX ???
While this is a nice idea, if some rogue state attempted to launch a missile at the US, don't you think they'd have a few terrorists with Stingers (or the Russian equivalent) hiding in the weeds outside the airports where the 747 takes off.
The 747 is an impressive machine, but I don't think it's maneuverable enough to dodge a shoulder mounted missile on take off.
I will be more comforable in an obvious civilian plane than in a possible war plane.
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The following passage is taken from the website:
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* Light is emitted in the form of photons. Photons have momentum, and when they are reflected off a surface, they transfer momentum to that surface. In principle, if a spacecraft is tethered to a large reflecting surface, or "lightsail", sunlight falling on that surface would provide a gentle but continuous pressure that could propel the spacecraft between planets without any need to carry propellants for primary propulsion.
While I doubt this pressure is sufficient(even in a laser) to do real damage, it is not out of the realm of possibility. Any mirror, however, is not perfect, and if you take a high power laser, and reflect it off of a mirror with a spec of dust, you will still get significant heating. It is unlikely that chrome would make a missile immune, but it may help.
Why is this news? Madonna has had such nose-cone lasers installed in her bras for years
Of course, the airlines would have to be willing to accept an 80% reduction in passenger volume, but we all put up with a little bit of inconvenience in the name of Open Source, don't we?
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Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I find it more disturbing that such a 'weapon' is actually considered a bad thing by some politicians...
The computer part of it isn't anything surprising. When your dealing with aiming a weapon fired from a platform traveling ~400mph at something hundreds of miles away traveling even faster the average quake players aim isn't gonna cut it.
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I think we should put more work into preventing or diffusing situations where you would need to arm a standard passsanger jet rather than on the weapons we could equip them with. Wouldn't these research funds be better put to use by developing some type of recovery program that could safely land those big jets? Something like giant parachutes, or a break-away escape capsule...
Well, I guess this automated firing system is going to kill amateur rocketry and anyone vying for the X-Prize.
This isn't a practical national defense system, either. For the theatre-level battlefield this would be great... You could even increase its range by putting up large reflective blimps, use GPS to coordinate the locations of everything and tie the detection gear to the man-portable search radars carried by the Army's LRP teams, and then make a bank shot that goes plane-blimp-target or plane-blimp-blimp-target.
Just please, PLEASE, Boeing, think about having a human-pulled trigger.
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-k
Anything the gets more Airbuses out of the air is good.
Gravity seems to be doing a good job all by itself. Maybe things are heavier over there or something.
--
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In Taiwan, twenty guys are going to pull a 747 with their penises
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Ok, is it just me or wouldn't a missile sender just design missiles with more rigid external integrity to defeat the laser. Kind of like Star Wars' weakness which was to overload the system with missiles.
managers...why god invented purgatory
In honor of the year, the onboard computer for the laser-equipped 747 will be named HAL-9000. Good luck to its crew.
Eh? Newsflash guy, but most large military E type aircraft are military variants of civilian versions. 737-300ER's are used by the military for everything from AWACS missions to mid-air refueling. And Air Farce One happenst to be both a military aircraft (although without offensive capability, other than it's passengers) and a 747. The problem of shooting down civilian aircraft by mistake has already been happening for 20 years now. The Ruskies shot down a KAL 747 back in the 80's, and we shot an Iraqi airliner down over the Gulf a few years later.
Okay, so now we'll have two jets, one commercial, the other military, that will show up on radar as being identical. This seems to me to greatly increase the chance that civilians will be killed accidentally.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
okay, so now the rogue nations have to do twin launches: one to bang the 747 and one to harras the US. the second one has a smiley painted on the tip...
Somehow I feel as if we had posted this a while ago - no search found it. i do remember that this has been talked about for quite some time, tho'.
After a rash of duplicate stories on slashdot, engineers have annouced plans to convert a Boeing 747 into a hot-blooded killer with a swiveling nose-cone laser beam theoretically capable of destroying duplicate slashdot stories "hundreds of keystrokes away." Of particular interest is the fact that "No human finger will actually pull a trigger. Onboard computers will decide when to fire the beam."
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I think I can sleep easier tonight knowing that in 8+ years, we'll have last year's technology defending us for tomorrow's threats. I guess they can't open soure it, can they.
And thic Col Pedro makes an interesting point:"instantly at the speed of light". I had something funny to say about that, but I think it speaks for itself.
http://www.unholyrouter.com
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Most of your arguement is very valid, I just have to diagree with this one point quoted above. The laser system is designed to attack ballistic missles, not AAM or SAM types. Computation for ballistic missles vs missles designed to attack planes are two very different things. The path of a ballistic missle is very predictable, it is going to be parabolic and is going up, not to mention it is a VERY large target. Trying to hit something that is coming at you, which is constantly correcting so as to be able to hit, and attacking facing in such a way to give you the least amount of target it not going to be a walk in the park. According to your arguement the side of a ballistic missle going in a predetermined parabolic arc is just as easy as hitting the cone of an AAM moving in a dynamic path. I think you have been playing the humans on StarControl too much if you think it can just zap everything that tries to attack it, because it doesn't work that way.
It has an 18 second window to hit the target. My guess is that the system designed to target is so speciallized so as to be able to get that 18 second window and fire that it probably cannot cope with other targets. Fighters would be the hardest because it they knew that they were going against something like that they would take precautionary manuvering, if complex enough (which is probably not very complex), would prevent the computer from being able to predict where the plane would be, and thereby prevent it from aiming and firing. Sure, nothing moves faster than the speed of light (as a physic major I know that all to well) but there are mechanical parts used for aiming in order for it to fire, which do not move at the speed of light. And unlike a missle which corrects after launch, or gunfire where it is a near continuous volley, if you miss then you have ~18 seconds before you have another shot.
