Battlefield Lasers

KeyShark writes: "An article on FoxNews describes how front-line troops soon will be protected by battlefield lasers designed to shoot down rockets, artillery shells and even mortars."

Comments

Not too hard.

[man_ls]

Sounds like they put a fire-finder radar tracking station onto a laser. They've had the ability to plot trajectory and such of incoming shells for quite a while, but now they'll be able to do something about it other than leave.

Unfortunately, I have suspicions if this will ever make it to deployment. The U.S. also has an anti-satellite laser weapon that has been tested and confirmed to work by overloading the circuits -- and it was nixed because of the poltical tension it would create.

Re:Not too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's an amazingly difficult control systems problem, especially if you have no advanced warning, as in these cases. The rockets that they downed were Katyushas, which are really simple, THICK metal tubes full of explosives. I saw the video of the tests back in July--the thing is really impressive. The laser itself in invisible and the source looks like one of those World War II signaling lamps on ships. If you look at the video of the Katyushas, you just see it flying along, it gets red, then poof!
As far as deployment goes, Israel has been pressuring the US for the last several months to at least put up a few stations in northern Israel--it's that effective. The main problem right now is that it's just not mobile, and it's not battle hardened. In other words, taking it out would be easy. But, eventually given enough money and time, they'll get this on the back of a truck, and then you're in business.

Re:Not too hard.

[maladroit]

It seems unlikely that political tension would causing deployment problems. There's a world of difference between the strategic and the tactical.

An anti-satellite weapon creates strategic worries - it could be used as a prelude to first nuclear strike, for instance, or directed against civilian satellites in some sort of economic warfare.

This, however, is almost purely tactical, and purely defensive. There really isn't someone trying to defend the right of mortar shells to land on someone.

Re:Not too hard.

[Lobsang]

Not too hard?

I think it may be impossible. You're forgetting:

1) Decoys
2) More decoys
3) Even more decoys
4) Foliage
5) Line of sight
6) Rain
7) Fog
8) Snow

Am i forgetting something here?

Re:Not too hard.

[flacco]

The U.S. also has an anti-satellite laser weapon that has been tested and confirmed to work by overloading the circuits -- and it was nixed because of the poltical tension it would create.

The coming space-weapons arms race with China will probably make political tensions irrelevant.

Re:Not too hard.

[tuxlove]

Am i forgetting something here?

9) Friendlies

Don't want to be hitting your own ordnance on the way out to the enemy!

Re:Not too hard.

[czardonic]

This, however, is almost purely tactical, and purely defensive.

I disagree. Any device that gives us the advantage by reducing the effectiveness of our rivals is likely to be protested. This is no different to missle-defense, which the Russians are not too hapy about.

Re:Not too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

>>>I disagree. Any device that gives us the advantage by reducing the effectiveness of our rivals is likely to be protested. This is no different to missle-defense, which the Russians are not too hapy about.

Balooney.

The Ruskies could care less. They just want to maximize political mileage out of US political bungling.

They have more than enough know out to create effective countermeasures to every missile defense proposal ever made. Their existing aging missle stockpile is more than 20x bigger than necessary to overwhelm the present SDI proposal ... assuming the missle defense system works at all.

Re:Not too hard.

[maladroit]

There are almost constant changes in the tactical arena that reduce the effectiveness of our rivals - more armor, better radar, faster jets, more realistic training, guided munitions, etc. But the diplomatic wars virtually always center around strategic concerns, like nuclear weapons, and other long reach weapons and 'weapons of mass destruction'.

Re:Not too hard.

[MxTxL]

Hmm, very true... with a 20 second window for busting mortar attacks, the laser operators (well, really the laser software) better know ahead of time which shells belong to who. This is just another good application for the whole 'digital battlefield' concept that you hear about on the discovery channel all the time. Allied forces need to have detailed computer positioning on all their units and be warned ahead of time what's expected to come flying out of where.

Re:Not too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

Evidently you failed to correctly read the parent post, as well as the article, which discussed MIRACL and so forth. "The US also has an anti-satellite laser weapon" where do you get space based? This thing is on the ground. Somebody mod down EccentricAnomaly, and attempt to expose him to goatse.cx.

Re:Not too hard.

[Knobby]

Am i forgetting something here?

Yep.. You're missing density variations and laser induced heating of the local atmosphere. Both of which will degrade the power of your beam, and complicate aiming the device. The Air Forces Airborne laser program attempted to solve these using a pair of low power lasers to sample the atmosphere and track the object. Given the information from the low power lasers, the optics for the primary laser could be corrected to hit the target. I'm not sure they ever got the system to work, but I seem to recall the power of the beam to be roughly equivilent to 30 ocyacetylin (sp?) torches focused on a single point.. There was a lot of speculation in the articles I read, suggesting that the laser power would be attenuated by some staggering amount by the atmosphere, and the chances for success were considered minimal by some of the scientists working on the project..

Re:Not too hard.

[man_ls]

I *never* said space-based anywhere in my post. Your comments are well thought out and I wouldn't mod you down for that, but I certainly wouldn't mod you up because you didn't read the article.

The anti-satellite laser is on the *ground* somewhere in the desert, probably the testing grounds near White Sands National Monument, in the gypsum fields. It's less of a "laser" and more of an "electromagnetic radiation emmitter" and it fries the satellites less by heat and more by a super-concentrated burst of radio energy.

The 747-mounted laser is a theater-defense weapon designed to fly around "hot-spots" in the world and shoot down something that is launched, within minutes of the launch, by using heat. It's a prototype, not too effective, I don't even think it's had more than one real test. *shrug*

Re:Not too hard.

[BLAG-blast]

One more:

- very shiny reflective missles maybe?

Re:Not too hard.

[czardonic]

I can't imagine that a device that could detonate ordinance before it reaches it's target would not be of strategic interest.

Re:Not too hard.

[SlideGuitar]

Uh... can someone comment on mirrors?

Like if I make a really shiny tank, can I drive around and be impervious to mean old high energy lazers? Why not?

What about shiny shiny mortar shells? Could they be safe?

thank you and goodnight!

Re:Not too hard.

[Asgard]

IANAS, but few reflective surfaces are 100% reflective (if any), so some energy will be absorbed, which will marr the surface, causing more energy to be absorbed, etc. It may help a little, but not much.

Re:Not too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. anti-satellite laser weapons are ground based, not space based. The one tested is called MIRACL.

Re:Not too hard.

[child_of_mercy]

orbital weapons intended to be used against terrestrial targets would be mad to be anything other than ballistic.

having gone to thr trouble of climbing to the top of the gravity well why not use all that potential energy?

"Thors hammer" style devices as written about by Larry Niven spring to mind.

A flying crowbar with minimal guidance systems can come down from orbit literally like the wrath of god.

but for blasting other stuff in space the speed of lasers would be helpful.

Re:Not too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

but for blasting other stuff in space the speed of lasers would be helpful.

True, but what's wrong with gravel? Dump a load of gravel, ball bearings or even plastic pellets in front of an enemy satellite. Make sure they have a high closing speed and you end up with a bigger debris field than you started with.

Re:Not too hard.

[child_of_mercy]

a) you'll bugger up your own orbit flinging gravel,

b) time to close will preclude many firing solutions

I'm sure we'll see a variety of approaches successfully applied.

Re:Not too hard.

[PhuCknuT]

one of the advantages to using a laser is that it won't blast the target into 1000 pieces, i'll just fry the electronics. You blow up a satellite in orbit and the debris will still be orbiting, slowly spreading out like a giant shotgun blast.

Reminds me of a theory that says once we get enough satellites in orbit, one or two of them exloding would be all that's needed to start a chain reaction where debris hits satellites, causing more debris, hitting more satellites, etc. The end result is enough junk in orbit that we can't launch anyhting into orbit without it being pummeled. Don't think we're quite near that many satellites yet though (i hope).

Re:Not too hard.

[ThatComputerGuy]

I remember a teacher of mine stating that a mirror is some 97 or so percent reflective, and the silver, which is one of, if not _the_ most reflective surface, is 98%.

Draw whatever conlusions you want based on that, but I'm pretty sure that losing 98% of the laser is not a good thing.

Re:Not too hard.

[RamboMambo]

Well hitting with the laser is like hitting a bullet with a bullet. It's not easy when you don't know where the missle comes from. And it will work only on fire and forget missle. If you can't calculate the way it travels i think it would be hard to hit it.

Re:Not too hard.

[Happy go Lucky]

Like if I make a really shiny tank, can I drive around and be impervious to mean old high energy lazers? Why not?

Couple of problems. No surface is ever perfectly reflective. And if an incoming beam has enough energy to do real damage to Chobham armor, then the mirror will probably not last too long.

Also, armor is good. Not being hit is better. Even if you could make a tank impervious to lasers by making a disco ball out of it, you still have issues with the more-conventional anti-tank munitions. Not to mention, you've just made the tank one hell of a lot more visible.

It's just a grander scale of what I teach at a certain police academy: Vests are good. I heartily approve of them. However, they're not magic. It's better to keep in mind that if a problem individual can't locate you well enough to shoot, he can't shoot. That's why tanks are painted camo.

What about shiny shiny mortar shells? Could they be safe?

If you can make them perfectly reflective on whatever spectrum is used. I doubt that, to be honest.

Re:Not too hard.

[JimPooley]

Well maybe they could use it when they accidentally drop bombs on their own people or their allies...

Re:Not too hard.

[Dyolf Knip]

Adaptive optics, yeah. They use it to reduce (ie, virtually eliminate) atmospheric distortion in telescopes and may be used to make vision correcting laser surgery even more effective. How'd you like to have 20/10 vision?

Re:Not too hard.

[Dyolf Knip]

Depends on the power of the laser, how well the surface reflects, and the melting/boiling point of the material. No mirror is 100% effective. Once the shiny surface absorbs enough of the energy from the laser it'll boil away and won't be much use anymore.

Re:Not too hard.

[Dyolf Knip]

Decoys

Well, the first MIRV ICBM's were like that. There'd be one warhead and a bunch of decoys. Of course, then someone realized that the enemy had no way of shooting down either the warhead or the decoys and that the cost of the warhead was cheap compared to that of the missile, so they gave up on the decoys. How much more expensive is a mortar that can kill you than a decoy which will merely annoy you?

Foliage

Fantastic. Now ground troops are given yet another set of contradictory imperatives: find cover in the trees vs don't be under the trees where your lasers are useless.

Line of sight

Well, all that says to me is that if this tech catches on, the days of artillery firing from over the horizon (or at all, really) are essentially over.

Water in the air

Agree, very big problem. Hmmm, I wonder what the effect of a high power laser is on the atmosphere. What happens when air and water vapor are heated to extremely high temperatures? Anyone know if it might it mitigate the dissipating effects somewhat?

Re:Not too hard.

[Dyolf Knip]

If you can make them perfectly reflective on whatever spectrum is used. I doubt that, to be honest.

Hahaha, I hadn't thought of that! What kinds of materials reflect, say, an infrared beam? Anyone know offhand?

Re:Not too hard.

[ErikZ]

Last I heard, they built 12 of the things. I hope they bothered to make sure it worked.

Re:Not too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

The current US Army counter-fire system, QuickFire, is a radar that back-plots incoming artillery & mortar fire, and when linked to a howitzer battery's network, is able to have shots going down range to the enemy launch area in about 5 seconds, which gives the enemy about 20 seconds max total to get out of the area. Not enough time.

Re:Not too hard.

[dossen]

Well, if the laser is set to protect your forces in a specific area, then no friendly rounds should be heading into this area. If there are, then either your defence zone is set too wide, or you are fireing close to your own troops, for which there should be special procedures. Or you've made a mistake, in which case it is good to shoot down the round. Basicly you just need to determine the approximate target of the trajectory, and match that against you troop deployment.

Re:Not too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

Decoys cost money, take space, and are a pain in the ass. If they don't look exactly like the real warhead, you can ignore them. This means that they must have the same flight characteristics as the real warhead. Since they're in the atmosphere, that means the same radar reflectivity and drag (at least). You can't just put tin foil up there. That means that they're heavy, take space, and reduce the room for the real warhead. Endoatmospheric decoys aren't that simple. Furthermore, when are these decoys going to be deployed? In an ICBM, you are generally intercepting the warhead after atmosphere reentry (with a ground-based system), but with this tactical system you're killing a rocket during boost phase (I assume, I don't see the original article in this thread, so I can't tell for sure). If you get the rocket before the warhead deploys, decoys aren't a problem, anyway. Even if you attack the warhead post-deployment, see earlier argument for problems with decoys. Your other points have merit, because the weather can attenuate the LASER at some frequencies. However, if the LASER is in a non-visible-light frequency band, it might be able to overcome the weather attenuation. I don't know the answer to that.

Re:Not too hard.

[Beowulf Smith]

You guys are all forgetting one major thing. This weapon system was developed in Israel, by Israeli's with some support and funding by the US. The Israeli's could give a rat's ass what Russia or China thinks about this weapon system. They will use it anyway, to knock down Syrian missiles and Palestinian mortar shells. Their recent actions clearly show they do not care what the international community thinks, which is as it should be. The US could learn a lesson from them.

Re:Not too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

The anti-satellite gov't plan has failed most of it's tests, and when they did work, the missles were rigged with some sort of sensor (I read this a long time ago) that in essence yelled to the systems "Here I am!"

Re:Not too hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't imagine that a device that could detonate ordinance before it reaches it's target would not be of strategic interest.

That's because you can't understand the difference between "strategic" and "tactical", moron.

Re:Not too hard.

[CBravo]

I guess you can use the same techniques used for re-entry vehicles. I believe dodging a laser is much more effective though.

Re:Not too hard.

[overunderunderdone]

1) Decoys
2) More decoys
3) Even more decoys

It seems to me that if three out of four of your enemies mortars or short range missles (which only have one warhead) were being wasted firing decoys you would have accomplished 3/4's of your defensive goals. As for why your enemy would be dumb enough to fire decoy mortar shells rather than just fire more of the real thing is another question.

4) Foliage

Seems a pretty easy problem to fix when positioning the laser.

5) Line of sight

Since mortar shells and short range missles fly through the sky rather than sneek around hills this isn't a big problem. I suppose using cruise missles would defeat this system but since Hezbullah and Hamas don't have any (very few nations do) it still achieves it's goal.

6) Rain
7) Fog
8) Snow

Perhaps a real problem (I don't know.) In it's use as a defense against mortars and short range tactical missles your enemy can now only attack you when he can't see to aim at you which is a pretty good defense against such weapons. In any event I suppose the Isreali's would be happy to limiting the sometimes daily rocket attacks to just rainy or snowy days given how rare such days are in Isreal.

Re:Not too hard.

[Bobo the Space Chimp]

Absolutely not.

It's like hitting a tub with a really long stick. That's much easier to do.

Re:Not too hard.

[Tassach]

It should be pretty simple to distinguish between outgoing and incoming artillery with doppler radar. [Infantrymen have been doing this for years by sound] Furthermore, if the software can track the shell well enough to shoot it down, it can predict where it's going to hit -- and if it's coming down close to you, it doesn't really matter who fired it.

In reality, this is more of a command and control issue, for which we have already worked out a solution. Don't you think the military has procedures to make sure that (for example) our airplanes don't accidentally fly through the middle of a friendly artillery barrage? You are not going to hear much about it on The Discovery Channel because the details are classified.

Re:Not too hard.

[Hal-9001]

Silver may be the most reflective material, but it is not the most reflective surface. It is possible to construct dielectric multilayers such that the reflected light constructively interfere and transmitted light destructively interferes and thus get 99.999999% reflectance. Unfortunately, such mirrors are only good for light of a specific wavelength coming from a specific direction, and if you know where the laser is coming from, you might as well recompute your trajectory to avoid it.

More of an issue is the mechanism by which metals reflect, which is for their electrons to absorb 100% of the light (distributed through a couple of skin depths of material) and re-emit the light back in the direction it came from. As a result, metal mirrors are very rarely used in high-power laser applications because they can fail catastrophically, and at relatively low powers compared to dielectric mirrors. That also means that making a really shiny metal artillery shell, missile, airplane or satellite won't protect you from a laser attack.

Probably the best defense you have against laser attack is the atmosphere, as something that's intended to damage metal will probably ionize the air it's traveling through and either deflect itself by local changing the refractive index, or block itself by making the air an opaque plasma.

Re:Not too hard.

[EccentricAnomaly]

I *never* said space-based anywhere in my post. Your comments are well thought out and I wouldn't mod you down for that, but I certainly wouldn't mod you up because you didn't read the article.

Apologies for the brain fart in reading your post. I did read the article though.

The anti-satellite laser is on the *ground* somewhere in the desert, probably the testing grounds near White Sands National Monument, in the gypsum fields. It's less of a "laser" and more of an "electromagnetic radiation emmitter" and it fries the satellites less by heat and more by a super-concentrated burst of radio energy.

It's less of a laser because it's not a laser but a microwave weapon... possibly a maser but not necessarily a maser... These things can also take down aircraft and disable automobiles.

But what they'll really be used for...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is to annoy the other guys, by shining them on stuff.

Re:But what they'll really be used for...

[Anonymous Coward]

What like: "Who is that tosser in the tank behind, shining his key fob in my friggin' mirror?"

:)

Bad timing

[Reliant-1864]

It's too bad the US soldiers in Afghanistan didn't have that. They'd have been able to protect themselves from their biggest threat

Re:Bad timing

[Dr Caleb]

from their biggest threat

You'd have to have a pretty big laser to shoot down a B52.

Re:Bad timing

[Reliant-1864]

Shooting down aircraft could be an interesting application. Target the fuel area. If computers can track a morter, it shouldn't too much harder to track a jet, as long as it's performing basic maneuvering. We already have hand held laser weapons, as long as you call using a laser pointer and flashing them in a person's eye, a weapon. Make it brighter and more conventional, and you got a weapon that can blind the enemy.

Re:Bad timing

[diesel_jackass]

when you say our "biggest threat" are you talking about ourselves?

(we have killed 3 times as many US soldiers as the Taliban.)

Re:Bad timing

[dumpster_d]

The technology to shoot down aircraft was developed and during the 1970's--no big deal. I remember seeing great footage of the engine compartment being nicely sliced out of a flying drone.

Problem is: the dispersion/diffraction of a high-powered LASER being used outdoors has the side effect of permanently blinding most of the people in line-of-sight to the aircraft [which can be a lot and, of course, include one's own troops].

Question is: why not just attach a whatever-KV potential to a spark-plug in a mini-dish and knock out the target's electronics instead? Should be easier--of course, that'd have little effect upon an incoming shell/bomb once the fuse has been armed.

Re:Bad timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't there something in Tom Clancey's Debt of Honour about a theoretical Japanese system that trashed planes by frying their circuitry? I guess that's thse kind of thing you're describing - sorta like a directable-EMP.

Re:Bad timing

[dumpster_d]

Never read TC.
I know that there are helicopter mounted versions used to disable vehicles.
From what I understand, you can take one a TV mini-dish, pull off the receiver, drill a hole and put a spark-plug in the middle, and hook it to a potential [stun-gun should work fine] and have a directed EMP weapon.
I was thinking of testing this out on my neighbour's car the next time its alarm goes off--I'll keep you posted.

Re:Bad timing

[child_of_mercy]

I believe in the Gulf War the British point blank refused to be the opposing arm of a US pincer movement, fearing that coming from the other direction in "funny looking tanks" they'd be blown to pieces by their allies.

Of course going back further my father was on board HMAS Hobart, in the US gunline off vietnam, when an american F4 mistook them for a helicopter(?) and put a missile into them, killing good men.

And not to get too bitter about it a large chunk of the RAN was sunk at guadalcanal by their american allies (funny looking british built ships).

These things happen but they seem to happen more when americans have their fingers on the trigger.

Re:Bad timing

[arsaspe]

n a TC Book I read, there was an aircraft carrier under attack by some fighter jets. They focused all the radars power on the jet, and fried the computer. If you think about it, it should work. A large microwave dish pumping out a few hundred megawatts of power would easily fry electronics. Of course a simple SAM would also get the job done, but you gotta admire Clancy for coming up with great ideas.

Re:Bad timing

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean friendly fire?

Re:Bad timing

[ghoti221]

Well, it does so happen that the average US soldier has more firepower at his/her beck and call then most troops of other nations.

But I think you're skating on very thin ground when you state that US troops are more prone to friendly fire incidents than other nations. You just don't hear about other nations' problems because they don't make it into the US press.

Re:Bad timing

[child_of_mercy]

well i'm an Australian with family in the British Army.

There's a general perception (might not be true) that American soldiers are discouraged from developing their independent thinking, which in turn leads them to blindly shoot at stuff which may later turn our to be one of their own.

Australian units in Vietnam had MUCH lower rates of friendly fire than their American counterparts, thats the only near-fair comparison I have.

hard part

[simetra]

The hard part will be making the lasers make a cool zapping noise like on Star Wars.

Re:hard part

[diesel_jackass]

this is totally unrelated, but when i first saw the Segway HT i thought..."wouldn't it be cool if it made the same noise as the cars on The Jetsons?"

then 15 or so minutes later:
http://diesel.2y.net/video/JetsonSegway.WMV
(i apologize for the WMV format, a friend made it)

Re:hard part

[slashdot2.2sucks]

..also making the laser scatter off of nothing in empty space so you can see it.

Re:hard part

[ansible]

...or move at a speed substantially slower than the speed of light.

Re:hard part

[isomeme]

Hey, any laser powerful enough to damage or divert artillery shells is going to make *thunder* when it fires. It's the same effect as lightning -- superheated air shocks away from the beam, then slams back in when the beam cuts off. That's way more impressive than zzzzt-whoosh-bleem, far as I'm concerned.

Re:hard part

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that will be easy. It will be hard to make the laser blasts take a while to hit target, so that Han Solo can dodge Greedo's shot.

Re:hard part

[Anonymous Coward]

I just hurt myself laughing. Beautiful :)

Re:hard part

[morbid]

I'll see your 6502 and raise you a Z80!

Re:hard part

[mpe]

Hey, any laser powerful enough to damage or divert artillery shells is going to make *thunder* when it fires. It's the same effect as lightning -- superheated air shocks away from the beam, then slams back in when the beam cuts off. That's way more impressive than zzzzt-whoosh-bleem, far as I'm concerned.

How fast can this laser fire. Drawing too much attention to yourself on a battlefield tends not to be the best of ideas. Since they enemy then knows where to target their weapons.

Re:hard part

[simon_cockle]

Damn right. Zero page had lots of spare bits just waiting to used as counters, flags etc.

Don't much care about the laser.

Re:hard part

[Hoi Polloi]

...or have them make noise in space.

Re:hard part

[Rogerborg]

• Drawing too much attention to yourself on a battlefield tends not to be the best of ideas. Since they enemy then knows where to target their weapons

What weapons though? Projectiles? This thing is designed to shoot them down, and it's not going to get harder if they're aimed right at it. Other beam weapons? Well, then you're in a line-of-sight slugging match, and the best technology (and economy) wins.

Actually, the biggest downside that I can see if the increased chance of friendly fire incidents. If you have a system that is designed to respond to a threat within seconds, you're really going to have to pick up the IFF and battlefield communication.

Friendly Fire

[NatePWIII]

Has anyone ever taken into the consideration that dangerous nature of these things? Maybe I'm thinking wrong but if these lasers are always on then it wouldn't take much to accidentally trip or turn and zap your buddy.

Re:Friendly Fire

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not always on. The current ones cost in the $thousands per second or per fire to run.

You aim, pull the trigger, and get a .5 second burst.

Re:Friendly Fire

[Malc]

Or hit him with the shrapnel from the munition that you just destroyed above his head.

a flame but...

[Sebastopol]

...maybe these can defend against friendly fire. so far all but one american military casaulty in the new war have been due to errant american bombs.

granted the frontline is a deadly place to be, but i'm shocked by how many of our own soldiers we're killing.

then again, i remember the same stories in the Desert Storm, Desert Fox, and the action against Milosovich (choppers downed/stealth fighters downed)

Re:a flame but...

[man_ls]

This has really been how it is in any war. In Vietnam, Napalm would hit allies on the ground as well as the enemies. In World War II, bombs would fall astray and kill civilians and soldiers for the same side. If there's a situation involving dangerous equipment, and humans are involved, there *will* be human error. In this case, it's lives lost - but it was going to happen anyway.

Re:a flame but...

[chancycat]

I read today that 8 Americans have died. Four accidents, and four combat-related. Of the four in combat, three from friendly fire recently, one (CIA) killed by the enemy in the prison uprising.

That's 3/8 due to friendly fire.

Re:a flame but...

[Winged Cat]

Shoot down friendly munitions erroneously aimed at you, only to be shot at for protecting the enemy? Not a good set of options there.

Re:a flame but...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct. The media doesn't like reporting the accidents.

Re:a flame but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Casualties include INJURIES and DEATHS. There have been far more than 4 casualties in the Afghanistan operation. There have been only 8 or so fatalities, 1 during the prison uprising, 3 due to friendly fire today, 4 in a helicopter accident.

casualty

n. pl. casualties

1. An accident, especially one involving serious injury or loss of life.

2. One injured or killed in an accident: a train wreck with many casualties.

3. One injured, killed, captured, or missing in action through engagement with an enemy. Often used in the plural: Battlefield casualties were high.

4. One that is harmed or eliminated as a result of an action or a circumstance: The corner grocery was a casualty of the expanding supermarkets.

fatality

n. pl. fatalities

1a. A death resulting from an accident or a disaster: highway fatalities.

1b. One that is killed as a result of such an occurrence: The driver was one of the fatalities.

2. The ability to cause death or disaster.

3. The quality of being determined by fate.

4. A decree made by fate; destiny.

5. The quality of being doomed to disaster.

Re:a flame but...

[Hal-9001]

In World War II, bombs would fall astray and kill civilians and soldiers for the same side.

Or even when they don't fall astray: IIRC there were a handful of American POWs who were casualities of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Re:a flame but...

[sunking2]

Well, personally this statistic is a pretty good thing considering the number of lbs of explosives dropped and the amount of time US forces have been on the ground. Would you prefer to have 1000 killed in combat just to make your friendly fire ratio look good?

While sometimes ending disasterously, it's a pretty firm belief that close air support is effective and saves lives in the long run (not to mention it can completely turn the tide of a battle).

That being said, i think its time to start moving in some heavy artillery and relax on the bombing a little bit. This war is getting expensive and using a b52 to take out some mortars seems silly when an battery of 155s could do the job quicker, cheaper and probably safer.

Re:a flame but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to tell you this, but your going to have friendly fire in any war.
Imagine if you will, It's dark out, you hear gun fire from far off. It's heading your way. Do you shoot or wait to be shot?

If bullets went whizzing by my head I'd shoot first and ask questions later. Call me crazy I'm all for self preservation.

Re:a flame but...

[andkaha]

If bullets went whizzing by my head I'd shoot first and ask questions later. Call me crazy I'm all for self preservation.

If I ever had to make that decision, I would know that the point where I made the wrong decision was when I decided to put myself in that situation.

Re:a flame but...

[child_of_mercy]

only to have the 155's crew's throats cut in the night.

Re:a flame but...

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd also be very stupid.. If you are being shot at the first thing you do is not to shoot back.. the first thing you do is hit the ground.. the next thing you do is to let whoever's shooting at you if you they can be seen is that your friendly.. IE HI!! IT"S MEE>> FRIENDLY FIRE!! OR STOP!! really loud.. that throws them off for a milli-second and if they don't fire again, then they are friendly or you have a chance to make sure you have at least 24 a2 rounds and switch your lever to burst.

Re:a flame but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Its dangerous just driving a humvee around
in peacetime of course more accidents will
happen when you start blowing stuff up with
thousand pound bombs. I'm shocked that the
number is as low as it is. I remember my
late Uncle who was in the infantry in WWII
from italy to germany(and due to clerical problems he was never shipped home during the
entire time!). One of the things that really
upset him was the time they were assisting
an AA battery and a flight of bombers flew
over and they tried very hard to shoot them
down. Later they found that they were
American aircraft, they apparently killed
quite a few airmen that day. Sad, but alot
of things are, I don't think those marines
expected that they were going to a bar mitzva
this morning.

Re:a flame but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing quite like lobbing 16" cannon shells from a battleship, nor dropping 70 500lb bombs from a B-52. The B-52's are used as much for morale-busting as anything else.

Sure, the red legs could maybe eventually do it, but not really.

And, as far as beating up the caves, they're using "daisy cutters" again (those 15,000-lb bombs dropped from C-130's). I bet we're using FAE's, too. Not to try and crush the caves, but to overpressure the suckers still in them.

I wonder when, if we decide that Those We Want Dead have been pinned down to a few caves, that we siege them by bringing in some seismic teams to map the few mountains they're in, then bring in some oil rig drilling teams to drop down some holes into the caves, and then gas them out (hey, they could probably use Chlorine Dioxide!)

Re:a flame but...

[overunderunderdone]

granted the frontline is a deadly place to be, but i'm shocked by how many of our own soldiers we're killing.

What is amazing since the Gulf War isn't how many of our own soldiers are killed by "friendly" fire but how few are killed by hostile fire. We have become so militarily superior to our enemies that we are in more danger of being accidentally hit by our own weapons than being intentionally targetted by our enemies weapons.

The current situation is a little misleading though since we have very few troops on the ground. I would imagine that among our Afghan allies there have been a very, very high number friendly fire casualties because of the difficulty of coordinating over a quickly moving battlefield with an essentially feudal, decentralised and undisciplined army without uniforms and the propensity of local warlords to switch sides.

Imagine looking at the reconasaince photos: how hard must it be to discern whether that column of turbaned men carrying AK-47's is a Northern Alliance force, A Pashtoon Anti-Taliban force, a Taliban force, Al Queada force, the forces of a local commander who hasn't made up his mind yet, who has made up his mind but hasn't told anyone, who's going to the battle and will make up his mind when he gets there, Or just a bunch of typically well-armed farmers on their way to the fields for the days work? And after the dust settles will the local warlord be honest about which side he was on the moment his men were bombed? Probably not.

A step up for laser pointers

[hether]

Who'd have thought laser pointers would come so far? :)

"...pocket laser pointer is going to bridge the gap between the Persian Gulf War and Star Wars."

Do you think they come with different tips like regular laser pointers do?

I think their idea has great potential, but like they said, this is just their baby, the first version. Its got a way to go before its cost effective, practical, etc.

Re:A step up for laser pointers

[diesel_jackass]

if they did come with the different tips it sure would make it easier for cowfolks to brand their cattle.

Re:A step up for laser pointers

[Anonymous Coward]

With this thing you would be able to see the brand...from each side!

are artillery shells that delicate?

[rebelcool]

I know the airborne laser (uses the same chemical type laser) was capable of shooting down rockets by weakening the metal skins, which the forces of flight would thus rupture and cause the thing to fly apart, but are artillery shells really that delicate?

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[pryan]

For artillery shells without an explosive payload, I would imagine if you could melt the tip, it would throw off the aerodynamics to throw the shell off course. That is assuming, of course, that you didn't vaporize it.

And for ones with an explosive payload, the obvious would happen in flight. :)

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[Winged Cat]

Consider: the explosion inside has to get out of the shell upon detonation. Sure, you could armor the shell more, but that would use some of the blast energy just tearing the shells apart...or turn the shell into effectively a shaped charge, blowing out only the laser-weakened side.

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[silicon_synapse]

It's the armor that makes the explosion possible. If you've ever held a match to a pile of black powder, you'd know that it doesn't do a whole lot. BUT if that black powder is confined to a small space, the pressure of the gasses builds until the container bursts. Hence the explosion. Now an artillary shell contains a lot of explosive and need to make a big bang. Therefore it needs a very thick, strong shell to contain the immense pressure of the gasses until enough gas has been produced to create the desired crater. That thick shell will also make it difficult to destroy enroute.

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[haruharaharu]

Now an artillary shell contains a lot of explosive and need to make a big bang. Therefore it needs a very thick, strong shell to contain the immense pressure of the gasses until enough gas has been produced to create the desired crater.

Black powder is a low explosive and will burn in open space. Most modern artillery explosives are HE and can detonate in open air (think C4). I would expect that you only need enough casing to keep the shell together during firing and to shield the fuse.

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[Life Blood]

Depends if we're talking a shaped charge or not. A shaped charge would require some sort of rigid blast plate to direct the blast energy to the right point. Otherwise, yes HE rounds only really need to be a box stuffed with C4 to make a big bang.

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[silicon_synapse]

You're right. I didn't really think about that. I haven't been keeping up on my explosives lately. =)

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[haggar]

Delicate or not, this system is in use right now as we blabber on /.

I have actually read, about a year ago, an article about THAL and how it's used on the border with Lebanon, to defend against katyusha shells and other missiles. I saw pictures of the laser turrets. Pretty neat stuff, actually.

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[DarenN]

Does anyone read the articles?

"These lasers are capable of vapourizing metal

Vapourise adj. To change state from solid to vapour by application of extreme heat.

That clear it up? The laser hits its' target. A large hole appears in the target. Target disentegrates (in the case of missiles) or explodes (in the case of shells)

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[Richard Kirk]

People haven't really tried to make laser-proof shells yet, but it wouldn't be hard.