Although the USAF ECM is very good, if I was in one of these and some fighter managed to get close enough to start launching some AAMs at me I would start doing some pretty serious manuvering to not get hit. Then I would be requesting back-up asap. They aren't invincible, just as carrier groups aren't invincible. If it was being attacked I very much doubt that it would be a lone fighter, unless it was the only thing left after the escort was delt with.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
www.airbornelaser.com - it's kind of funny, and very surreal. I thought it was a joke the first time I saw it, and watching the promo films on there made me think of the opening to Real Genius. Gotta love it...
--Dg
Ageis(sp?) is not only the name of the class of ships but also the detection/targeting/fire-control system the ships are equipped with. Phalanx is an older system employed on many types of ships (mostly the big ones) which lacks enough range to shoot down a commercial aircraft. Either way, the decision to fire was made by a human. Any computers involved just told the missile where the target was.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
I think the laser would be of more use inside the plane. To get rid of: 1. Annoying people behind you who decide it's funny to keep kicking and moving your seat. 2. Children who don't stop crying. 3. People who put their seat back as soon as they get on the plane. Leaving tall people like me with their TV about 10cm away from their face. 4. All the people who can afford to fly first and business class and who look down upon us mortals who fly coach when we walk by. 5. People who hog the toilets. KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL!!!
Jeez, you'd think the flyboys would think about this for a second. OK, so we're going to retrofit one of the most widely used passenger airplanes with war-making technology.
Now an enemy knows that the US has 747's used to shoot down missiles. Doesn't that suddenly make every 747 in the sky a suspect? Someone, please correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems likely in stressful times to make civilian airliners a legitimate target.
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Thank you, that is exactly how I wanted to put it.
*gasp*! Slashdot checking to see if they posted it before! Unheard of! Though, its not Taco posting this, so I guess they're allowed to do something that makes _some_ sense.
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Linux is only free if your time is of no value
Be in Your Senses
You can whine all you want, but a soveriegn nation is just that.
That sounds like a pretty big double standard if you are defending US actions in/against other sovereign nations.
It's easy for the little countries to cry about abuse of power. They've never abused their power, but then again they've never been in the situation the United States finds itself in.
I completely disagree. I can think of a several countries who, in their theatre of the world, are in exactly the same position and power, yet do not act with the same belligerence, aggression, or paranoia. (Of course, I can also think of countries who, in the same position, did act with the same belligerence and paranoia, or worse).
The "but the USA is unique and so is above ethical judgement" arguement just doesn't work. Other countries have been in the position that the US is in, and other countries currently are in similar positions. There is far and away enough preceedent to see that abuse of power IS a choice, NOT a necessity of situation. By your line of reasoning, any of the great abusive dictators of history had every right to do what they did.
The unfortunate irony is that where there once were no terrorists, abuse creates them. And then the US cries foul when it reaps its entirely predictable harvest, and then steps up the abuse...
One step soltuion to the "problem" of terrorists - stop creating them in the first place!
This does not pose the slightest threat to Russia or China. The laser's range is under 200 miles, and a big, slow 747 could never get close enough to their missile fields to shoot down their ICBMs. This only threatens rogue states with missiles, like Iraq and N. Korea.
Where exactly did you get that 200 mile range?. The article refers to shooting down missles "hundreds of miles away at the speed of light" which puts pretty much anyone in range of at least one US military base.
I'm sure anyone who wants to deliver a NBC payload to the US is much more likely to use a 747 and a suitcase than a missile!
Enjoy spedning the money...
Tom
I have discovered a wonderful
If you're interested, there is a special airing on CNN this Saturday, (January 13th) during their "Science & Technology Week" program at 1:30 pm Eastern. Coverage will include Boeing work at both Wichita and Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.
some 747's with freakin' laserbeams on their heads! Honestly people, throw me a freakin' bone here...
-Dr Evil
But, I've seen "Moonraker."
I disagree... I don't think it needs to predict very much at all. It doesn't have to lead the target at all so why does it need to know where it's *going* to be? It can calculate where it _is_ and adjust the beam direction to compensate for the motion. Assuming the target is just at the horizon (outside of missile range, and assuming that atmospheric effects don't corrupt the beam, yadda yadda) it's just a point and shoot matter... I guess it just depends on how quickly you can adjust the laser's targetting mechanism to accomodate the motion of the target.
//begin sarcastic rant
//end sarcastic rant
We kin build a anti-missile thingy cuz we's the best damn country in da world and all them treeties don't mean shit. We can't never trust them damn forners. That "stability" bullshit is just a trick so the Reds and the A-rabs can get us all comfterble-like and then launch their nucyuler missiles at us. George Dubya knows that we needs them lazers and sheeit so we kin protect ourselves from all them other countries that wanna kill us. And all that whinin about schools and healthcare is just the kind of commie bullshit we's trying to stop.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
It is at least theoreticly possible that we will have 747's blowing up terrrorists? Is it just me or is the irony overwhelming?
This story reminds me of the movie Real Genius. The parallels are staggering: Big laser mounted in a plane to be able to fire anywhere. In the movie, they talked about a 5 MegaWatt laser, and here they are saying the laser is more than 1 MegaWatt. Hmmmm.
If it's a blue laser, does this mean it'd be a BLOD?
Would the user interface have a twitching nuclear warhead to give you advice?
-Jason
Yeah, so my MSMouse says it requires 40MB to install. So?
and can you hammer a six inch spike through...
.^
oh, nevermind.
^.
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Soylent Foods, Inc.
Sheesh, are we a bit nationalistic or what?
During all these years I haven't understood why US is so damn paranoid about being attacked. You guys waste a horrendous amount of money on your army and cruise around trying to find new threaths so that the circus can go on. I guess this paranoia also shows in the amount of hand guns in US.
Ok, before I'm moderated -1 troll, let's get down to business.
1. Should we in the rest of the people be happy that there's a trigger happy superpower who treathens our security? And now the new leader will increase the funding for their strong army. What are they doing? Are they planning to take over the world? No, we don't see it that way buy you guys would in our shoes.
2. A revenge happens if the offender is found. Imagine waking up one morning to news that Washington is totally destroyed by a nuke. There went the president and most of the administration. What if nobody saw that coming and the sender is not found? Who are you going to attack?
3. There will never be a shower of nuclear warheads. Nobody would do that. Not even the most insane leaders. A nuke is best as a strategic weapon that is smuggled in and detonated by surprise. Anything more than that just is suicide.
4. Keep in mind that you guys are the most trigger happy people in the world. Maybe Hitler would have used it but nobody else. But then again, US did use it against Japan...
5. Do you realise how paranoid you sound when you say that a nuclear shield is necessary but a public school system is redundant?
(Sorry, the quote's not quite right, but I don't have time to look it up.)
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Have you ever played with a laser-pointer and tried to aim it at things like street signs as your car dives by them (while driving or not, it is difficult--and these are stationary objects)? It is *very* hard to aim it correctly, and it is not just a bullet (which can miss, but is only in one place at a time), but it is more practially thought of as a line ir thin column of light which can do damage to or destroy things at *any* point along its presence instantly. I, for one, feel more secure knowing that no person will actually be manually aiming and squeezing the "on" button for one of these death-rays.
I guess it really WILL be a "Blue Screen of Death."
--
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
This is not new, but that's what you get when your source is CNN. This ABL story - complete with the exact same details and drawings - was printed in Aviation Week OVER 3 YEARS AGO. This project is maybe a little closer to flying than it was 3 years ago, but nevertheless this is only news to someone who was born yesterday.
/. will have a "new" story about how the U.S. military wants a ballistic missile defense system. Betcha' didn't know about that!
Next thing you know
The laser used was invented back in 1978, i imagine the past 20 years have been spent perfecting the mirror. The adaptive optics computer has probably been made small enough to be useful with todays technology...
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I beleive the problem with the failed missile defense systems so far has been targetting. We can get defense projectiles into the air, but getting them to meet incoming stuff has been a problem (ask anyone who's played Missile Command :).
I'd like to see more info on how they solved the
problem. I'm sure it helps that a laser beam travels a bit faster than a projectile, but there
would still be some sort of tracking problem to solve, wouldn't there?
--
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Someone has even figured a way to come up with "phasers" that stun a person. Two laser beams ionize the air enough to provide the path of an electric current. sort of like a taser(?) without the wires.
In any case, I am sure we will here more of this sort of thing.
The US looks like it is walking in the direction of high tech beam weapons, etc. while the under developed nations go in the direction of bioweapons.
An interesting balance of power, to say the least.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You beat me to the reference! :)
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Cool! Know what the biggest plane that IS threatened by birds in the engine?
Anywhere I can see some of this video you mention?
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
And just like AWACS, it's a valuable target - in a real air war, AWACS would be a strategic target - the enemy would fly sorties against AWACS, presumably enough to take out the surrounding guards as well.
Ok, you get in your jet, I'll get into my 747.
Again, I stay over the horizon (out of your LASER range) and fire my AA missiles at you. I don't know the official range of AA missiles, but it's more than enough for me to fly behind you and not actually cross the horizon and be in the line of sight of the laser. And I can do a quick 180 verticle loop and then rotate level and hit the afterburner to get away after the missiles are away.
In reality, the jet would be protected by a squadron of planes - but assuming I could get a lock and fire off two missiles at the 747, counter-measures aside, I should be able to score enough of a hit to disable the craft. (Most counter-measures rely on the craft being smaller and being able to move rapidly away from the counter-measure - I'm not sure how much flares/chaff would help a 747.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
2. Huh? So a city just disappears and when no culprit is found in the first 5 minutes we'll all just shrug, say 'aww, schucks', and get on with life? I don't think so.
3. 'Never' is a very strong word to use. True, it is unlikely that any leader would test out the MAD scenario, but are you really willing to bet several million of your fellow citizens on your fortune-telling?
4. Lemme put it this way. There exist countries whose citizens have, in fairly recent history, publicly chanted 'Death to America' or something similar. Their leaders repeatedly make threats against the US (read the North Korean news service sometime). Now some of these countries are developing weapons of mass destruction that could, with the press of a button, wipe out significant portions of our population. And you tell me that we shouldn't worry? How about we send all our cops out without any protection whatsoever since the bad guys would never dare attack an officer of the law .
5. Evidently you've never spent time in our public school system.
--
Dyolf Knip
Sorry, You'll have to get within about 7 miles to be in a sidewinder range. It's a short range missle only. The only missles with that range is the navy Phoenix missle system on F-14s.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Who is going to attack american aircraft flying over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans? The USA has the only real oceangoing Navy these days...
These aircraft would never be deployed in an area where the USAF does not have complete air supremacy.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The 747 looked on radar rather quite like the American reconnaisance planes that quite regularly would cross the border just a tad, and then record what happened as the Soviet interceptors scrambled to defend their homeland. When a fighter got anywhere near incursion point the American would be long gone. The Sovs just thought they finally caught one of the American planes, when they actually blew up an airliner (they didn't even bother to call the plane on the radio first).
> I think it'll be about never that they'll put these things on regular jets, for the same reasons that recoilless rifles don't get mounted on school buses.
You obviously went to the wrong school.
-mdr
Why are they using 747's? Do they really need that much space to shove a computer into, that just locks onto a target and fires a laser? You could probably do it with a Cessna, for a hell of a lot less, and have the advantage of not being such a gigantic blip on someone's radar screen.