Metal at normal temperatures is good at reflecting, and not good at absorbing. However, if you sink in enough power, then some of the metal is vapourized - this forms a layer of plasma just above the strike point, and that plasma absorbs the light just fine. If you are wanting to cut a hole in metal, then you would have to use a series of short pulses with gaps to allow the plasma to disperse. If you were machining something like plastic, or ceramic, then the thermal shock will tear out large chunks, but with metals you are usually boining of the stuff, atom by atom. If the object is spinning, then it is almost impossible to land the beam in the same place twice.

ICBMs are vulnerable in their boost phase, then there is lots of rocket propellant that goes off with a nice bang when hit. However, once the warhead is in the ballistic phase, then it is just a chunk of stuff flying through space: the ablating material might propel it a bit off course, but that's about it. For a short period during re-entry it may become delicate again as it finds its target, but then most of it's energy is in momentum, not propellant, so there is not much for your laser to make go bang.

The same is surely true of shells. If the fuse is hidden in the body of the shell, and there are no exposed and vulnerable non-metallic parts, then iut should be very difficult to attack.

Ion beams might be another matter - these can have momentum and a lot of penetration, but they don't tend to travel in straight lines in the atmosphere (hosepiping). Another poster has mentioned the thunder you might get if the beam heated the atmosphere. Now this has been proposed as a method for allowing an ion beam weapon to get a clear shot at the target.

Jus' another defence company putting out the high-tech begging bowl, I reckon...

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, one of the shell's main tasks is to provide material for shrapnel. I served in the Swedish army, commanding a 155 mm FH 77B howitzer unit. In the construction of the projectiles you have to consider that you want as much explosives as possible in a ballistically functioning unit at a feasible price. The shell can't be too heavy, but you still want it to sustain the enormous forces developed as 45 kg is accelerated to >800 m/s during a millisecond or two - and it's supposed to make some shrapnel as well. Only 10 kg of plastic explosives wouldn't waste many Russians (or Pakistanis, as our late peace-loving PM Olof Palme sold these babies to India (and sold our country to the Soviets)).

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[ErikZ]

Read the what?

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[overunderunderdone]

This reminds me of an exchange between a senator and one of the engineers working on SDI. (from rather fuzzy memory) The senator asked: woulnd't simply spinning the missle be a good defense against the laser. The engineer replied that it would be just as good a defense as being a spinning ballerina was against a machine gun.

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[Fenris2001]

The laser doesn't really have to destroy the artillery shell - think of high school physics and the conservation of momentum - the laser pulse heats a small area of the shell's case to a few thousand Celcius. The heated gases fly off, and in doing so, push the shell off course - so instead of hitting it target, the shell chews up empty ground (hopefully!). If the shell DOES explode, it's a bonus.

Uh huh

[_pi-away]

Wow, cos if it's on fox news then it MUST be true!

Re:Uh huh

[flacco]

Wow, cos if it's on fox news then it MUST be true!

Fox News: News for idiots.

Took it off my channel line-up ages ago.

Re:Uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

What you didnt see in Fox (or any US news)
was how easy it was to fool the technology when the US decided to test their toys and bomb Yugoslavia for 3 straight months.

The funniest thing I ever saw was when it was all over. They had BBC there when the Yugoslavian MIGs where taken out of ground and that one scene with the mountain side opening up and dozens of planes flying out was priceless.

The graphite bombs were rendered almost useless by applying hair spray on wires. Microwaves in old tanks were used as decoys....it was getting funnier by the minute (well, except for the civilians they were trying to kill but those only matter when its US civilians)

Sorry Sergeant, your platoon cant go out, we have to get the latest security patch first...

yeah....that inspires confidence.

Like that German UN relief guy said on Swiss TV, "The only people who believe in the accuracy of smart bombs adn such technological wizardry are being fed the clips straight from the Pentagon. Once you've been on the ground for a few of these things (bombings), you realize how totally imprecise they are. Unless, of course, they aimed there in the first place!"

Keep watching Fox or better yet, CNN....
best fiction on TV.

Re:Uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

News for people that don't need the Liberal elite telling us how to think. Go read the new book called "Bias"... you might learn something. Or you'll just end up calling me a but wipe. Oh well, I bet you listen to techno music....

Re:Uh huh

[monkeydo]

They had BBC there when the Yugoslavian MIGs where taken out of ground and that one scene with the mountain side opening up and dozens of planes flying out was priceless.

I think you were watching one of the old James Bond films. Really, planes _flying_ out of a mountain....in Yugoslavia?

The graphite bombs were rendered almost useless by applying hair spray on wires

I guess I don't watch enough CNN since I have no idea what a graphite bomb sould be used for, or why you would put hairspray on wires.

Re:Uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

"What you didnt see in Fox (or any US news)
was how easy it was to fool the technology when the US decided to test their toys and bomb Yugoslavia for 3 straight months"

The reports of Serbian defensive defensive techniques were ALL over the US media at this time! Sorry, your claims are not valid.

Re:Uh huh

[Squeeze Truck]

I think I recall reading that the Serbs were able to fool laser-guided bombs and cruise missles by painting huge red and yellow colored squares on the airfields and tanks they wanted to protect. Evidently this screwed up the "signature" of the object (or something like that) so that it didn't look like an airfield or tank.

Re:Uh huh

[flacco]

News for people that don't need the Liberal elite telling us how to think. Go read the new book called "Bias"... you might learn something. Or you'll just end up calling me a but wipe.

Or a presumptive idiot. Who can't spell "butt". But you're doing a great job of parroting what you've been told.

I didn't say a word about politics. I'm talking about the news FORMAT, TV personality behavior ("reporter" and "news anchor" are completely inappropriate terms), etc. Especially those insipid shitheads who do Fox's morning chat show or whatever it is.

It's a general trend that is infecting other news programs as well, including CNN. I call it the Foxification of all news. Sensationalized Hardcopy-like story setups, that damn "swoosh", or "chu-wonggg" sound that sounds like someone just threw a knife into someone's forehead.

Or the despicable info-box headlines. I actually saw one on CNN about Omar that said "Big Talk - Done Walked". If the monkey whose job it is to write those things ever was a real news employee, he must spend a lot of nights at the kitchen table with a gun in his mouth wondering what the hell happened to his life.

Can "News Hour" on PBS be far behind, now that they are whoring for Archer Daniels Midland? Maybe not. There is no escape from the non-stop sea-to-shining-sea marketing mind-fuck machine.

Oh well, I bet you listen to techno music....

Hmm, that's relevant.

Save Us

[artlu]

Hopefully lasers will also be able to detect errors in our own ammunitions so that no more innocent Americans lose their lifes as those did today in Afghanistan from that missile error.
AJ

Re:Save Us

[maladroit]

Um ... actually a bomb error, and the laser described in the article is not for guidance (guidance lasers have been around for a while).

But no technology is going to eliminate human error. The bomb that went astray today was a guided munition, it uses GPS. But a human decides where to bomb, and if that human picks the wrong target (like a Chinese embassy), or enters the coordinates wrong, then disaster is going to follow.

Re:Save Us

[Anonymous Coward]

innocent americans???!!!!
how about those innocent taliban being killed by the innocent americans?!!!!

i hate it when people expect a war to be fair...if you are part of it, you die!

Re:Save Us

[DNS-and-BIND]

FYI: the bomb that hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade wasn't a mistake. We had blown up all the Serbian Army's big radio transmitters, and they had no way to get messages from HQ in Belgrade to the units in the field in Kosovo. The Chinese helpfully stepped in and began relaying orders to the Serbian Army via the transmitter on the grounds of their embassy. The USA was faced with a dilemma...if they accused the Chinese in public, they'd get the usual lousy treatment from the media, UN, etc. If they did nothing, the campaign was in jeopardy. Shockingly, the USA chose to do the right thing, which was bomb the embassy (which had forfeited its neutrality by consorting with belligerents). Only the portion of the embassy containing the transmitter was bombed, and the Chinese knew damn well they had been caught red-handed. The Chinese didn't protest too much, and the event provided a convenient way for the Chinese public to blow off steam that would have otherwise likely been directed at the Communist Party.

Re:Save Us

[Anonymous Coward]

so that no more innocent Americans lose their lifes

Oh?
What about the innocent Afghans?

Make love not war

Re:Save Us

[indiechild]

Well I once read how the USA "accidentally" bombed Schaffhausen in Switzerland three times during WW2 even though it's 50 miles across the border inside Switzerland... allegedly the Swiss were making tank parts for the Germans in Schaffhausen.

So I don't really doubt that the Americans deliberately hit that Chinese embassy.

FoxNews?

[nomadic]

Couldn't find a more reputable source?

Re:FoxNews?

[TheCaptain]

If you are going to offer such profound criticism about something, at least have the decency to back it up.

Re:FoxNews?

[Anonymous DWord]

How about this?

Re:FoxNews?

[Tralfamadorian]

That still doesn't back up the previous statement. The shows enumerated on that list are opinion shows and never claimed to be "news"

Re:FoxNews?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have to say that everything pretty much on that web site noted is opinion in one form or another.

I would have to say though you will be hard pressed to find a news organization that is not biased with opinion. The only ones I have found so far are the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal and even those have business analysis which in a way opinion.

How many of your local papers backed one elected official or candidate or another in the past few years. All of the ones I have read in Indiana all come out and say it. We think you should vote for so and so....

Re:FoxNews?

[Anonymous Coward]

why .. not left enough for you?

Re:FoxNews?

[andkaha]

If you are going to offer such profound criticism about something, at least have the decency to back it up.

Here you go:

• Go to the archive of FAIR and search for "fox news" (including apostrophes).
• Try the same search at PR Watch.
• ... or try "fox" at AIM.

Re:FoxNews?

[errxn]

Thank you for that. That site is pure comedy. Unintentional, of course, but comedy all the same. Funny because when the leftist bias that we've all become used to is not present at Fox, suddenly they are the "evil" right-wing network. I just love to see the "logic" and "critical thought" of left at work yet again...

Re:FoxNews?

[TheCaptain]

I glanced over the links...but I don't find those things terribly compelling.

Actually, the FAIR one was rather funny. If you can't see the bias in those sites, then I really don't even know how to begin arguing the point with you.

1.) They link to indymedia as a good alternative news site...(Yeah...no bias there!)

2.) They link to Salon as a good "mainstream" news site...again...most liberal people I know will even acknowledge some pretty serious bias there.

3.) The items you gave were almost all "activist" sites, which generally are going to have a bias, regardless of their claim to have none. If they are trying to further their cause, they aren't going to post anything that questions any of their own points or views. It's actually rather sad that alot of times, the more "mainstream" news sources seem more willing to question their own points of view than these "fair" or "alternative" ones...but that part is just IMHO.

And for the record, we all know Slashdot has no bias at all, right? :)

Re:FoxNews?

[andkaha]

If you can't see the bias in those sites, then I really don't even know how to begin arguing the point with you.

The same to you. Sorry.

Or, just use pen lasers

[chancycat]

Think about it:

Eash of our troups has a pen laser and two house cats.

1) Release cats between you and the enemy.

2) Direct cats toward enemy trenches with pen light. Watch enemy freak out.

Re:Or, just use pen lasers

[Rubbersoul]

The PETA people would not like this :)

Re:Or, just use pen lasers

[ChadN]

Then lets do it!

Re:Or, just use pen lasers

[dumpster_d]

I saw this tactic employed once . . . the best part came in targeting the unsuspecting victims' crotch at the final moment.

He and the cat didn't think so; but, Damn, that was funny.

Re:Or, just use pen lasers

[Spunk]

Brilliant, but they will have to be careful not to infringe on any patents.

Re:Or, just use pen lasers

[broody]

Inspired by the 1960's CIA spy cat perhaps?

Re:Or, just use pen lasers

[guinan]

Nah, that'd never work.
I mean what chance does a pen versus a sword?

This just in!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.

Re:This just in!

[bloggins02]

This would be true if it weren't for the fact that in what we sane people call "the real world", peace doesn't come from asking the enemy nicely. I'm sure in whatever world you live in all problems can be resolved by saying "Hey, if we talked about it we could live in peace and understanding." I'd love to live in that place, but that pesky little thing called reality doesn't seem to want me there.

When diplomacy fits, use it, but do I have to rape your wife and murder your your children before you decide maybe it would be a good idea to fight back?

Re:This just in!

[Anonymous Coward]

...but not half as much fun.

Besides, we're not fighting for peace, we're fighting for...

>flipflip<

...magnetic transient interfer- whoops! Wrong excuse cal- er, codebook. That should have been, um, Infinite Justice. Yeah.

Re:This just in!

[theJavaMan]

Well, people always choose the most easy way, not the smart and efficient way

Also under development:

[Nindalf]

Revolutionary new developments in extremely shiny rockets, artillery shells, and even mortars.

Re:Also under development:

[slashdot2.2sucks]

Revolutionary new developments in lasers not in the visible range.

Re:Also under development:

[Winged Cat]

Revolutionary new developments in lasers whose frequency is not absorbed by typical munition casings. (Consider: microwaves can heat water inside a ceramic container without directly heating the container itself. True, they do react with metal, but at least some of the energy would penetrate.)

Re:Also under development:

[Phanatic1a]

Making a rocket or shell shiny is easy. Keeping a rocket or shell shiny after it's been transported, unloaded, loaded into a weapon, and fired through the air at high velocities, is not.

Re:Also under development:

[Migelikor1]

Mirror coating, etc. doesn't make a difference. Try holding a match to the mirror, and you'll find to your surprise that the mirror gets warm. That's because oxidation is releasing lots of energy all over the place. A laser is a way of releasing lots of energy to a single spot. Tom Clancy said mirror coating or spinning a missile in front of a laser would be like having a ballerina pirrouete in front of a shotgun. Besides, in the battle between bigger armor and bigger guns, the guns always win eventually.

Re:Also under development:

[jack deadmeat]

Sigh. The mirror misconception rears it's ugly head again.

If the laser is powerful enough to destroy an artillery shell in flight, making it shiny won't do a damn bit of good. Packing a diamond backed mirror on it would make it too heavy.

Basic physics classes are down the hall and to your left.

Re:Also under development:

[Maj. Kong]

Tom Clancy said...

Citing Tom Clancy as an authority on millitary affairs is like citing the late Stephen King as an expert in criminology.

Maj. Kong

Re:Also under development:

[maladroit]

Um ... the late Stephen King ? ... anyway, Tom Clancy is widely acknowledged as an incredible researcher - if it's in one of his books, chances are he found an authorative source. This is especially true about the weapons systems in his stories.

Re:Also under development:

[MongooseCN]

Revolutionary new developments in extremely shiny rockets, artillery shells, and even mortars.

Don't forget smoke screens.

Re:Also under development:

[Malc]

What's he late for? His death? When was it scheduled for?

Re:Also under development:

[Anonymous Coward]

Basic humor classes are down the hall and to the right. Take a joke.

Re:Also under development:

[Nindalf]

Mirror coating, etc. doesn't make a difference.

To be blunt, this is wrong. I do agree, however, that just polishing up a stainless steel shell until you can shave in front of it probably won't make enough difference. Most mirrors don't reflect nearly enough light.

On the other hand, such powerful lasers are hard to make and very expensive. It would be tempting to make them just barely strong enough to work against existing designs which have no defense against such countermeasures. If a spinning (or randomly tumbling), mirrored shell, can cut down the rate of heating by something like 30%, and there's some extra heat-shielding inside, it might be enough to survive.

All kidding aside, you also can't rule out, as I said, revolutionary new developments in mirrored armor. I mean, if there was no way to deflect the beam, there would be no way to generate or aim it!

BTW, Tom Clancy is a novelist, not a physicist. His entire livelihood is sounding plausible about things he doesn't really understand.

Besides, in the battle between bigger armor and bigger guns, the guns always win eventually.

Ah, but which is which? This is an odd historical precedent to apply in favor of a defense mechanism.

Re:Also under development:

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me like you haven't been reading Slashdot for a while, at least at -1 ;-)

Re:Also under development:

[Anonymous Coward]

A baby seal walks into a club.

Re:Also under development:

[Anonymous Coward]

A guy walks into a bar.

Re:Also under development:

[dumpster_d]

"All kidding aside, you also can't rule out, as I said, revolutionary new developments in mirrored armour. I mean, if there was no way to deflect the beam, there would be no way to generate or aim it! "

Exactly. You don't polish steel, you give is a coating which does not absorb the wavelengths the other guys are using [make it the colour of the beam].

• Or you make it so extreme heat doesn't generally cause a catastrophic failure [HE is already like this].
• Or you start applying stealth technology to the projectiles so they can't be tracked.
• Or you give your troops Rosco Model 4500 Foggers to disperse the defensive beams [plus, it'll make the war-time photography look so cool!]

Re:Also under development:

[cvd6262]

You should read Clancy's "A Guided Tour" series and then repost begging forgiveness. The man used to write naval text books.

Re:Also under development:

[NonSequor]

Ouch! That hurt!