I remember seeing this on discovery channel. Looks like a damn good idea specaily if nukes are baring down on us.
thx
I remember this being mentioned on Slashdot in one of its early incarnations. Must have been autumn 1997 or something. Perhaps articles weren't archived back then. I am quite confident it must have been 1997, I have been using an artists impression of that 747 as a wallpaper for a while in that period.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
Having the computer decide when to fire is nothing new. The fire control systems of modern tanks consider the trigger as a "release", more or less, but the computer decides to actually fire the gun. Granted the difference between the trigger being pulled and the gun going boom is miniscule, its important; the fire control computer makes last minute adjustments of things before firing. Its almost like using a "predicting gunsight" on a fighter plane.
After all, its hard to teach a human operator about things like barrel warp.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
There was an article a few years(?) back in either Popular Science or Mechanics that even had an artist's rendering of the plain. I remember them saying something about a 747 being a mobile command center in the sky and it having various defense radio jammers etc... and even the nose mounted laser... Kind of cool to see it all starting to come together.
The Discovery Channel ran a program over a year ago, maybe even a couple years ago, in which they talked about various measures being tested for missile defense. An entire segment of the program was given to the 747's. Pretty much, the problem with them is that the amount of fuel required to power a laser strong enough to destroy a missile is enormous, and each 747 could only physically hold enough fuel for 2 or 3 missiles (the entire area normally used for cargo and passengers was converted to a huge power cell).
I agree - the only justifications made seem to be thinly veiled chest beating. I can't grasp the tactical advantage. Consider:
ICBM technology is every bit as difficult to develope as the nuclear warhead it carries. The result is that "Rogue Nations" (excluding the USA) often get the nuke before the ICBM.
Terrorists, on the other hand, are likely to only be able to get their hands on the nuke, not ICBMs.
Regardless of whether you have ICBMs or not, to bomb the USA, a suitcase makes an infinitely better delivery system for a rogue state or terrorist.
So what is the tactical effect of the shield? It renders null and void the "Nuclear Deterrant" capabilities of the nuclear powers, yet doesn't affect the terrorists or rogue states.
Hold on a minute - but if Russia or China are suddenly looking at a foreign nuclear power that has deliberately neutralised their nuclear defence (deterrance - M.A.D.), or even attempted to do so, they would be insane to not develope a new nuclear defence. (In their place, Americans would demand nothing less, and probably a lot more.)
So the USA will then discover that China is developing missiles specifically designed to penetrate the USA missile shield. Insert paranoia - What possible reason could China be doing that unless they intended to use those missiles against the USA? We are in Imminent Danger! Action Must Be Taken!
Can you see where this is going?
And through all of it, the terrorists and rogue states have a delivery system that penetrates the shield with ease.
What utter idiocy.
The reason behind the shield, as comes across in public advocacy seems to be a need for patriotic military wanking off in the knowledge that "We're The Greatest!" and the arguments just window dressing for an unspoken desire to have solid In-Your-Face proof of how great we are.
Do the people advocating it even care about NPTs? They genuinely don't seem to give a rat's ass (though they claim otherwise). Scary.
Ye shall reap what ye sow.
Except when it comes to nukes, it's more like we (innocent civilians) reap what they sow.
If a shield won't stop terrorist nukes, what will? Telling the CIA (and others) to stop creating the terrorists in the first place by fu(king people over would be a nice start.
While it massages the ego to think that terrorists or rogue nations hate you because they envy your wealth and power, in the real world beyond hollywood, tit-for-tat is the motive.
I think the LAST thing we need is for enemies to have a reason to start classifying passenger liners as "potential threats". Fire one or two blasts at, say, Iraq from a Boeing, and I'm sure they'll start to feel damn nervous whenever a passenger liner from the US enters their airspace.
It's bad enough that it *does* actually happen now and again that passenger liners are destroyed after being mistakenly classified as military threats. One of the more famous such incidents (I can't remember the name of the flight, but they did make a movie about it) there is *still* speculation that the cause involved the US military putting spy cameras on passenger liners in the hopes that they could do spying without being shot down, if it was the case they were wrong. That was just spy cameras. Imagine huge laser cannons. Nobody will know anymore if a passenger liner is a threat or not, so they'll just destroy them for good measure, like they did with abovementioned incident (IIRC the plane was flying *incorrectly* over Russian military airspace, nobody has been able to adequately explain why the plane went there at all.)
You're not thinking cheesy enough.
GORATH!
my physics college buddy was heading to work on that plane 4 years ago. Besides Discovery channel did a whole piece on it around a year ago. Cool SHIT though!
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
use whatever part of the plane is responsible for destroying the luggage, and aim that at oncoming missiles? Much more damaging, without the costly R+D.
Actually, the threat of deploying 5,000 Minnesota-St.Paul's baggage handlers (the ones who think that US mail is made by Spalding) would be enough to make any of these lunatic rogue nations think twice.
It's worked before - Thatcher threatened once to deploy 10,000 medium-range Millwall soccer fans and that stopped a potential armed conflict right there.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0089886
"During todays first test of the laser weilding 747, a freak accident occured and the DOJ headquarters was turned into a raging inferno..."
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I remember seeing on PBS the other day that Tesla had the idea of creating directed energy beam weapons over eighty years ago. Anyway, it's one of those ideas that has resurfaced many times. Like in Reagan's Star Wars initiative, which was to shoot down missles in space.
I guess it has never been practical to actually create a weapon like that, when it's pretty cheap and effective to use depleted uranium bullets to tear missles apart like they do on Navy carriers and the like.
If this is the same system I heard about a few months ago then it is designed to be used as part of a missle defense system. There is no way that a human is going to accurately aim at an ICBM and pull the trigger. You need a computer for that sort of precision. (or a storm trooper)
Cannon?! Just how close do you think you're gonna get to this thing? I somehow doubt that any escort fighters will let you get within the mile or so you need for those cannon rounds to reach their target.
>2.In the article, it reads that each shot for the laser takes several minutes, much longer than it takes for an AA missile to reach its target.
Where did you get the "several minutes" part? They only said that they thought they could get 7 minutes of total fire time out of the on-board laser fuel. They also said that they should get 20 or 30 shots out of that. 7 minutes/20 shots=21 seconds per shot, maximum.
>3.Airplanes are not the only anti-air weapons. A flak gun against a 747 would be almost too easy. I very much would like to see a 747 try and dodge anti-air shells. Rockets could also be used, but would be much less effective.
AA guns, even the really heavy caliber ones, have a maximum altitude of far less than 10,000 feet. Seeing as how the operating altitude for the plane in question is better than 30,000 feet, it would be kinda funny watching you try to shoot it down with an AA gun. Rockets (assuming guided) would be quite effective, unless the plane had some kind of electronic countermeasure system (ALL large military planes have kickass ECM systems).
>4.The laser system is designed to shoot down ICBMs, not airplanes, nor AA missiles, nor rockets.
You finally have a good point. A SAM is a very difficult thing to hit. Even more so since they have this annoying habit of approaching from behind, outside the laser's field of fire.
Solution: Wild Weasel. Air defense suppresion is a very important mission these days. Just look at some statistics from Desert Storm:
Number of big, slow planes flying over hostile ground: a hell of a lot
Number of said planes shot down: 0 (+/- 5%)
Number of SAM sites on said hostile ground: a hell of a lot
Number of SAM sites destroyed before the big planes were allowed to fly there: a hell of a lot
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
First, you're right that most of the responses are idiotic, particularly the 'genetic-engineered corn' type. Also the ones that confuse this weapon with strategic missile defense.
However, the post you're quoting was not saying either of those things. The post was claiming that it's illegal to paint a military aircraft as a civilian aircraft.
These are all very good ideas/questions, and I wish to comment on them. But keep in mind I'm just a nerd following the news as it happens, not a scientist working behind the scenes.
1. The laser could be depoyed indefinitely to the region of conflict at lower cost.
Not neccessarily. A 747 is very expensive, but a boat big enough and fast enough to carry the laser and still fulfill the mission is probably almost as expensive. Further more, a boat probably isn't the best choice strategically, as I'll point out below. (Note however that my expertise is limited to aircraft, not ships. Don't take it as a bias, though.
2. It would also allow the laser to fire while the missile was still slow, full of fuel, and very close to the ground.
Perhaps, but bear in mind that one of the key points of the "airborne" laser is that the missle can be shot down at any point of its trajectory, preferably high up in the atmosphere near its apex, or over the territory of the ones who launched it if such action were justified. An aircraft is probably the preferred vehicle because they can go literally anywhere on the earth's surface (with a ship, you'd be limited to the launch sites that happen to be relatively close to the coast), and they are at least an order of magnitude faster than ships.
3. The larger payload of a ship would allow the laser to be much more powerful than one deployed on a 747.
Very right, but the laser that will be installed on the 747 is already the largest laser in the world. There is the issue of practicality. You may be able to have a higher powered laser on a ship capable of destroying a missle 500 miles away (versus the Airborne Laser's 200), but you run the risk of not getting there on time or at all.
4. The cost and risk of deploying 747s to a theater of operations could be prohibitive.
That's never stopped the Air Force before.
1. Would a big, slow ship be more vulnerable to counterattack than a big, slow 747?
Speaking relatively, I'd say a ship would be MUCH slower and therefore vulnerable to attack than a 747. Airplanes can attack ships effectively and ships can attack ships effectively, but the only thing that can attack airplanes effectively is airplanes. (If that made much sense...)
2. Would water vapor present at the surface diffract the beam so much it became unusable? For that matter, what about inclement weather?
Good question... I'm inclined to believe that things on the surface such as water vapour and weather would lessen the power of such a weapon. Whereas at high altitudes above the clouds, you let little else than clean and thin air.
All that aside, putting a laser weapon system on a ship in the future could very well be a good strategy. Probably not for shooting down global-reach missles, but for shooting down enemy aircraft overhead (remember, lasers track quite well) or for attacking other ships.
(Still need to find a way to get at those damn submarines!)
The problem (if you're dying) is warheads, not missiles. If I'm Saddam/whoever and I have a nuke, even if it doesn't fit in a backpack, I can put it onboard a 5-knot freighter and slowly send it to Washington, DC. I can then detonate it once it's near enough to kill all the politicians (this would likely cause Saddam's popularity to rise, but I digress).
If a warhead fits in a backpack (Former Soviet Scientists developed -- and may now be selling -- just such a thing) the possibilities for delivery are ENDLESS. Why risk both failure and detection by leaving a missile contrail back to Baghdad/wherever so you'll be attacked by the US? The generals proposing SDI should learn chess, and to think "outside the box" of missiles. If we can't win the tax-and-spend war on (some) drugs that's one thing, but an expensive failure here costs not just taxes, but lives -- needlessly.
I'm not saying the Democrats are right, of course (they just don't get their loot from fatcat military contractors, relying instead on fatcat trial lawyers). The Democrats are wrong that there should not be an SDI, there should, but it should be (mostly) directed OUT -- towards asteroids. (To anticipate the counterargument, dinosaurs would have probably found the possibility remote, too...)
jammer99@hushmail.com
(Cowardly, but merely Pseudonymous, not anonymous.)
So what happens when the computer makes a wrong decision?
Well, "ding.wav" probably sounds, along with a popup "Fatal Error" message which lets you click only on OK, rebooting the plane.
Man, with one of these we could hold the world hostage for
<pinky>one *million* dollars</pinky>
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Being an aeronautics fan myself, I have to say that this is really, really old toy turned real with a convincing budget.
The first ideas of a 747 with an ICBM lauch-detector telescope and laser mounts to shot-down those missiles have been around since the eighties.
I have in my hads (paper support: really old) a drawing of one of those military B-747 as an intergal part of the SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative: a.k.a "Reagan's Star Wars).