Re:Also under development:

[Wyatt Earp]

THEL and ABL both use spotting lasers to detect the atmospheric conditions and then the data is feed through the computer. That way the adaptive optics can work around the issues.

Plus it's hard to get a smoke screen above about 200 feet, and the vast majority of the things these devices will shoot down go higher than that.

Re:Also under development:

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, Tom Clancy is a novelist, not a physicist. His entire livelihood is sounding plausible about things he doesn't really understand.

So is Arthur C Clarke, the novelist credited with inventing the geostationary satellite. Funny that.

Re:Also under development:

[Migelikor1]

I used him as a source for what I considered a funny analogy. Surely you agree he can write a funny analogy? The quote actually was made by him in an interview with some MIT folks and pentagon folks durring which they tried to describe how Star Wars would work. He, just like slashdot readers, assumed he was smarter than the scientists employed to make the weapons, so he asked why not just cover sattelites and ICBMS with mirrors. They then explained that they were hoping to deliver at a minimum two sticks of dynamite, which would be able to burn through existing systems, and (here's the important part) completely destroy the delicate bits. That includes Sattelite solar panels and all the sensor systems on missiles. Again, Clancy was smart, and referenced the then emerging technology of GPS...could you mess that up if you had no sensors? No, the panel replied, but by the mid-nineties, their laser technology and computer control should let them deliver considerably more energy, and enable slagging (melting) missile bits far more robust than the sensors. To that, Clancy replied with the quote about a ballerina.
Also, I reccomend you read the book series Guided Tour of...(Carrier, Armored Cav, Fighter wing, Airborne, etc.) If Stephen King spent a big chunk of his life writing criminology texts, interviewing homicide detectives, and researching enough to write non-fiction analysis and case profiles, then sure, I would use him as a reference. However, in this case, despite what I consider Clancy's adequate qualification, I just used his color commentary.

Re:Also under development:

[Migelikor1]

Me: "Besides, in the battle between bigger armor and bigger guns, the guns always win eventually."

Reply: "Ah, but which is which? This is an odd historical precedent to apply in favor of a defense mechanism"

Good point. What I intended in my statement is that this gun can defeat the armor on incoming ordinance, and should be able to scale up to continue to defeat it. However, I do believe that even the most powerful laser defense system in the world will be rendered useless by the next type of ordinance, (maybe offensive lasers?) An example of the sword slicing both ways, eh?

Re:Also under development:

[Cerebus]

On the other hand, such powerful lasers are hard to make and very expensive. It would be tempting to make them just barely strong enough to work against existing designs which have no defense against such countermeasures. If a spinning (or randomly tumbling), mirrored shell, can cut down the rate of heating by something like 30%, and there's some extra heat-shielding inside, it might be enough to survive.

A few points:

1. Artillery shells and ballistic missiles already spin for stability.
2. Tumbling decreases accuracy by large margins.
3. There's only so much thermal shielding you can put in a projectile-- and the impetus for the projectile is to maximize the payload.
   

Re:Also under development:

[child_of_mercy]

"Try holding a match to the mirror, and you'll find to your surprise that the mirror gets warm."

the flame also deposits soot on the surface, which makes it less reflective.

Re:Also under development:

[seann]

soots from burning carbon

most likly, the laser won't express so much carbon
*unless a weasel gets in the way*

Re:Also under development:

[child_of_mercy]

I was referring to the example given.

Re:Also under development:

[MulluskO]

Okay, mortars that are... totally transparent!

I'd be much more difficult to target too. Also much more expensive. Aim for translucent, maybe?

Re:Also under development:

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, you were being a git. Good work.

Re:Also under development:

[istartedi]

There's only so much thermal shielding you can put in a projectile-- and the impetus for the projectile is to maximize the payload.

Perhaps they will come up with a missile that has just enough payload to take out a laser installation. The missile might use an ablative coating or something, and of course it would be too heavy for general-purpose use but once you've taken out the defense you can just go back to using regular missiles.

Even in that case though the lasers are useful: they forced the enemy to spend time and resources developing, acquiring and deploying yet another specialized weapons system.

Re:Also under development:

[swillden]

You should read Clancy's "A Guided Tour" series and then repost begging forgiveness.

The guided tour books are excellent, but you shouldn't take them as an indication that everything Clancy says/writes is correct.

In particular, don't believe anything he writes in any of his novels that has anything to do with cryptography, code-making or code-breaking, because it's all seriously wrong.

I have no idea whether you should pay any attention to what he may have written about lasers and mirrored satellites, but he definitely does write about things he is clueless about.

The man used to write naval text books.

Really? I have never heard that. He was an insurance salesman before he started writing fiction.

Re:Also under development:

[Hektor_Troy]

"Besides, in the battle between bigger armor and bigger guns, the guns always win eventually."

Eventually being the key word.

I saw a documentary on Discovery about the Gulf War, where a tank commander commented, that his tank was going *bonk* from time to time, and they couldn't figure out just what the hell was going on, until another tank commander told them. They were taking fire from a T70(or 72 can't quite remember) behind them. The enemy tank was HITTING them - but not causing any damage - well, I suppose they were worried their tank was having engine problems, so to some effect the iraqies were causing a minor panic, and maybe a minor head ache from all the *bonk*.

Re:Also under development:

[mpe]

Or you give your troops Rosco Model 4500 Foggers [rosco-ca.com] to disperse the defensive beams [plus, it'll make the war-time photography look so cool!]

This is a theatrical smoke machine.
There are military smoke machines, but these are considerably bigger. i.e. trucks... Also IIRC they can produce IR opaque fog, so as to hide the number of troups and vehicles being covered.

Re:Also under development:

[mpe]

Perhaps they will come up with a missile that has just enough payload to take out a laser installation. The missile might use an ablative coating or something, and of course it would be too heavy for general-purpose use but once you've taken out the defense you can just go back to using regular missiles.

Or simply fire more missiles or shells than the laser system can shoot down. Remember that there is currently artillary which can function as a so called "one gun battery", firing several shells which reach the target at the same time.

Re:Also under development:

[indiechild]

The man is a novelist, I'm sure he uses a bit of creative licence in every book. Whether his creative concepts are based in reality or fantasy, who knows?

He does have a lot of military contacts though.

Re:Also under development:

[pmc]

Tom Clancy is widely acknowledged as an incredible researcher

He is? I remember reading Rainbow Six (about 500 pages too long) and was stunned by the poor quality of research, particularly in the background stuff such as British Pubs, Football teams, local dialect, and the rest. There is also the gross error in the plot: The Aussie Olymipics were taking place in their winter - the cooling system that is a vital plot element would not be required.

So I'd take what he writes as fiction - not as an authoritative source.

Re:Also under development:

[PeeOnYou2]

If it turns to offensive lasers, all the armor will become steel with mirrors on it. There is a cycle that exists. I believe they will come up with all kinds of new technologies, just as they have been doing since prehistoric days. But there have also been and will also be the armor, or defense to every weapon. Sooner or later they're going to have to realize that they can just use OLD techniques that everyone thought was out dated, and no longer had a guard up for. ;P

Re:Also under development:

[Bastard Operator Fro]

The other thing Stephen King is late for, is a book signing.

He's alive and ... perhaps, well. Definately in good health.

Re:Also under development:

[dillon_rinker]

Bah...those things that have to do with Ordinary Life are worthless. We want FACTS, man; we want to know, down to a hundredth of a millimeter, the actual caliber of a Chinese-manufactured AK-47 knock-off, circa 1973. We want accurate descriptions of the small-unit tactics used in the Nigerian Congo during the Boer Wars of 1987. We want to know, from bootstrapped satellite reconaissance, exactly how many outbuildings in the classified CIA camp in Walla Walla Washington were large enough to house a toilet in 1990.

You, sir, are full of Pablum (tm).

Re:Also under development:

[Anonymous Coward]

That'd be fire from a T-72, not 70. However it'd more likely have been a T-55.

Perhaps it's an urban (?) myth, but IIRC the tower of some perversion of the T-34 had the acoustical characteristics of a bell, so even if they were out of the Germans' range, or the Germans had only MG ammo left, the T-34's crew would be vulnerable because sitting inside the T-34 would be like sitting inside a church bell when grenades and bullets hit the tower.

Re:Also under development:

[markmoss]

Paint on an outer coat that will simply boil away fast, exposing the reflective inner layer. It doesn't have to be shiny (reflecting all the light the same direction), but just has to reflect it somewhere. E.g., paint containing a high proportion of titanium dioxide particles might be optimum. No material is completely reflective, so some fraction of the laser beam will be deposited in the shell as heat and a big enough laser at close enough range will still burn through. What reflectivity does accomplish is to require a bigger laser, which is harder to move, and to keep fed with electricity or chemicals.

To form any laser beam, you've got to have mirrors that reflect the light sufficiently well as not to melt or become deformed. A metal-cutting laser handles this basically by using big mirrors to focus the beam onto a tiny spot -- the beam is spread out wide enough to not be destructive at the mirrors. War lasers have to accomplish the same thing, but with a point of focus that is far away and moving. That's tough to do in vacuum, and much harder when you've got air diffracting the beam, but adaptive optics helps by warping the mirror to approximately cancel the atmospheric effects.

This system is probably for defending small areas, so it's "kill" range need be only a few miles. That's a lot simpler case than the long-range kills desired for starwars systems. It's still quite an accomplishment if it works.

Finally, there is a very old technology that will defeat any possible mobile system: solid shot. Maybe the laser can vaporize 30 caliber bullets, but a 105mm gun can fire a solid slug 4 inches in diameter and weighing about 30 pounds at something like 2000mph -- no laser is going to melt enough of that to make much difference, and if it hits the kinetic energy is almost as destructive as a chemical explosive. It does have to hit, not just come close -- and without any homing technology in the shell, because lasers certainly can blind sensors and melt steering fins.

Re:Also under development:

[pmc]

Pablum eh? Someone has been reading word of the day, methinks. A true sciolist, sir. I fleer at you.

Re:Also under development:

[Squeeze Truck]

That tactic worked pretty well with nukes in "Total Annihilation".

Re:Also under development:

[Hektor_Troy]

If it's an urban myth I don't know, but something strikes me as odd:

If they are out of the enemy's range, then how the hell can they be hit by MG rounds and grenades?

I may not know much about amunition or anything, but if a tank with it's HUGE barrel og HUGE firepower behind the projectile can't fire longer than a machine gun, I'd consider getting a new tank.

Coming from FoxNews...

[Omerna]

I see a new primetime special:

Giant Laser Building!
Watch 3 teams of scientists try do design and build lasers to protect our troops on the battlefield! Tonight at 8!

Come to think of it, that'd be a good Simpsons episode (the lasers I mean) or maybe a Junkyard Wars in the near future.

Re:Coming from FoxNews...

[xah]

You know, Geraldo Rivera is carrying a laser. If he gets a chance, he's going to use it on Osama.

NO! To make jiffy pop!

[xeeno]

like in real genius.

Re:NO! To make jiffy pop!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that movie was "Young Einstein" not "Real Genius".

-stephen

steveMF81 at hotmail dot com

Yea

[sui]

Yea coz this will work until they start making the missle's reflective.

"Fox News" != "News"

[AMuse]

I've known it for a long time, but the events of the WTC, and now this, are continually proving it for me.

FOX News is one of the most sensational, "check the facts later if anyone bothers to call us on our imaginative story" news agencies to ever hit the books. It wasn't 5 minutes that the first building hit the ground before FOX news had conclusive proof that Bin Laden did it.

Of course, they blamed Oklahoma City on him too, and look what happened.

For gods' sake, stay away from them.

[/RANT]

We know where this leads

[Anonymous Coward]

Go down the laser attack path,
disregard kinetic energy attacks,
and get your ass kicked by furry Ewoks on your first alien planet mission.

We need to say "no" to battlefield lasers. Let's continue fighting with molecules.

Heh

[beefstu01]

I found it amusing that it costs $3000 to fire a single shot with this sucker. A bit pricy for a focused blast of light if you ask me.

Re:Heh

[pagercam2]

$3000 is only half of a toliet seat at government prices!!! I think they're using chemical lasers and they are real big and complex, so $3000 for anything the government gets involved in is a pretty good price and if you can use it to save a HUMMV or M1A1 tank the saving would be great, even if you save only a single soldier per $3000 you're way ahead of the game, helps moral, keeps soldiers out of hospitals, saves having to train new soldiers, saves having to knock on parents door to tell them that Johnie isn't comming home. $3000 seems like the deal of the centrury, getting it to work is the only problem I see.

Re:Heh

[flacco]

$3000 is only half of a toliet seat at government prices!!!

Gotta fund those ultra-black projects somehow.

Re:Heh

[eviljav]

Are you trying to suggest that this laser program is only a half-ass attempt?

Re:Heh

[linatux]

checked out the price of some of those flash missiles lately? Percentage wise, it's not much different to shooting them down with a .22 rifle.

Re:Heh

[Tackhead]

> I found it amusing that it costs $3000 to fire a single shot with this sucker. A bit pricy for a focused blast of light if you ask me.

If you're one of the guys sitting under the incoming artillery shell, it's simultaneously "cheap" and "priceless".

Re:Heh

[pbox]

I think actually $3000 is pre-government price. The government price would be probably $300,000 per shot. Still somewhat less than cruise missles.

Re:Heh

[Xerithane]

Wrong. Independance was also wrong with their pencil invoice.

The way many government invoices are totalled is you have a list of supplies and a total cost of budget. So you have a $25,000 pencil on the invoice and you also have a $25,000 32-cpu 10GB ram box there.

Granted, it's stupid and most invoices aren't like this a lot of them are. All the hype about projects having "hidden overhead" is typically bunk.

Is it really so difficult?

[djrogers]

All I asked for were some frickin' laser beams!

Re:Is it really so difficult?

[Happy Monkey]

Indeed. These won't be useful until they can be shark-mounted.

Re:Is it really so difficult?

[ShelbyCobra]

And we will call it the Alan Parson's Project...

Re:Is it really so difficult?

[jsse]

All I asked for were some frickin' laser beams!

Exactly like what a CIO-idiot said in last meeting:

"All I asked for were unbreakable secure transaction! Is it so difficult?!"

You must be him.

Here's a related piece

[hether]

Military Lasers High and Low
Battle lasers are rapidly moving from the realm of theory into operational reality

The Airforce Association
http://www.afa.org/magazine/0999lasers.html

Budget overruns

[Darkfred]

At 6000 dollars a shot the enemy can just start firing rocks at us and wait for us to go bankrupt.

Re:Budget overruns

[linzeal]

What kind of power source would these need to be deployed permanently in military bases? A frigging nuclear generator probably. Hey, maybe this will pay for fusion research.

Missile Defense?

[global_diffusion]

Sweet. More things built off the missle defense idea. Of course, nobody's heard of the Maginot Line...

Re:Missile Defense?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Belgium deserves some blame for not letting france build it on their border too; that would have stopped the Germans from just going around it at least.. But sheesh, what a terrible plan that was.

France:"Come get us! We've got a Wall!"
German1:"What will we do? They've got a wall."
German2:"We'll ignore it; They probably did something French to screw it up anyway."
German1:"true, true."

American:"Just try and nuke us, we've got missile defence!"
Afghan1:"We don't have nukes."
Afghan2:"We don't even have missiles."
American:"..oh...wanna buy one?"

Re:Missile Defense?

[Happy Monkey]

High-tech warfare is a game of rock-paper-scisors, but the enemy will win if you are missing one of the above, and he knows it. The Maginot line was unsuccessful because they were complacent once they had it. I don't think that will be the case in the US for a while, now that we've had both the 9-11 and the anthrax attacks.

Two arguments I've heard against missile defense are that it doesn't work, and that it wouldn't stop other attacks. For the former, the fact that it doesn't work hardly seems like an argument against research. As for the latter, if we put all our money into aircraft security and mail sanitization, we'd be unprepared for missile attacks.

Not a sermon, just a thought. (OK, maybe that phrase implies that it is a sermon. Oh, well.)

Re:Missile Defense?

[Wyatt Earp]

The Maginot Line failed because it couldn't move. Oh, and because it wasn't finished.

The only anti-missile system the US is working on that doesn't move in the ABM system. Most of the laser systems are mobile.

Plus the Maginot Line arguement doesn't hold water, because it was a tactical solution for a strategic problem. While the ABL and other systems like THEL are tactical solutions for tactical problems.

Re:Missile Defense?

[child_of_mercy]

also the line wasn't completed.

they never ran it along the Belgian frontier as planned.

the line wasn't cracked it was by-passed.

a bit like americans in vietnam.

Re:Missile Defense?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Maginot Line wasn't actually a bad idea. It was just poorly implemented in only stretching along the France-Germany border. The Germans took one look at it and said "Ok then, we'll just go through Belgium." Ironically enough, the Maginot Line was the last thing in France to fall. Germans were frolicking through the Lourve and the French were still fighting out at the Maginot.