Reagan years went away and SDI was dropped because the "enemy" collapsed (= the cold war was won by economics). But now, Dubyia thinks that some major contributors of his campaign must make some bucks building an eighties-idea with new-millenium technology and Daddy's advice.
Anyway, nothing new under the sun.
Regards, opkool
You can whine all you want, but a soveriegn nation is just that.
It's easy for the little countries to cry about abuse of power. They've never abused their power, but then again they've never been in the situation the United States finds itself in.
I recall a certain island nation in Western Europe...
Blar.
I hope they don't use MS OS to control the laser, cause I don't want to see the blue-screen-of-death while the laser is being used. :-)
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
While I can sympathize with the discomfort that the system will fire itself, I don't think we are (yet) at the point where we should fear the technology. After all, there are still people deciding where the plane will fly and what the rules of engagement will be for the laser.
This system is far more refined in its targeting capabilities than nuclear weapons. Nukes take out whole cities indiscriminately, this will only -- okay, it's designed to only -- take out missles and aircraft. Missles are obviously not civilian, so that only leaves the possibility of targeting the wrong aircraft. And since anyone flying a plane should know how to use the radio, there shouldn't be cases of civilians accidentally ending up in the path of an autonomous system.
When someone decides to apply an AI to deciding what is a target to begin with, then we'll have gone too far.
Nope, no sig
I used to bullseye womp rats in beggar's canyon back home.. they're not much bigger than 2 meters.
The 747 could be up to 30,000 ft, putting the horizon at 202 miles (176 nautical miles). And if you're that far away you'll be taking several hours to fly around him and by the time you're behind him and his AWACS picks you up, he'll just leisurely turn around and point the laser at you again...
:)
Also, from what I've been able to determine, the maximum effective range for most US Air to Air guided missiles is about 110 nautical miles. And unless you're terrain hugging you'll probably be visible at a range over the 202 (176 nautical miles) mile mark, but we'll ignore that slight difference. So you're approximately 66 nautical miles from firing range. It's a safe bet you'll be travelling at or near supersonic speeds so you could bridge that gap within a minute. Now I am not an expert in materials technology so I can't tell you how long it would take for the laser to burn through a critical system in a plane. I just think that a minute would be cutting it pretty close...
Also, it wouldn't surprise me if they equipped the 747 (or it's escort craft) with some form of point defense mechanism.
It'd be an interesting to see what would happen.
anyone watch that movie real genious where they did this,
all saddam has to do nwo is wrap all his tanks in foil wrap and that should do the trick.
I do like the spin idea, though it won't work if the pulse is very short.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
I guess Sadam will be going down to walmart to buy mirror tiles for his missiles then.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
When we discover that a massive asteroid is heading towards us, so that we can shoot it down with three laser beams.
Like in that super-cheesy TV movie, Asteroid.
I wonder if this thing is in the visible range? That amount of energy for that length of time is going to light up the sky if it is visible. Good job they can fly by instruments as they'll have to cover the cockpit windows.
The discovery channel had a special on this about 3 years ago in which they used a 767 for this. They used a small targeting laser then a high powered laser that would burn through the sides of the missles. They estimated 1000 USD per shot. I'd be careful if they named it "project Dagobah", you never know what they have planned next.
I am !amused.
Somehow I feel as if we had posted this a while ago - no search found it. i do remember that this has been talked about for quite some time, tho'.
You're right. It's been discussed since about 1985.
Simply blow up the other plane before they blow you up!
A few years ago there was a documentary about the SDI ("Star Wars"), and there was footage of a test from the 80s.
IIRC a DC-10 was used to store the laser and computers for the targeting (big ass computers back then, therefore big plane, I believe a plane smaller than a 747 could be used nowadays(ie, a smaller target)).
Anyway, a F-4 Phantom then fired a heat seeking missile at the plane (the warhead had been removed, but the missile could still have brought down the plane). There was some great footage of the missile being sliced in two by the laser.
They must have been pretty confident that it would work as if it hadn't there was a chance the plane would have been destroyed.
Now of course, over 10 years later the US can't get missiles to hit other missiles, when back then they had a working laser.
"There are bad people out there that will try to do bad things." - Microsoft 05/11/00
Air Force Vision:
Air Force people building the world's most respected air and space force-Global Power and Reach for America.
Air Force Mission:
To defend the Untied States through control and exploitation of Air and Space.
What the hell is wrong with these people? Global power and exploitation?
I also suspect that a "kill" against the missle would not be hard - you are either attacking a thin radome, or blinding a IR sensor. It's aspect to the plane would not change much, as the missle is trying to fly in a straight line to the plane. On the other hand, the software will likely only be developed to attack ballistic missles for now. Just wait for version 2.0 though!
Also, red tends to be less absorbed (hence red sunsets - longer path through the atmosphere absorbs the shorter wavelengths). A blue gigawatt laser would be awesome for heating the air out to about, say, a mile. Likely get a thundercrack out of it. And get to fly though it :-)
http://home.achilles.net/~jtalbot/history/starwars .html
Note the 'Albuquerque Office' reference...
For sure they are not working on a new way to JiffyPop.
-- Wherever you go, there you are. BB
See also:
http://www.reagan.com/plate.main/ronald/speeches/r rspeech0f.html
http://www.airdisaster.com/cvr/kal007.html
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I remember seeing a show- and I can't remember exactly which one- on TLC or the Discovery channel last year about military lasers. One of the biggest problems they encountered was distortion due to atmospheric interference. They solved the problem with a flexible mirror, controlled by many little actuators that changed the surface angle(s) to correct for disturbance miles up. Pretty cool. As to whether they should- it's a moot point. Progress is inevitable, and the military is hardly going to abandon all that research and possible technology just because there's nobody worth killing right now. Funny, Real Genius was on TV last night. Quite relevant!