-David 'Klep' Kleppinger, Raving Lunatic

Re:Missile Defense?

[rela]

The Maginot Line failed because it couldn't move. Oh, and because it wasn't finished. You could finish it any way you wanted, as long as you didn't make it move it'd still fail. Remember how they defeated it: by driving tanks around it.

Re:Missile Defense?

[Wyatt Earp]

Yes, they drove tanks around it because the French had only budgeted the money for the extension to the English Channel in the spring of '39 and they didn't have time to extend it.

Of course, if it had been extended, the Germans could have done a sea-borne operation and gone around it, or used Paras to fly over it.

Arm the cats

[simetra]

Better yet... strap a remote-detonated bomb to the back of the cat, so when the cat is where you want, blow them up.

Re:Arm the cats

[Zalgon 26 McGee]

You joke - but in WWII the Russians did some experiments with dogs, training them to associate the underside of a tank with food. Strap on a mine, and boom.

First field trial worked perfectly - dogs saw tanks and ran towards them. Only problem: they'd been trained to associate Russian tanks with food, not German, and forced the Russians into retreat.

(this may well be urban legend, but it's a great story)

Re:Arm the cats

[Zalgon 26 McGee]

Gah. Hate to reply to myself, but I found a link!

Re:Arm the cats

[linzeal]

No It wasn't.

Got this earlier today on slashdot
Read down to get story about explosive russian dogs.

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/5-11-19101 -0-31-9.html

Re:Arm the cats

[SuiteSisterMary]

This reminds me of the 'Buttery Wholesomeness' supplement for HoL; one of the shortest lived RPGs in the world. One of the weapons featured there was called 'Kitty Kitty Bang Bang' and the illustration was of the cutest little kitten with a vest on, and on the back of the vest was a 'safecracker' style bundle of dynamite with a windup alarmclock; surrounding the kitty were a bunch of 'tick tick tick tick tick' words. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. The completely unknowning look on the kitty's face completes it.

Re:Arm the cats

[Anonymous DWord]

Yup. The US Navy did tests like that with dolphins. Dolphins are smarter than dogs. While they're still alive, anyway.

Re:Arm the cats

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the russian navy, the dolphins are not owned by the ukraine.

Re:Arm the cats

[flewp]

The U.S. experimented in WWII with attaching little incinderary devices to bats and releasing them over Japan. Basically, the bats were encased in a big bomb type of thing that dropped from a B-29. The bats were released from their compartments, and would nest in buildings. After a set time, the bomblets would explode, setting the buildings on fire. I believe this was only tried in Japan due to their building matierals (paper, wood, etc) which would easily ignite. I also don't believe this was very successfull, as there isn't much press on it.

Re:Arm the cats

[zulux]

Still in use:

On at least two occasions since the marine mammal program began, the Navy has used dolphins in combat situations, reportedly for surveillance and mine detection. First in 1971 during the Vietnam War, then again in 1987 during tanker escort operations in the Persian Gulf. One of six dolphins deployed to the Persian Gulf died, the Navy reported, when it developed a bacterial infection.

Re:Arm the cats

[child_of_mercy]

oh c'mon

the brits tried to train pigeons to peck at pictures of battleships,

then put the pigeons in glide-bombs with a harness to guide the bomb in the direction being pecked at

it didn't work.

Re:Arm the cats

[Afrosheen]

That sounds like a good British tactic. Did they try releasing rabid skunks on the battlefields also?

The land of Mr. Bean sure has some wacky ideas. You gotta hand it to 'em, they have a good sense of humor.

Re:Arm the cats

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Actually, this was done, and it DID work. Trouble was, keeping the pigeons alive + training them (very human-labour-intensive) cost a lot more than the military first thought (not to mention the expected public outcry from flyring-rat-sympathisers if they found out), so the plan was abandoned,

Re:Arm the cats

[Squeeze Truck]

England doesn't have skunks. Skunks are indigenous to America.

GI JOE..

[diesel_jackass]

Finally the GI Joe cartoons will be a little more accurate! (nobody dies, right?)

Seriously though, it seems like it would be a little easier to sneak one of these onto a plane, into a concert, to a press conference, etc. (once they're manufactured smaller).

ah well, it had to happen eventually.

Govexec.com says

[hether]

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0401/042301nj.htm

that "These lasers also have a drawback--their energy comes from large tanks of industrial chemicals, which have to be mixed until they glow, like an outsize high-school science project. And they are so bulky that one weapon fills a large aircraft, or a small building. "

Does this jive with the fox news article?

Re:Govexec.com says

[Happy Monkey]

Yes, though foxnews says there's an experimental solid-state laser that looks promising. With that, it would cost 25 cents per shot, and fit on a Humvee.

Re:Govexec.com says

[bloggins02]

Does this jive with the Fox News article?

Yes, unless of course you don't know what solid state means :-/

Re:Govexec.com says

[indiechild]

In the Vietnam war era, we had the 13-cents killers. Soon, we'll have the 25-cents killers!

Hold on a second...

[Zen Mastuh]

Fox News wants us to believe that the Lunar landings were faked, and that the government has lasers which can shoot down ordnance from space? Hmmm....

Re:Hold on a second...

[Anonymous Coward]

That wasn't Fox News, it was Fox.

Re:Hold on a second...

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, Fox News is a different channel than Fox. :)

Expen$ive

[Reliant-1864]

Man, $3000 / shot? That's a lot. Use a $5 million dollar missle to blow up a tent and a $3000 shot to shoot down a $50 mortar shell. Now that's what I call efficient spending. Which side will run out of money first? For $1000, you cause the US government to spend $60,000 shooting down mortar shells (assuming shells do cost $50)

Re:Expen$ive

[shatteredpottery]

Mortar shells cost a fair bit more than that, artillery shells still more. Particularly the newer ones. But there is a cheap way to overwhelm such a system. :)

Re:Expen$ive

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but with a shell falling on my head I'd gladly fork over the 3 grand.

Re:Expen$ive

[flacco]

Man, $3000 / shot? That's a lot.

What's the cost of a 105mm shell landing on your command and control center?

Re:Expen$ive

[Life Blood]

Umm, no

If you read the article again you would notice that these lasers are designed to shoot down theatre range ballistic missiles. So you are shooting down a $100,000 missile with a $3000 laser. Not too bad.

Re:Expen$ive

[Reliant-1864]

Article says it can also be used to shoot down artillery shells

Re:Expen$ive

[Wyatt Earp]

What is the cost of a mortar shell killing people? More or less than the three grade for a shot? I'd say yes, so would the people being shelled.

The way it works is...

You have your own mortars/howitzers/MLRS and a counter-battery radar. Someone shoots some rounds at you, you have a defence laser.

Hezbollah/Narco Terrorists...someone fires some smoothbore Russian mortars or some 122s at you. Counter-battery radar finds it, but the rounds hit your camp and you take dead and injured. Your counter battery fire killed the tangos.

With a close defence laser, you fire your counter-battery fire, but the close defence laser knocks out the enemy fire. You've taken no loses and the enemy has. That's how wars are won.

The life of a soldier in harm's way is almost priceless...as evident in the money the military spends on SAR and training.

Re:Expen$ive

[styrotech]

Priceless

Re:Expen$ive

[number one duck]

10 to 1 says it can also be used to shoot down ducks. Whats your point again?

Doesn't Israel already have these ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I read a while back that Israel received some of these types of lasers from the US to shoot down Kaytusha rockets coming from Hizbollah in S. Lebanon. Were they ever used and if so does anyone know if they were effective?

Any weapon has this problem...

[Svartalf]

Trip and shoot your buddy with your rifle/SAW...

Trip and impale your buddy with your pike/sword...

And so forth.

Besides, this isn't a personnel carried device- it's a Humvee/Bradley mounted device. One's an eximer the other something solid-state. Both are going to be too large for people to carry.

Re:Any weapon has this problem...

[Tackhead]

> Besides, this isn't a personnel carried device- it's a Humvee/Bradley mounted device. One's an eximer the other something solid-state. Both are going to be too large for people to carry.

How many of you, when reading this, started drooling and pounding on the table, screaming "I want one! On my car! I've been good, Santa! I WANT! I'll never get stuck in traffic again, and if I do, at least it'll be fun!"

A Humvee (or better yet, a giant winged robot that can fly on Mars!) with a battlefield laser! Fuck this traffic jam, d00dz! Check out my ride! I rule!

Funniest /. post *ever* (n/t)

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment contains no text 'cuz the subject sez it all.

Just what we need on the battlefield

[Teleporting Wombat]

>>The laser weapons vaporize metal.

OK, I fire it at your depleted uranium artillery shell. Vaporized uranium on the battlefield. Voila! How's that for environmental cleanup?

Re:Just what we need on the battlefield

[Doctor Memory]

Dunno, is depleted uranium toxic? Will it leach into groundwater? If not, then where's the problem?

Re:Just what we need on the battlefield

[halo8]

HAHAAH!!! out of all the lame posts that mention cost.. friendly fire and stuff.. this one is good.. this deserves at least a 4 in my book

Re:Just what we need on the battlefield

[child_of_mercy]

"is depleted uranium toxic?"

YES

"Will it leach into groundwater?"

YES

but hey, its usually used on someones else water table right?

Re:Just what we need on the battlefield

[broody]

Of course not, the mutant children in Iraq is just pure propogranda by the wiley British.

Re:Just what we need on the battlefield

[CaptJay]

Ugh!

You see, that's exactly my concern... Every time the US decides that they must act in some part of the world, they cripple the population there for generations with their weapons and sanctions.

Viet Nam? Agent Orange. Iraq? Depleted uranium residues and heavy sanctions. Kosovo? We'll have to wait a couple of years before we see what happens...

Re:Just what we need on the battlefield

[Rogerborg]

• • The laser weapons vaporize metal.
  OK, I fire it at your depleted uranium artillery shell. Vaporized uranium on the battlefield. Voila! How's that for environmental cleanup?

Uh... since you bring it up. I fire my depleted uranium shell at your T-72. It self sharpens on the way through the armour, then sends your tank up in a fireball and puts carconigenic dust 2km in the air. How's that for environmental cleanup. And that's not theoretical.

The end of air combat

[biotechnician]

Since like all technology this will disseminate to the other countries in the globe, this also means a major change in air power. Manuverablility means practically nill at the speed of light. Large aircraft equiped with lasers would in addition to destroying missles would also be able to destroy all aircraft, even if the enemy aircraft are super manuverable, stealthy, super expensive F-22 jets. In fact the developement of powerful lasers will strongly reduce the importance aircraft, all you need to do is see the aircraft and you can kill it.

Re:The end of air combat

[Oswald]

You mean, say, something like this?

Re:The end of air combat

[Anonymous Coward]

You will see these responses to this threat:

1. Stealth will become even more accelerated.

2. Air Crews will reemphasize low-level approaches and attack.

3. Smart "Stand-off" weapons will become more important and emphasized.

4. Air War doctrine and training will be even more heavily emphasized.

This situation was something that Air Forces faced before. In the wake of the performance of SAM's in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, many thought that tactical aviation's days were numbered. Air Forces, especially the US/NATO/Israel, responded in the ways I listed above. By the Lebanon War, Israel substantially regained their edge in the air. We know what the US and NATO have done in the last few years.

Re:The end of air combat

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the highly maneuverable and stealthy 747. It attacks like an thief in the night with snowboard boots on and bells tied to every joint.

Re:The end of air combat

[Syriloth]

all you need to do is see the aircraft and you can kill it.

That's not really that much of an advantage, considering that 90% of all air-to-air kills are made without ever seeing the enemy plane.

Re:The end of air combat

[xah]

Is that in a combat simulator, or are you talking about actual combat? If the latter, from which battles was this statistic compiled?

Re:The end of air combat

[child_of_mercy]

except u still have to be able to track the thing,

just because the beam moves fast from the laser doesn't make pointing the laser in the right direction less challenging.

plus many missiles fire beyond line of sight these days.

Re:The end of air combat

[Danse]

LOL :) Where are the moderators when you need them. That was funny as hell :)

Re:The end of air combat

[ZigMonty]

The point they are trying to make is that having to see them first is a handicap. Modern air to air missiles (like the Aim-120 or the Aim-54) have huge ranges (> 100 nautical miles for the Aim-54). In the gulf war, because of American AWACS, a lot of Iraqi planes never saw what hit them, and that was before the AIM-120 entered service. It was all directed from afar. This beyond visual range fighting is why IFF (Identify Friend of Foe) was developed. Can these lasers travel 100 nautical miles through clouds? No, then they are essentially useless for air combat.

See:
AIM-54 Phoenix Missile
AIM-120 AMRAAM

Re:The end of air combat

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. If battlefield lasers are made practical (a working laser equipped Boeing) then no missile could ever get close even though it was fired from beyond visual range. Any plane that came within visual range would be shot down instantly. (Targeting is done by computer controlled mirrors so no amount of maneuvering would help.)

It would be the end of air combat as we know it until suitable protection against laser weaponry is developed.

Re:The end of air combat

[ghoti221]

However, if the F-22 is stealthy, how do you see it to target it? And if you're flying in a huge 707, how do you prevent the F-22 from zapping you with a bunch of AMRAAMs from BVR? (Or, resurrect the idea of the Phoenix missile, and pop'em from even longer range. )

I don't think the concept of air power is dead yet.

Re:The end of air combat

[Rogerborg]

• except u still have to be able to track the thing, just because the beam moves fast from the laser doesn't make pointing the laser in the right direction less challenging.

We used accoustic stations on the ground to listen for aircraft in WWII before radar caught on. These things were accurate to a couple of degrees back in 1939 with basic engineering and human ears doing the direction finding. We can do better now, if we want to. The more we deploy stealth aircraft, the more incentive our targts have to develop these forgotten technologies.

So, we know where the aircraft is to within a few hundred metres. If it's day and a clear sky, you can see it, but chances are it's night. Find the hottest spot in the sky in that area. It's not hot enough to throw a missile at, but it's enough to give us an idea to within a few metres. Fire at it. And again. And again. And again. And again... Ever seen the amount of AAA that gets thrown at US stealth planes? Count the cost. Lasers actually work out pretty effective, if you're firing within a few metres at a pretty fragile target. Heck, you only need to make a little hole in it, and there it is on your radar all of a sudden.

Stealth aircraft have been getting slower and slower, to cut down on heat. I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation were fuel cell powered electric ducted turbofan vehicles. They not only have to be invisible to radar, but they also have to be silent and cool (or only fly when it's rainy or cloudy).

• plus many missiles fire beyond line of sight these days.

If only we had some way of shooting them down in flight...

Re:The end of air combat

[markmoss]

just because the beam moves fast from the laser doesn't make pointing the laser in the right direction less challenging. It does take out one part of the challenge. If you fire a bullet at a moving target, you have to calculate or guess where the target will be when the bullet gets there. This is still a challenge, because (1) it takes a while for a radar set to accumulate enough position measurements to give the speed and direction accurately, and (2) if the target is capable of changing direction (bullets don't, missiles do), then it's just guesswork anyhow. Since a laser beam moves about 500,000 times as fast as any military hardware does, at battlefield ranges you can just point and shoot. Other things you can ignore are deflection by gravity and Coriolis effects. "Windage" doesn't apply as a deflection to your aim, although optical effects of the air do have to be corrected for to get the beam focused enough to cut metal. On the other hand, hitting a 6 inch wide projectile at 1 mile range requires aiming to better than one part in 10,000 -- that's very precise. And if you are waiting for the artillery shells to come within one mile before shooting at them, you'd better get them on the first shot.

("Starwars" lasers would have to lead the target, since speeds and ranges are much greater. A "close" shot might be 3,000km; this takes 10ms for the beam to get to the target. Double that, at least, for the time from the last sight of the target to the beam reaching it. A satellite travelling at 3600km/hr = 1km/sec moves 20 meters in that time. It's probably only 2 or 3 meters wide.)

Re:The end of air combat

[Galvatron]

What if the "missile" was a remote laser drone?

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

They may be a bit hasty with some stories, but at least you don't get the liberal slant to all the stories that you would with CNN and others. I prefer to make my own decisions and not have someone else tell me what my opinions are.

For a more technical overview...

[mbessey]

...of specifically the solid-state high-power laser, take a look at Lawrence Livermore's page on the project:

http://lasers.llnl.gov/lst/helstf.html

Re:For a more technical overview...

[Anonymous Coward]

Scary that they can't spell "average" (high-avarage-power) right in the article!

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just pissed because they don't have the typical left wing slant.

Tick on FOX TV this Wednesday night!

[CaptainCap]

Since we're on the topic of FOX, The Tick is on tonight on FOX TV (9:30 pm) as well as it's
regular time on Thursday night. Two weeks on, two weeks off, then two night in a row, gotta love
those crazy guys at Fox.

Laser Rifles!

[MikeyNg]

It seems to me that the next extension of this is to have laser cannon mounted vehicles. It sounds like they'll be able to get these devices cheap enough to mount on a vehicle, and then you'd get to put the temperature of the sun on infantry or wherever. Plus, you could wave it back and forth like a magic light saber of death - you wouldn't miss as much as you would with a projectile weapon. You get automatic tracing fire, but it also allows the enemy to pinpoint YOUR location pretty easily, too. But there probably isn't alot of armor that could stand up to it right now.

Re:Laser Rifles!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lasers on the ground designed to blind humans are banned by international treaty.

Maybe these new High Energy lasers are banned from ground fighting too because of this (they'd blind you as well as burn you).

Ofcourse some countries who signed the treaty still develop blinding lasers (China and US I think are among them) for use against people and tank periscopes etc.

So maybe they'll develope HE ground lasers too.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

lol

You do know that the Fox news network had not yet lauched at the time of the oklahoma bombing, don't you?

They definately are weak in fact checking, but the way all the major new source tilt the news one way or another, I dont see how it makes much of a difference.

lasers, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can seasoned UNIX soldiers get battlefield lasers to protect them from the lameness of linux?

missle defense

[jrs 1]

i'd always assumed that this idea was impractical because i'd thought of this a long time ago and assumed that if it was feasable, someone would have done it by now. anyway, it could be extremely useful in a world war; to detonate missiles in mid-flight, before impact. a nuke exploding over the atlantic could be a lot less harmful than exploding in a major city. i guess it'd just have to be very very accurate.

Re:missle defense

[PhuCknuT]

The problem is, powerful lasers have until recently been VERY big beasts, and aiming at something the size and speed of a missle is an incredibly difficult problem. The US has developed a flying version of this technology that can shoot down an ICMB from hundreds of miles away. The laser take up most of the space inside a gutted 747. Unfortunatly the US is violating treaties in developing it, so who knows if they will ever be put into action.

Re:missle defense

[blowhole]

What's LOOM(TM)?

Re:missle defense

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt it -- hundreds of miles is a lot and in the atmosphere there is a lot of water and dust and other stuff aside from the beam blooming if this is the correct English word for it.

Up yet all tests were either fakes, like a missile hull that was just blown up but it made for a nice effect, or were conducted under totally unrealistic conditions. At the end of the day throwing stones at each other would be probably more effective.

Re:missle defense

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright, so lets assume one, just one makes it - the EMP, cholera, the plague, radioactive fallout , you name it.

One would be a disaster and if you think just one would make it you had better get a reality check, sorry.

Re:missle defense

[Dyolf Knip]

The problem is, powerful lasers have until recently been VERY big beasts

Agree, and getting the kind of surge power needed to actually destroy something is never easy.

and aiming at something the size and speed of a missle is an incredibly difficult problem

But it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to hit it with another missile! Look at the inter-satellite laser link the ESA set up a few weeks ago. It was almost trivially easy to do! It's clear that lasers will be able to do what ABM's never can.

The US has developed a flying version of this technology that can shoot down an ICMB from hundreds of miles away. The laser take up most of the space inside a gutted 747.

Yeah, I saw that. How about we put nuclear reactors on a couple of space stations in LEO and use them to shoot down any long range missiles? We know that the reactors would work, the lasers would work, and the targetting would work. Aside from the fact that it would be expensive to deploy (thank you very much, NASA!), though less than an equivalent ABM system, what's left?

Unfortunatly the US is violating treaties in developing it, so who knows if they will ever be put into action.

I'm not sure, did we have any ABM treaties with countries other than the USSR? If not, they're treaties with a nation that no longer exists. Just how binding is it?

Re:missle defense

[Anonymous Coward]

Aiming lasers is as easy as turning a mirror.

This raises some frightening questions

[joshjs]

What's to stop them from using these things on people? They have amazingly accurate targeting systems and they're cheap to fire (article says 25 cents (maybe dollars, I forget...) per shot.

So what's to keep the defense dept. from using these things for assassinations, or ground warfare?

Would that be cruel and unusual?

Here's a question: is there a "right of the people" to keep and bear these? The idea doesn't sound assuring, I must say: what kind of signature would it leave. Bullets can be tracked, but this -- would there even be a body left?

I'm not trying to complain or predict horrors, because I'm all about the advance of tech. I just want to know a little more about this kind of thing.

Also: it's eerie that the article only mentions uses of these for defense, and not for attack, covert (which I think is a promising potential use for this technology) or otherwise. Just considering it's a time of "war" and all.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[linzeal]

What is more cruel a bullet in the stomach which can take days to die from or you are missing your head and on the way to the ground your body is sawed in half? I mean if people want to kill people this is a damn efficient way to go about it.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous DWord]

There's an international treaty that the US has actually signed (wonder of wonders!) against using lasers on people. I tend to doubt it'll be followed in practice though, when "our" forces are involved.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous DWord]

Here's a six year old report on blinding weapons of the US military.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous Coward]

I was watching WWF Smackdown and someone was using a laser against The Rock. About 30 seconds after the first attacks began, the attacks ended without further incident.

I've always wondered how WWF security got to the attacker's location so quickly.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[luge]

As far as it being 'cruel'... if such lasers are powerful enough to destroy solid metal shells, they are probably powerful enough to kill instantaneously or fairly close to instantaneously. Compare to the rather gruesome and slowly fatal wounds gunshots produce... obviously, I'm no expert on these lasers but I'd think (offhand) they might be vastly more 'humane' than most current battlefield technologies. [Please take 'humane', in context, of course... nothing 'humane' about shooting anyone with anything more powerful than a Super Soaker.]

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[spicyjeff]

I'd rather be shot with a self coterizing laser versus a heavy lead slug that rips through me and creates a shock wave such the exit wound is 20x the entry wound. Now that would be cruel and unusual.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Razzak]

There's a lot of treaties like this to minimize the "horrors" of war. For example, it's a war crime to use an anti-tank rocket or a .50 cal machine gun on infantry.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous Coward]

they traced it through the smoke-filled arena... I mean, the Rock's gotta have his fireworks.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[EccentricAnomaly]

So what's to keep the defense dept. from using these things for assassinations, or ground warfare?

Simple... they don't work that well. The best they can do is heat up thin metal rocket skins and make them burst because of the pressurized fuel inside... most rockets are so weak structurally that they would collapse if you drained the fuel out of them.

These lasers are too weak to do much damage. The worst they can do to people is use laser light to blind people... which is pretty bad, but it ain't no death star.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Casca]

I believe the U.S. is not allowed to use .50 caliber or greater weapons on human targets, only equipment. I am told that a canteen is often considered equipment when carried by a potential human target.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous Coward]

"war crimes" is an excuse used by the victor to slaughter the losers.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we've found our new weapon's Achilles Heel.

It doesn't matter where you shoot the laser from, if you smell what the Rock is cooking.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Too true. I prefer the old days where the victor would simply kill the royal family and get on with governing. Nowadays, with democratic republics it's a little harder to round everyone up to kill.

Better to simply wipe them out on the battlefield.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Brian_Ellenberger]

So what are you looking for, a "humane" way to kill people?

Personally, I don't think a laser is any worse than getting killed by a 50 cal bullet, a 1000 pound bomb, or a 767 airliner.

Brian Ellenberger

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous Coward]

The treaty is probably more related to the possible (and easy) use of lasers for blinding large amounts of people permanently (but I haven't looked, so I am posting cowardly to not spread unfounded rumors).

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Fnkmaster]

Honestly, I'm not sure that on the battlefield per se this would be terribly effective. The thing is, bullets cause huge amounts of collateral damage, make organs bleed, bounce around, create big exit holes, etc. Bullets are very good at wounding and killing. Is a bulky, truck mounted laser any more effective against personnel than a 50 mm automatic cannon on a truck which can mow people down? I doubt it. And you can keep firing the cannon, you don't need a huge generator to keep it going. Just doesn't seem like a cost effective way to kill ground troops.

Against tanks and vehicles, perhaps this would be effective... though those are slow enough in general that a guided rocket or smart bomb is probably just as effective. And they are big and much better armored than a small incoming Katyusha rocket, so I don't know how well that would work at this point.

Planes are not that much unlike missiles and artillery shells in that they are big things flying through the sky at high speeds with lots of fuel in them. I would think that planes would be susceptible to this class of laser weapons too, as a result, and avoid the complexities of defeating chaff, ECM and jamming systems.

Also, if this actually works for shooting down these small projectiles, is there any fundamental reason a later iteration of this technology couldn't be used to defend from ICBMs - I suppose you would need a lot more range to get high enough to hit them while it still mattered. Perhaps better than the missile defense program missiles that don't seem to work really well in the real world.

The "plane-mounted assasination" might be effective though. If we can hit a rocket from the ground, we can probably hit a person from a plane with the same laser. And it might not be efficient against large numbers of ground troops, but if you want to knock out one guy with minimal or no collateral damage that would result from shooting missiles or rockets at him, this would possibly be effective. Although I may be wrong about the "no collateral damage" thing... refracted laser light all over the place could definitely at least blind a lot of people.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[jack deadmeat]

Of course, the US Army trains, manufacutures, and stockpiles these weapons. It's okay see, because they're intended for use against optics... not the guy looking through them.

A link to the Bradley Stingray.

Here's another.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous DWord]

Aww, too bad, because you're right. :-)

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Cygnusx12]

".. Here's a question: is there a "right of the people" to keep and bear these? .. "
I doubt it.. You have about as much right to own a tactile nuke.

Even on the issue of "improvised" weapons, see how considerate your local police are of a potatoe gun.

I'm curious as to if any of our constitutional scholars can shed some light on the exact legal definition of "arms". I hate to sound constituionally obtuse here, but is there a legal definition between say, your gun shop hand-gun, and say.. a shoulder launched anti-tank missle?.. (You know.. for protecting your home.. from other bigger more aggressive homes.)

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[basking2]

Military folk have a refreshingly clear moral code. Killing people is bad, but many times necessary. Killing people should be done quickly and coldly -- no zest for death, just do it and get it done with; keep your kids and neighbors safe. At least, that is the general concensus... you have special officers some times and I hope they never never get any type of command opertunity. I talked with one guy from Switzerland (I think it was) who told me about one of these guys he went through training with. It was funny until they did an exercise where he shot child-dummies. Granted, you may have to shoot them anyway to protect yourself (suicide bombings) but you just don't go about plugging humans! I'm on a tangent...

Oh well, I guess my suggestion/answer is morals -- they have some of them still in the army. Thankfully moral relativists only seem to run talk shows and teach university classes. I'm not sure I'm confortable in universities, though...

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[linzeal]

How is this flamebait I'm quite serious. I mean people spoke of the horrors of guns shortly after they were introduced and the same discussion ran after nuclear weapons were used. Why wouldn't we explore the human cost to deply these weapons.

Blindly patriotic moderators is the cause of this I might add.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Wyatt Earp]

The Russians use these devices as well.

Testimony from a Navy Officer injured by a Russian merchant ship's laser while working with the Canadian Navy.

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1999_h/ 99 -02-11daly.htm

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[dumpster_d]

The LASERs would be effective at kill. Heck, a friend used to bull's-eye rats on base with the target designator in his M1A--and that was enough to kill w/o being designed as such [unless he was BS-ing me, of course].

Of course, chemically projected slugs and their launchers are CHEAP: and the budget makes the army.
Heck with 'plane mounted', use a dozen satelites--have a low power same freq LASER to draw a bead and then burn them down to their boots with the high-power one. Hit whoever you want in the world at your convenience and from the comfort of your office terminal.

Militarily: useless
Politically: priceless.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[horos1]

> Honestly, I'm not sure that on the battlefield ?> per se this would be terribly effective.

Of course they would, if all the kinks were removed from the laser, the laser was made cheap to fire, and there was a way of automatically targetting objects.

Figure: suppose the laser consisted of a hemisphere - where the laser could be aimed at any point in that hemisphere based on a computer tracking device.

Then, any 'human heat source' within firing range could be instantly killed. Every 100th or so a second, the computer could track external heat sources that looked human and didn't have a 'friendly' tag attached to them, apply a small enough charge to cauterize their aorta or jugular vein, and go on to the next target. No recoil, no aiming necessary. And it really doesn't require that much energy to kill someone..

After all, all warfare is is the application of energy to the right point at the right time. Combine technologies that a) provide instantaneous transfer of energy (lasers) with b) instantaneous calculation of where to aim that energy (computers like the one in the segway) and you've got one hell of a scary world.

Ed

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[cancrman]

Yea, seriously. At least if you get shot with a .50cal you're pretty much dead and not in a lot of pain. Instead of, say, getting shot in the stomach with a 9mm. That would hurt like a bitch.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[marick]

What's to stop them from using these things on people? They have amazingly accurate targeting systems and they're cheap to fire (article says 25 cents (maybe dollars, I forget...) per shot.

Cheap to fire? Hardly.

From the article: But the THEL is expensive to fire, costing $3,000 or more per shot because of the exotic chemicals used. It also requires supply lines to keep the weapon charged with chemicals.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[marick]

Oops... it appears that one of the lasers only costs 25 cents per shot. My bad.

The new laser, called the Solid State Heat Capacity Laser, is about five feet long and a foot-and-a-half wide and will be small enough to be installed on an electric-powered Humvee.

"Those two couple very well together," said program director Randy Buff.

The electric laser costs about 25 cents a shot, he said.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a question: is there a "right of the people" to keep and bear these?

A well regulated militia, being nessesary to the security of a free state... blah blah blah

(What part of *WELL REGULATED* do you not understand?)

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an international treaty that the US has actually signed (wonder of wonders!) against using lasers on people.

We signed the ABM treaty, too. What's for lunch, Mom?

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Ian Bicking]

An excellent point to bring up.

Considering these offensive possibilities is the only way I've found to make any sense of missile defense: why some people are trying so hard to make it, why others are so opposed to it.

In its proposed use, it's obviously stupid: it does a very poor job of defending against a very unlikely attack. Maybe its supporters are just trying to make more money for weapons producers -- actually, I'm sure they are -- but maybe there's more to it.

But then why do all these other countries get so bothered about it? If it's doomed to fail -- there seems to be concensus on that from all nonpartial observers -- then why not just let the US fail at it?

So here's where this theory comes in: missile defense provides a reason to do research and implementation of military systems in space, with high accuracy lasers and all that. It doesn't have to work, because it will never be tested in a realistic way, and the staged tests will just be faked (like all the tests so far).

Once you have high-precision and powerful lasers in space, you have a hell of a lot of power. Spy satellites already have impressive accuracy. It's entirely possible to create an offensive weapon that could kill anyone that's out in the open (given a certain amount of intelligence -- supposing biometrics don't get too good, so they could identify us from space).

Of course this would scare the hell out of all the other countries -- enemies and allies alike. It's no secret that the US is a fickle lover. One day you're our best friend -- Noriega, for example -- the next you're in jail. Or just dead.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Fesh]

Hmm. Then the .50cal sniper rifles that the SEALS and other forces use are anti-equipment weapons? Pardon my cognitive dissonance here...

I thought the rule was anything larger than .50cal. 'Course, I'm sure that being strafed by 20mm is no picnic... (Hell, being attacked with anything would put a crimp in my day...)

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Ryan Amos]

Yeah, but a .50 caliber sniper rifle is fair game... Plus the .50 BMG rifles the US uses use the same ammo as a .50 caliber machine gun (BMG stands for Browning Machine Gun) Hell, they're even legal for civilians to own. Not to mention that the M98A1A rifles that US special forces use get 6" groupings at 1000 meters...

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[child_of_mercy]

"tactile nuke"

Yeah I really hate those nukes that want to touch.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Ryan Amos]

I believe a 50 mm cannon is called a "mortar." ;) You're probably thinking of .50 caliber, which is about 12.1 mm, and still a fucking enormous gun. Hell, anything bigger than a .336 will be enough to blow a rather large hole in something (thus why .357 revolvers are classified as "big game hunting" weapons.)

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Danse]

I think the .50 cal rule dealt with machine guns, not single-shot sniper rifles. I could be wrong though.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[swinginSwingler]

Furthermore, what's to stop someone from cooking a LARGE amount of popcorn in some poor professors house? This is serious stuff!

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Stonehand]

Sure, it could be used as anti-equipment.

That 0.50-BMG cartridge was originally designed as an anti-tank (WWI era tank...) round, if memory serves. It likely has enough penetration to still be good enough for damaging many things besides flesh and blood today.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[kin_korn_karn]

Ever seen what a .50 can do? How you going to prove that it wasn't a grenade or artillery when people are blown to tiny pieces?

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[kin_korn_karn]

that's correct, the doctrine is that the .50 BMG sniper rifles are to be used vs. equipment only (anti-materiel weapons). I doubt anyone in SOCOM takes that seriously, though.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Stonehand]

You might have to look at British case law to figure out the distinction between arms and, say, field artillery.