Isn't that discrimatory towards the members of the population who look like ICMB's? Just imagine: You're walking down the street 5,000 feet above Iraq, and suddenly you get your ass burned off! Just because you're 70 feet tall, 10 feet around, and have a tremendous plume of burning gas behind you (the result of an unrelated gastrointestinal disorder, I'm sure) you get indiscriminately attacked by psychotic targeting computers! We have to stop this thing right away, or pretty soon anybody who looks like any type of missile will be at risk!
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
More tax dollars well spent....lets put a huge laser on a commercial airliner for no apparent reason what so ever...........yeah..makes since
If a bird or birds flies into the motors of a plane like this it can badly damage the plane or down it. If the laser mistakes a flock of oncoming geese as a missle it's probably best to shoot them down anyways.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
The US Air Force has been working on what they call an "Airborne Laser" for years. The idea is to provide a defense against ballistic missiles in a particular theatre of battle. For instance, in the middle east, when Iraq was shooting scuds all over the place. The airborne laser, like the Patriot missile, would be used to shoot down missiles, but unlike the Patriot, which shoots down ballistic missiles as they are approaching their target, the airborne laser would shoot down the missile just after launch. That way, the payload and the missile would fall near the launch site.
If you want more info, go over to FAS, the poor man's Jane's Defense Review.
So don't worry about the computer firing the laser, unless it's name HAL, or Shodan, or Skynet, or something... :-)
A very good history of laser beams can be found at http://students.washington.edu/jboyd/laser.htm.
I believe you will find it informative and of relevance to this story.
I wonder if this could be used against ground targets, or is it only good against the relatively fragile missiles? I can imagine that it would be handy to be able to be waaay far away and zap your enemy without risk. Even if all you could do is blind the troops, that might be nearly as good as blowing up their stuff.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
How about taking one of those huge transports that are currently under development, and putting two of these side by side. Then fly 10 in formation and use them to take out aircraft...
This idea isn't that new. It was part of the Reagan administations Star Wars program, they just didn't have a targeting system capable of hitting a moving missle from a flying platform. But when Star Wars was scraped, this idea was also. I think they started working on it again in 1997 or 1998.
I was just responding to the troll above... I know there are fine planes coming from the USA, although I wouldn't put either any of the DC10 or the 747 into this category (they are both issued from several decades old design).
The airborn laser is meant to be used at medium range (100 miles or so) on fast moving targets (several Mach number). This is outside the range of current DU projectiles (and SAMs). The idea is that the intense power of the laser beam will weaken the structure of vehicles traveling around Mach 2 or more. Aerodynamic forces would cause the target to disintigrate (aerodynamic forces on a weakened Mach structure is what destroyed the US space shuttle--the shuttle did not actually explode, but rather disintigrated).
A Scud missile re-entering the atmosphere is traveling at several Mach number, making it nearly impossible for a projectile to hit. The same is true of ICBMs. Directed energy weapons (such as lasers) show great promise in use for this class of target.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
USAF has been working on airborne laser concepts for years as part of various theatre and strategic missile defense projects. The 747 is a good platform for this - lots of payload capacity (power generation for the laser) and plenty of duration to loiter in a threat area.
But don't think this is going to be a "Battlestar Gallactica" with wings. The plane is going to be one great big high-value target. It will need escort fighters, tankers to refuel the fighters, maybe an AWACS to manage things,... you get the idea. Then there needs to be a ground base to maintain the laser system, housing for the technicians, facilities.... Multiply by the number of aircraft necessary to provide 24x7 defense of an area and you begin to get an idea of the difference between a one-off technology demonstration and a real weapon system.
ummm... yeah...
so that's why all the battleships were decommissioned several years ago...
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/US-Israel/thel.ht ml
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
To make a house full of pop corn!
...it decides to track a Cessna at a few miles out and destroy it because it 'seemed' to be on an intercept course. Wasn't 'Wargames' enough of a lesson that we shouldn't give up control?
Sounds like SOFIA. An infra-red telescope that's being put into a 747SP. It's supposed to be based at NASA's Ames Research Center when it's finished. It's not a weapons system, it's an observatory.
Hopefully whoever engineers this project decides NOT to equip the guidance system with a M$ OS, i could see it now "nuke bearing off from cuba... fire fire.. OMG not another Blue Screen of Death"
1. clouds ? - the strength of the laser will decrease as it shoots through a cloud.
2. aiming the thing; the missile is moving very fast, the plane is moving fast and is not so stable, the missile and the plane are far away from eachother... all in all that makes it very hard to aim correctly.
3. power of laser ? It takes a very powerful laser to destroy something, this requires some serious power generation. How hard would it be to make missiles resistant against a laser ?
All in all I wouldn't be surprised if this plan came from a politician that is friendly with Boeing or one of the laser weapon manufacturers.
Lets see... what would happen if the officers had to use one of these OS's to fire the weapon....
DOS: The officers would see this after firing: Abort, Retry, Fail?
Windows 98: the officers would miss all the targers trying to get the wizard to configure the laser properly.
Windows 2000: the officers would fire and the plane would blow up from a blue screen of death(wonder if the laser color is blue?)
Mac OS:As soon as they fire a Type 11 error, Please Reboot comes up and laser does nothing
Mac OS X: Officers are too tripped out watching the fire app scale from big to small in the docking bar.
Linux: Officers are to busy re-compiling their kernel's to fire
Amiga OS: Officers miss chance to fire while ranting how this 10 yearold OS is still the best
BeOS: never installed.. could'nt find a copy so they installed DOS instead.
:)
If you think about it, a projectile has to calculate a collision in turbelent air for two things - itself and the target- at ridiculous closing speeds - maybe mach 6 or higher. and if it misses the first time, you need to send another missile.
a turreted laser, on the other hand, only has to follow it's target- if it misses one second, it can readjust the next, and depending on how far away the missile is, the tracking speed of the turret doesn't have to be that fast - maybe three degrees a second for a missile thats twenty miles away, and thats' probably being generous.
the only problem is having this big easy target in the sky over hot spots, but if it can destroy incoming anti-aircraft missiles, it should be safe with a fighter support and available SEAD weapons. (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses)
also, on a cool extra-geeky note, it might be the first significant use of energy weapons! how far off are the Phasors?