ISTR that way back when, they might have had some provisions protecting the individual keeping of arms -- by which they meant man-portable personal anti-people weapons, unlike, say, cannons, mortars and their ilk. I'd suspect that the US interpretation would be a more modernized version (0.50-cal Barrett, OK; 60mm mortar or 105mm howitzer, not OK).

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[SectoidRandom]

Im slightly confused as to which i would prefer less; A laser heating my liver to 2000 degrees, or a bullet to the head?

Seriously is there much difference?

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Fnkmaster]

You are right - I meant 50 cal, by which I was thinking of "largest possible gauge for reasonable anti-personnel usage". And yes, it would definitely do some serious damage.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Fnkmaster]

Okay, what you are saying is that IF the targetting were so good it could figure out how to hit a vital area AND the fire rate were 100 times a second (i.e. target acquisition and firing combined take only 1/100th of a second) and you had a continous source of large amounts of electricity to power the sucker.

I agree with that - but I don't think any of your assumptions are terribly reasonable. It would take longer than 1/100th of a second to kill somebody with a laser. Also target acquisition and aiming would take on the order of 1 second. Nevertheless, it could theoretically be used to set up a "kill zone" that would be mildly effective. I still think you could be just as effective if you used the same automatic targetting and aiming system with a machine gun. And you face the same problem that it won't be able to figure out who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. Too many friendly fire instances are possible with this sort of thing, unless you just want to create a no-man's land.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[nEoN nOoDlE]

Are there any signed treaties preventing us from attaching these to the heads of sharks?

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[csbruce]

So what's to keep the defense dept. from using these things for assassinations, or ground warfare? Would that be cruel and unusual?

You're right. People should only killed decent and proper with a sniper's bullet.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[martissimo]

when i was in the military this is what i was told regarding this topic.

while trained on a 50 cal+ weapon they will make a very strong point of the fact that you cannot shoot people with them.

they will then almost always point out just following this that it is certainly OK to shoot at a persons gear like the canteen on his belt or his backpack he's wearing.

take it as you will but thats my firsthand experience

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Weezul]

I would prefer that they spend money researching lasers as opposed to buying tanks. The laser research will give us civilians *some* technological advances, the tanks will not buy us shit.

OTOH, Congress is seriously talking about deployment which will not buy as much new tech, but still more then the tanks.

They should spend all the money researching the space plane so that they can cheaply launch all these new sats. when they are done. Yeah that's it! :)

Perhaps we could sell them cruise missles traveling at mock 16?

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Ziviyr]

Good luck finding the jugular on that missile thats flying up your other hemisphere. :-)

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[jburroug]

Once you have high-precision and powerful lasers in space, you have a hell of a lot of power. Spy satellites already have impressive accuracy. It's entirely possible to create an offensive weapon that could kill anyone that's out in the open (given a certain amount of intelligence -- supposing biometrics don't get too good, so they could identify us from space).

Say wasn't this the plot to the movie Real Genius? Damn funny movie...

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but its legal to use them on military equipment.

Fortunately uniforms count as military equipment so you can shoot the troops uniforms with you .50 cal. Its not you're fault there are people in them.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[indiechild]

I think the Geneva conventions probably classifies "inhumane" weapons as ones that are virtually guaranteed to kill you with very little chance of survival, so .50caliber guns fall into this category.

Believe it or not, 5.56mm caliber rifles are "humane" weapons of war because the round they fire, the SS109 full-metal jacketed, is only "designed to wound" at typical engagement ranges. Of course, at close range it's a whole lot more lethal than that (as the FBI discovered), but nobody's going to complain except the Red Cross, really.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[snarf_snarf]

Is the price of popcorn kernels skyrocketing? All I can think about is filling my Prof.'s bunglalow with seed and well...

Never mind. I watch too much cable TV and I love my country but fear my government.
FBICIAESCHELONCARNIVOREDRUGSCARTELMEDELLINOSAMAAFG HANISTANKILLKILLKILL

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Rogerborg]

• lasers are too weak to do much damage. The worst they can do to people is use laser light to blind people... which is pretty bad, but it ain't no death star

If you kill a soldier, how long does it take two men to bury him? Hours.

If you blind a soldier, how long does it take two men to care for him? A lifetime.

Special forces need weapons with stopping power. If it comes down to grunts shooting, it's better (economically) to cripple. Harsh, but military planners have to consider it.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Rogerborg]

• Bullets are very good at wounding and killing. [A laser] doesn't seem like a cost effective way to kill ground troops

Why would you want to kill them? You're not fighting them, you're fighting their state/organisation, and its economy. So wound them. Cripple them if you can. Blinding is ideal. Make them a burden on their state. It's harsh and it doesn't have the faux purity of death, but that's the way military planners have to think.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[bigwig10001]

There is a treaty banning armed unmanned aircraft. The U.S. signed it. That is why cruise missiles were always launched from a ship or plane.

We obeyed that treaty in Afghanistan, until Mullah Omar's pickup got away from an unmanned Predator aircraft armed with a Hellfire antitank missile. The CIA dude at the console said "well, my hands are tied." Cheney and Rummy had some major hissy fits. Now no one's hands are tied.

Bombs away! (and hope skynet doesn't become self-aware and view us as a target)

Big Magnifying Glasses

[simetra]

Next is the Mighty BMG, allows you to burn your enemy to a crisp. Only works on sunny days though.

Fortune cookie say...

[Fortune Master]

Do not be alarmed by the intense burning sensation.

Fox News needs to learn English

[sam_handelman]

I know that the illiteracy of journalists is now an american tradition but:

Smaller, cheaper and more lethal, the high-powered version of a pocket laser pointer is [...]

means that these battlefield lasers are smaller, cheaper and more lethal (all three of which I doubt) than... a pocket laser pointer. I assume that they mean smaller, cheaper and more lethal than previous generations of killer laser weapons (and even that, I doubt) but this is ridiculous.

Even though these lasers work - which, given how well the same technologies work for telescopes and given the output of an OI laser, I don't really doubt - that doesn't make this automatically a practical technology and it seems clear to me that it's a white elephant for cash starved defense contractors.

Re:Fox News needs to learn English

[Anonymous Coward]

"means that these battlefield lasers are smaller, cheaper and more lethal (all three of which I doubt)"

You really doubt that this laser is more lethal than a pocket laser?? Hmm...

Although I do agree on the first two :)

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, yeah, they are SOOOOO even-handed over there at Fox. Not a whiff of bias there at all.

Can they target insects.

[stompro]

I would love one if it could track and fry mosquitos.

Warning, Warning, Entering bug free zone, please wear eye protection.

Re:Can they target insects.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a 'No Fly Zone'.

Re:Can they target insects.

[hughk]

There is a rumour about a guy in Russia reported a while back in The St Petersburg Times, who made a smaller zapper for mosquitoes (which are a major headache during the summer in northern Russia). It used two lasers, one for tracking and a pulsed beam for frying. The guy was working at the Lenningrad Optical Institute which was where some of the Russian laser research is done.

Someone heard about of this device and nixed on the grounds that it used the Soviet Starwars technology, which is restricted and secondly, you don't really want to be in the way when it fires.

Re:Can they target insects.

[stompro]

As Duffy would say, Har har har.

:)

A Marine's Haiku

[Knunov]

This is my Haiku
There are many more like it
But this one is mine

Semper Fi!

Knunov

Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[SirTreveyan]

I can see this being used against tanks. It would come in very handy first causeing the reactive armor to detonate prematurely making it easier for later traditional rounds to penetrate. Hell...why not just keep the damn thing firing at a tank...Im sure that a tanks surface is not match for temperatures like the surface of the sun.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[Anonymous DWord]

What they've been using it for mostly is for optics and antennae. A blind tank is pretty useless, and easy to sneak up on with more conventional (read: cheaper) weapons.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[pa-guy]

OK, so you may slag off some armour. Tanks move using low ground, scooting around treelines etc. They also move in pairs (fire teams), with one member of the team staying put while the other moves to his next fire position. This thing is line of sight (obviously). That means that the tank thats getting hit's fire team partner will take out the laser. As well, even if it does penetrate the armour, there will be no spalling on the inner armour. Pretty ineffective actually.
BTW, I was a tanker for twenty years so I do have a little clue about this shit.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[child_of_mercy]

$3,000 a shot is a LOT cheaper than any anti-tank missile.

not so much worse than an AP artillery round.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[child_of_mercy]

With all due respect

these things don't have visible beams, no muzzle flash, no smoke, no noise

how are you planning on returning fire if you can't see it?

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[the_2nd_coming]

have you seen what some of these lasers can do? they have lasers that can knock down a building....do you think that armor will stand a better chance against such a laser?

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[Anonymous Coward]

You could make a detector for these things. Just because a human can't see a short infrared laser blast doen't mean a machine can't.

Since these lasers seem to all be truck-mounted, an aerial rader scan could be used to find targets too.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[child_of_mercy]

u sure?

we're talking a coherent beam...

so the detector would have to be along the firing line right?

I suppose a really tip-top damage control system might manage to get a fix?

Also expect the truck carrying this thing to be well camoflaged.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[DNS-and-BIND]

The M1 Abrams tank has had lasing warning for a good while now. I remember getting "Laser Detected" warnings playing M1 Tank Commander back in 1987...

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[Weezul]

That all depends on how powerful a laser you were talking about, but I don't think they seriously want to zap tanks. That advantage of a laser is that it can be aimed and fired very quickly, so you use it to zap fast moving missles, shells, or air plains you don't use it to zap slow moving tanks.

If you did want to kill a tank with a laser for some reason you would use a very big one and melt it quickly or switch to gamma rays and just kill all the guys without hurting the tank. I could perhaps see sat based gamma ray beams for picking off specific personel behind enemy lines, but tanks are easy to kill with old tech to be worth the trouble.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[Anonymous Coward]

They have beams visible to IR sensors. Simple defense, though, would probably be to develop some sort of smoke/dye cloud weapon that has some incredible IR-absorbing qualities. The sensor of the future would then become millimeter-wave (or shorter) radar. Fire in a big cloud of the anti-IR smoke rounds prior to your assault, and your tanks still can see because the MMW radar can see through the cloud.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[Codifex Maximus]

Who says you gotta penetrate the armor to take out a tank? All you gotta do is render it immobile (take out the tracks) and it's effectively dead.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[Anonymous Coward]

these things don't have visible beams, no muzzle flash, no smoke, no noise

You are a fucking moron.

Visible beam: dust particles in the air can cause enough sparkle to show where the beam is coming from.

Muzzle flash and smoke: none of these, granted.

No noise: Superheating air produces a sound very much like thunder. A laser being used in this manner with enough energy to penetrate tank armor will certainly superheat air and create a lot of noise.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[Anonymous Coward]

Killing a tank with a laser is impractical at this point. It requires incredible amounts of energy, certainly not the sort of thing you can drag a lot of around with you, especially on a battlefield. With current production and storage technology, you might get five or so tank-killing shots before you have to recharge.

Regular tanks, using low-tech regular rounds, get forty or more rounds before a reload (the Israeli Merkava gets 85, plus more if it uses its cargo space for ammunition storage).

You can see how this might cause problems.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[Beowulf Smith]

Remember though, these lasers can make a small spot the temperature of the sun for a brief period (less than a second). Now, for a thin skinned missile, artillery shell, or mortar round, that will cause significant damage. However, even an old tank with equivalent of 17 inches of steel plate armor will easily withstand a shot by this laser for the brief amount of time that it is firing. Maybe if you could continuously cycle the laser for several minutes you could cut through, but no laser in existence (or any planned in the near future) could do this without being hooked to a nuke plant for all the power it would require. So, it's not really a possibility. Maybe with room temperature super-conducters used in large batteries, it may be possible to store that much energy, but then you still have to charge these weapons. So are you going to build a power plant for each mobile laser? No worries friends, your tanks are safe for now (well at least the main body of the tank, antennas and scopes are probably screwed).

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[pa-guy]

A mobility kill doesn't render a tank dead. If the weapons systems are still online it's still dangerous.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[pa-guy]

Sorry, forgot to mention that most tanks have laser detectors these days.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[pa-guy]

they have lasers that can knock down a building

Really? I seriously fucking doubt that 'they' do, and if 'they' do the device certainly isn't portable.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[Tassach]

IIRC, reactive armor is pretty well obsolete - it's not very effective against the current generation of anti-tank weapons, most of which were designed to defeat reactive armor. The US hasn't used it for many years, and I'm pretty sure the Russians have stopped using it as well. It may still be used by some smaller countries that bought their military equipment from the USSR, but even that seems pretty unlikely -- reactive armor is very difficult (and expensive) to maintain, which lessens the probability that any army that has to rely on Soviet hand-me-downs will have the resources to keep it functional.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[Bobo the Space Chimp]

But you can just go around it and leave it there. That is the point.

Anyway, mortars can take care of it at that point.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[pa-guy]

Sure, you go around it. But the crew is still alive, and the running gear is easily repaired.
Mortars? You're joking right? Mortars are not accurate enough for this sort of thing. You would need a direct hit from a very large mortar to do anything. Artillary is not for killing panzers.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[child_of_mercy]

thats a targetting laser being detected.

it's not incinerating on it's way in.

and did that "laser detected" give you a range and bearing?

Against a real fighting laser you wouldn't need the "laser detected" light, because your flesh would be melting first.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[Cheese Metal Rulez!!]

The beam is in a spectrum of light invisible to the human eye.
Reflected light (from dust etc...) will also be invisible.
Superheating such a thin beam of atmosphere will create a sound something like this;
"pop!"

Not really audible over the noise of a tank and certainly no use for a positional fix.

Re:Purely defensive??????? I dont think so....

[krenskeoz]

120mm HEAT rounds burning through the overhead armour will ruin most tanks. Not to mention the ability to move against the flank and rear of the tank once it is immobile.

Mind you the Laser is much more likely to score a electronics kill on a tank making it almost useless at longer ranges. If the Laser punps enough heat into the Hull It may become unliveably hot as well.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

No bias at any of the big 3 or CNN, I suppose?

Ha ha, Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

This post claims Fox reporting isn't liberal and the next one claims they are! But I'm sure your "objective" viewpoint must be the correct one.

More handy links

[mbessey]

Most of these haven't been updated in a while, though...

The US Army's HEL sites:

http://www.smdc.army.mil/FactSheets/THEL.html

http://www.smdc.army.mil/FactSheets/HELSTF.html
TRW's contribution:

http://www.trw.com/thel

-Mark

Re:More handy links

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. Split the links, get double the mod points. Well done!

Not gonna work.

[blair1q]

Old way:

Shell comes down, buries in dirt, explodes. Shrapnel flies everywhere, but mostly up. Maybe shell has an altitude based fuse, so it explodes in the air. Shrapnel flies everywhere.

New way:

Shell comes down, gets zapped by laser. Shrapnel flies everywhere.

Still, you have supersonic, ballistic shrapnel, and still, you have it landing full-speed on the target.

--Blair

Re:Not gonna work.

[flacco]

Still, you have supersonic, ballistic shrapnel, and still, you have it landing full-speed on the target.

If the shell is directed at an even marginally hardened target, you'd much rather have a bunch of tiny, dispersed bits of metal (burning off their momentum agaist air resistance with their much greater overall surface area) than a massive, explosively-armed charge burying itself into your position, then detonating.

Re:Not gonna work.

[PhuCknuT]

The idea is to detonate it well before it comes down, hopefully far enough away that shrapnel doesn't land on you. And even if it exploded relativly close to impact, shrapnel has much less penetrating power than an intact shell. I know I'd rather be in a tank hit by shrapnel than one hit by an armor piercing shell.

Re:Not gonna work.

[Life Blood]

Ummm, no.

There is an optimal place for a shell to explode to do the most damage and be the most lethal, destroy that and the weapon is less effective. This is why the proximity fuse was such a breakthrough. Shotguns suck at long range. A shell detonated too early will likewise suck.

Now what if the shell is an armor-piercing shaped charge? If it goes off early it is useless in an AP capacity because it lacks penetration. Sure some fragments might hit someone, but it won't damage anything sufficiently armored to take anti-personnel rounds. Best yet it doesn't have to go off that early. A few meters or so should do it.

See the point now?

Re:Not gonna work.

[dbrutus]

How about shell is fired and is identified, targeted, and zapped by laser before it reaches your troops.

The shrapnel still flies but it either gets nobody or, even better, gets the launcher's own troops.

Does anybody else think the guys who thought this up must be David Drake fans (Hammer's Slammers)?

Re:Not gonna work.