And I bet a beowulf cluster of these couldv'e gotten every scud ever launched in the gulf war.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Don't they know that good will always win over evil?
--
Major assembly began last August, but I remember seeing an unmarked 747 at the Boeing plant a few years ago with some strange hood over the back part of the "hump". It appeared that this hood slid backwards, perhaps not a laser but a high altitude telescope to check out satellites?
l /i ndex.htm
At any rate the home page of the airborne laser is here:
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/military/ab
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I think there is a great testsite somewhere in Redmond... could it be?
Sheesh, are we a bit nationalistic or what?
Yeah, you could say that.
Keep in mind that you guys are the most trigger happy people in the world. Maybe Hitler would have used it but nobody else.
I answer most of the other stuff in a post further down, but I couldn't let this one go. Do you really think DeGaulle would have resisted using the nuke? Not a chance. Churchill? Possible, but I think if it would have ended the war he would have been as ready to use it as Truman was. And if you think that Stalin would have refrained, you're being delusional.
Laser weapon mirrors are incredibly well designed. This is what took 20 years to design. They have to be extremely well constructed, out of special materials (i dont know what materials, i dont build mirrors and its highly classified stuff anyway in these cases). The mirrors *have* to use whats known as adaptive optics which in many cases is hundreds of tiny pistons are computer controlled to change the shape of the mirror (which itself is composed of many many mirrors). This allows the system to compensate for airframe jitter, and to focus the laser beam on its target. Naturally, this requires ALOT of fast computation when your target is moving several times the speed of sound (granted, this system sounds like its designed for scuds, which move about mach 3, as opposed to ballistic ICBM's, which move at mach 11+).
-
... a large spinning mirror and you can vaporize a human target from space"
-- Real Genius
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had the idea in Footfall.. the fithp had laser weapons in orbit and on ships such that they could destroy anything that resembled military equipment...
they also had big self-propelled metal bars hanging around in orbit which could be directed down upon an area, functioning as thin, heavy, guided meteors...
ìì!
"No human finger will actually pull a trigger. Onboard computers will decide when to fire the beam." I find this to be a bit disconcerting. "
;)
As long as you don't look like an enemy target to the computer then you have nothing to worry about.
forth ?love if honk then
Go learn some physics and come back. Massless-ness doesn't matter. Volume and Density don't matter. It carries energy (E=hv) and momentum (p=E/c), and the transfer of momentum that occurs upon reflection is what imparts pressure.
I am an enlisted member of the Air Force and first wish to note that I am not a member or participant of this project. I have no affiliation with it whatsoever. However, it is interesting use of technology to me and I've been following it very closely.
The official website: Airborne Laser.
To be blunt, this isn't new news. It's been in design for a couple years now and they're just now getting ready to test fly the actual aircraft with the laser onboard pretty soon now. It's undergoing preliminary testing at the base I'm currently stationed at. (Kirtland AFB, NM)
The slashdotter's concern that a computer controls the laser should come as a surprise to no one. Almost every part of every aircraft and space vehicle is controlled primary by computers, to include weapons systems.
Perhaps there is the concern that this plane will go up, fly itself, and indiscriminately shoot down whatever it finds. That is bull. It will be flown by experienced pilots with expertly trained individuals operating the laser weapon systems. The computer *has* to be the one to "pull the trigger" because the calculations are far to numerous for humans to do. But the computer is always being operated by a person.
How it works is rather interesting. The crew first receives news of a missle launch somehow and it's approximate coordinates. The fly to the approximate area of the missle and try to identify it. Based on the type of missle it is, the computer picks out a specific spot to fire the high-powered laser at on the missle, (such as the fuel tank) to ensure its destruction. A tracking laser locks on to the missle while the high powered laser fires and destroys the missle within seconds. This is, of course, greatly simplified.
Hemos noted that this hasn't appeared on slashdot before.. that's partially correct. It's never been an actual story, but the conversation has come up many times before in the comments where discussion has been on the topic of US defense against global weapons. I know I've mentioned the airborne laser at least once to prove my point.
was a good idea, but there are some flaws.
This is the first step the living in the world of Terminator! Better go buy some German Shepherds so that you can tell when the real humans come to your house or when the termintor robots do..
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
I would love to know what kind of mirror design they use for the thing. The most crucial component of any high powered laser the mirror, because it has to withstand over a megawatt of energy pressure and heat, AND must be comprised of computationally intensive adaptic optics technology to cancel out the jitter of the airframe and atmosphere. This is what 20 years of hard work to do
-
If the Concorde disaster has shown anything...
Well, considering it's the first one to crash, ever, I'd have to say they are in fact quite safe...
/Mikael Jacobson
"But surely we won't be still stuck with Linux in 25 years!?"
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
This scares me less than Microsoft driven voting systems.
This is a fairly common thing for time-critical weapons. The human operator controls the system with an "enable" button -- holding down the button signals that it's OK to fire the laser or drop the bomb or whatever. It's the computer that decides the precise moment to shoot. If the enable button is not held, the weapon can't go off.
I am confused...why the nose. It would seem like the worst possible place to put this thing. The targeting system requires a predictable and stable platform from which to fire, I imagine the nose is not the best place....
Besides, don't you get 360 degrees of viewable space from the bottom? You could'nt do much better than say 270ish from the nose, at best, less you run the risk of burning your wings off. =P Sure, you lose the ability to shoot up, but I don't imagine these things will be flying below (very close to the ground), or at the level of (maneuvering?) likely targets, will it? I imagine well above the action is the best place for such a weapon....or am I on crack?