[Wyatt Earp]

There is also a system that uses radio signals to detonate the proximity fuzes at a distance from the friendly lines.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/an-vlq-9 .h tm

"The Shortstop Electronic Protection System (SEPS) is an RF Proximity Fuze counter measure. The Shortstop battlefield electronic countermeasures system is capable of prematurely detonating incoming artillery and mortar rounds. It counters the threat of RF Proximity Fuzed munitions by causing them to prefunction, to protect friendly ground troops, vehicles, structures, and other equipment under fire."

Shortstop is already in service.

There are already radar systems to track rounds down to a 60mm mortar shell.

Re:Not gonna work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shell is detonated at 5000' in the air. By that time, shrapnel falling down is an annoyance, not a hazard.

Re:American lives expensive?

[Doppler00]

I for one think that the life of an American soldier is worth at least $3000. Of course superior military technology costs more. Who do you think is winning in Afghanistan now? Those who spent billions of dollars creating an air force? Or those riding on the backs of horses?

Get real

[writertype]

I can buy an automated projectile system to shoot down guided missiles, but a laser? To shoot down artillery shells? Can you imagine the engineering required to lock onto said shell and the laser power to detonate it? What about smoke or other haze?

And let's not even consider making this a "personal" means of defense.

Sounds like the old warbirds over at Fox are lobbying for a larger military budget.

Re:Get real

[Slicebo]

The tough part isn't tracking and locking onto the incoming projectiles . . . we have decades of artillery/anti-artillery
and naval experience in this area and plenty of custom sensor and computer hardware designed to do this. The
difficulty is delivering sufficient laser power to the target in a few milliseconds.

Re:Get real

[mmontour]

I can buy an automated projectile system to shoot down guided missiles, but a laser? To shoot down artillery shells? Can you imagine the engineering required to lock onto said shell and the laser power to detonate it?

As far as the tracking, it seems to me that it would be significantly easier than in a projectile system. In the projectile system, you have to move something rapidly through 3-dimensional space and trigger it when it's within a small distance of another thing moving rapidly through 3-dimensional space. With the laser, you just have to track two angles so that the beam stays on the target. That's a much simpler control system.

And gorillas!

[Stir]

Large, gray, head smashing diamond protecting gorillas, ala Crichton's Congo.

You mean jiffy popped eyeballs?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

If they use any wavelength that is well-focussed by eyeball optics you'll blind anybody without eye protection tuned to the laser that looks in the direction of anything the laser is shining on.

If they get hit in the face with a specular reflection they might have eye damage beyond merely going blind.

War is about to beome H.E.L.

Re:You mean jiffy popped eyeballs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Such "dazzle" weapons were developed during the 80's, and were apparently used.

Re:You mean jiffy popped eyeballs?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Such "dazzle" weapons were developed during the 80's, and were apparently used.

True. And there are moves to outlaw them (like poision gas and biological weapons) as inhumane (and counterproductive).

But what I'm talking about is accidental dazzle. When you're sending a light pulse that can vaporize metal in miliseconds, even a tiny splinter of that energy, focussed by an eye's lens, can wreak havoc on retinal cells.

Colloids, proteins, and DNA are a lot more fragile than metal.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

FOX News is one of the most sensational, "check the facts later if anyone bothers to call us on our imaginative story" news agencies to ever hit the books. It wasn't 5 minutes that the first building hit the ground before FOX news had conclusive proof that Bin Laden did it.

Of course, they blamed Oklahoma City on him too, and look what happened.

You do know that the Fox news network had not yet lauched at the time of the oklahoma bombing, don't you?

Heheh.. ya... maybe he should check his "facts" first.

OKC bombing = 1995
Fox News founded = 1996

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

Make your own decisions? You just repeated their slogan practically word for word. Just because it's biased towards your political viewpoint doesn't make it all right.

You spun your post, too - "a bit hasty". FoxNews Channel sensationalizes all their headlines and reports stories with little basis of truth. All news organizations, in their haste to get the scoop on a story, seem to do this, but Fox is incredibly bad about it...

Uh huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

And what if they start casing their weaponry in polished mirrors? You haven't seen hell until you've seen a 100-ton disco ball loaded with TNT hurtling over the front lines.

MIRACL

[sheetsda]

The granddaddy of all the laser weapons is the Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser, known as MIRACL, which fills a large building and its surroundings at the test site.

Nice acronym. Now every time I see a picture of someone standing in a beam of divine light from the sky I'm going to get a mental picture of him bursting into flames and melting.

Re:MIRACL

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe that's the weapon used in the XFiles? (first or 2nd season, I forget...)

Re:MIRACL

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like the killer satellite in AKIRA.

Re:MIRACL

[InfoVore]

I have a good friend who worked on MIRACL at the WSMR HELSTF site for many years. He tells great stories about things that happened out there. A few examples:

- They once declassified an obsolete drum drive by running over it 3 times with an APC (security said it had to be 3 times ...)

- MIRACL is a deuturium-flouride chemical laser (basically a specially designed rocket engine). They stored the deuturium as heavy water in a holding pond. During bird migration season, an unusual number of ducks would swim in the pond. It turns out that the ducks liked the heavy water. They floated just a little bit higher due to the higher water density.

- A moth was once caught in one of the side-lobes of the main beam during a routine shot. The resulting ball of plasma blew a basketball sized hole through a heavy electronics rack several feet away.

But my favorite was:

A couple of times a year VIP's would decend on the facility to review it (HELSTF was constantly under threat of being shut down). The Congress critters and Pentagon brass would always bring along an entourage of "experts" - laser physics phd's, consultants, etc. The project manager had to assign two engineers just to watch these "experts" as they walked through the facility. They had a bad habit of "adjusting" anything with a knob, wheel, button, or switch. In a couple of cases when they didn't catch the "adjustments", it actually caused tests to fail WHILE THE VIPS WERE THERE - a very bad thing when your funding is iffy. My buddy made a suggestion and they implemented it. After that no more problems with undocumented "adjustments". My friend built a couple of "twiddle boxes" - working dials, lights, readouts, the whole works. They very prominently placed these devices on racks in the control areas. When the tour groups would go through, the manager would point to the faux-boxes as the system controls and data recording interfaces. Presto, no more problems with "adjustments" to the real system.

I.V.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[DarkEdgeX]

Uh, sure, whatever.

They were only on 24/7 in the days following 9/11 reporting on every detail as it came out. Making assumptions is something I EXPECT the media to do, what the hell do you think reporters do all day? "Hm, let's gather some facts, but never actually suggest any possible conclusion, yes, this is news-worthy, HONEST."

Besides, I'd be willing to bet they were only reporting what government officials were telling them in private (the bin Laden connection). I think most people are used to seeing un-substantiated news on the TV, and most folk are smart enough to make their own decisions (what's the Fox News slogan-- "We report, you decide."-- this was more than true after 9/11; they presented a number of possibilities right after the attacks happened, and left it to you, THE VIEWER, to decide).

Personally, I think you're just some CNN-zealot who doesn't like Bill O'Reilly.

Now all they need

[Amazing Quantum Man]

is some really big cats, so they can get some exercise (US Patent 5,443,036)

the goddamn hippies

[HongPong]

Next thing you know the goddamn hippies are going to demand we only set them on 'stun.' Bastards!

Re:the goddamn hippies

[dumpster_d]

AHK!
You're right!
Let's use the system to smoke the hippies!

Re:the goddamn hippies

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Blame them for not being as bloodthirsty as you are.

this is good?

[gotih]

we're removing all risk to US gov. troops -- is the right to bear arms going to be moot? thomas jefferson (i think) said we must have the right to bear arms as a last resort to resist a tyranical government here. while i don't like many aspects of the US government i'm not ready to take up arms however if we slide further towards a totalatarian government (and further away from democracy) i might support an armed takeover. i really don't know since i've never thought much about it but this seems to be a step in the wrong direction -- we can save our soldiers lives through other means, like negotiations.

Re:this is good?

[basking2]

We're not pulling out all vulnerability to troops, especially if we are talking about an internal revolutionary war. In that case there are many more elements to consider. Revolutions are dirty because intelligence lines are more complicated and security is more breachable, not matter how hard you try. Some folks just change side and don't tell their superiors!

This particular type of technology doesn't seem to threatening a revolutionary war because we couldn't get rockets anyway. If we could get rockets, we probably would have the connections to get some more nifty fancy stuff-- like these lasers. The article doesn't go into how to design around a hit on the rocket -- think war head and the problem doesn't seem to be solved by this system; Or think gasseous payload. This is no magic bullet. It DOES seem like a nice way to keep our troops safe from conventional artilary, though!

Personally, I'm suspicious that this is more a PR thing that real alaysis of the situation. Given some obvious work arounds, why would a potential enemy get a heads up so soon? If we met up with a truely depsarate enemy that could manufacture arms of their own and had sufficiant disregard for human life, they could slap some thing on to rocket body that could slip through this system, or at least cause some collateral damage.

I'm tempted to think that either the private sector is close to this tech anyway, and so there's no use keeping it secret or it has other, more tactically useful uses, like covert detonation of arms depots. THAT is something you can't work around as easily.

The obvious defense is reflective coats, but then a stalite/plane can see it in a second -- bing -- target of opertunity. Even if you put a cloth cover over that coating you still have a building that reacts very differently to radioations of differing wavelengths. A satalite could tell that it aint-no-pile-o-rocks. The other is to use anything non-reflective, and then you can use black-body radiation to your advantage using a 2-4 person ghost team at 3 am. If they are low enough to the ground, the device's output would be tough to localize and you destroy a the arms fuling the oposition's war and don't kill many of their troops. Now THAT is a desirable outcome for most modern campaigns! Destroy the tools to wage war and keep the humans safe! More importantly, you DON'T put arms depots in a civilized area. You can't trust the local populous (spys) and in the Taliban's case, you REALLY can't trust the local populous.

Note that the above is me speculating while very sleepy. I didn't think too too deeply, so there may be some logical quirks, but you get the idea.
Hope this helps!
(Hope that makes sense...*yawn*... even when I preview this I'm bleary-eyed....)

Re:this is good?

[Anonymous Coward]

uhh... what the hell are you talking about now?

Re:this is good?

[Anonymous Coward]

...if we slide further towards a totalatarian government (and further away from democracy)...

FastTrack, the WTO, secret evidence, Bush's executive orders including one amending the Presidential Records Act, Ashcroft's repeal of attorney-client priveledge, military tribunals that assume guilty until proven innocent, Bush's appointment to the Presidency by the Supreme Court (neither candidate was elected).

Is that far enough away from democracy for you?

Bias? You want Bias?

[errxn]

Well, then, I have two words for you:

Dan Rather.

Lasers?

[PhoenxHwk]

Why lasers? It doesn't quite have the panache of using a rocket to shoot down other things. Plus lasers move at the speed of light, so its not even half as challenging to hit a moving piece of balistics as it would be with another projectile!

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I like my news to be at least checked before it gets to me. That's why I Just Say No to Fox, and every week, I get the Weekly World News instead. I don't want to read unsubstantiated rumors about BatBoy.

10 and 11, Clouds and commercial aircraft

[Futurepower(tm)]

Thanks for bringing a little sanity to this subject.

And dont forget:

10) Clouds. Laser light does NOT penetrate clouds. The water vapor easily absorbs all the energy.

Also don't forget:

11) Friendly aircraft. On July 4, 1988, the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes, in the Persian Gulf, shot down an Iran Air A300 Airbus, killing 290 persons, after mistaking it for an attacking jet fighter. "The U.S. government deeply regrets this incident," Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon news conference.

The cruiser was "equipped with the most sophisticated radar and electronic battle gear in the Navy's surface arsenal."

Organizations that sell weapons are often not honest about the shortcomings.

--
Links to respected news sources show how U.S. government policy contributed to terrorism: What should be the Response to Violence?

Re:10 and 11, Clouds and commercial aircraft

[Anonymous Coward]

please take your sig and put it where it belongs. i have them turned off for a reason -- i don't want to see it.

Re:10 and 11, Clouds and commercial aircraft

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm probably going to regret this, simply because what I'm saying will play directly into your implied argument that the U.S. is somehow guilty of propogating it's own form of terrorism, but:

The Vincennes had a history long before that incident of being a dangerous ship to be around. I know. I had close friends stationed on it. The ship had the nickname "Robocruiser" because the Captian left the Aegis system in full-auto most the time.

In this particular case, the ship was in full-automatic mode (wherein it determines what to shoot at and what not to shoot at). In full auto, the ship had decided that the inbound was not a real target and therefore did not shoot. The OOD (most likely the Captain at this point, since they were at GQ (battlestations to you non-sailors)) placed the system in semi-automatic operation (tracking and weapons management is automatic, but the decision to fire is made by a human) and fired anyway.

Do people make mistakes? Yes. Is this in any way indicative of some vast conspiracy to subjugate the rest of the world? No. At the time, the crew honestly thought they were under attack. My friend on board the ship could hear the cheering from CIC when the inbound was knocked down! (Thin aluminum hulls on Aegis class ships.) No sane person would cheer the deaths of 300 people.

Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.

Re:10 and 11, Clouds and commercial aircraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, giving assistance to Israel really justifies getting attacked like the US was. Like it or not, Israel is a legal, reconized country, which is constantly threatened by its neighbours. The US has a long history of giving enough support to Israel, and little has changed. If you have a reason with Israel existing in the first place, the US was one of the few western countries that had nothing to do with its creation. Most of the article is a blind, biases rant bordering on racism.

Just because the CIA missed it doesn't justify it, in the same way that leaving my car unlocked doesn't justify someone stealing it.

Regardless of the problems in Saudi Arabia, the situation there is many, many times better than it is in "similar" countries such as Iraq and Iran. Just because they are ruled by a monarchy who doesn't pretend to be a democracy instead of a dictatorial regime.

Re:10 and 11, Clouds and commercial aircraft

[child_of_mercy]

two words

x-ray lasers

of course the nuke that powers them upsets some...

seriously projectiles will always have a place, but as laser tech improves so will they

there was a good 200 year overlap between the crossbow and the black-powder gun.

at the start the crossbow would win every time, and by the end it was a curiosity.

Re:10 and 11, Clouds and commercial aircraft

[Anonymous Coward]

this is true i was on the wainwright we were relieved by here the fault was the captians...

I also know more but will leave it for another day

Re:10 and 11, Clouds and commercial aircraft

[perlyking]

Is one of the reasons for high tech mistakes this:

"For every 50 cents which our government spends on the military, it spends only 6 cents on education".

Re:10 and 11, Clouds and commercial aircraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunatly, the advanced tech that would have ID'd the Airbus by it's radar profile was not turned on. If the plane had come by 30 min later it would probably still be in service today.

More bias/social engineering from the hawks at FOX

[Sleepy]

This wasn't news, it was a *commercial*.

It's pretty simple:
1) a chunk of your tax dollars goes to pork-barrel arms projects (that don't work).
2) Said arms dealer profits.
3) Arms dealer "lobbies" for more congressional pork.

In the "old days" of the early 90's, #3 meant simply bribing the congressmen via his campaign "war chest". While that made effective lobbying, today we have Rupert Murdoch's lobbying group, "Fox" television. It's sad to have seen the name of a once-great US media company bought out by a "naturalized" foreigner whose intentions are simply to influence American politics.

In other words, this is a LOBBYING EFFORT to raise taxes for yet another military boondoggle. It's just pretend news.

Congress is already leery of "star wars" (the SDI kind), seeing how there is so much pressure to deploy the damn thing, when star wars misses 3 out of 6 targets in *lab* conditions.

Now they want the same unproven technology on the ground. Fox runs nothing but editorials against "government pork" and "big government" EXCEPT when it serves the war hawks or their stock portfolio.

Remember, these are the same maggots who ran "investigative reporting" how the USA supposedly never landed on the moon. Note this story ran JUST BEFORE renewed calls in Congress to both cut NASA funding (to make them less effective), AND to privatize NASA altogether.

George Orwell was wrong. In the future we will be controlled by mindless, hypnosis-inducing corporate-sponsored "information", news, etc.

Wounding is the point

[Anonymous Coward]

A wounded enemy soldier needs soldiers to carry him off the battle field, he needs medical attention, he still needs food and supplies.

Wounding an enemy uses tons of enemy resources and removes him from battle (most of the time permanatly).

A dead enemy needs no support, treatment, supplies, etc.

Therefor, in battle, although 'gruesome' or less 'humane' (or more, rather be hurt than dead), it is better (IN GENERAL, as in, overall in the war) to leave the enemy wounded rather than quickly killing them (although no body complains when it happens) since these wounded people still consume enemy resources.

Re:Wounding is the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Alot of the militaries in the nations where monotheistic religions are popular actually waste lives and manpower resources to recover dead bodies. They say it is for honor.

That is bullshit. It goes deeper than that. The unproven claim that their is a God and some afterlife is so popular it is part of our culture, it does not matter if it is true, the marines will still send soldiers to die to recover a dead body for some myth.

Re:Wounding is the point

[indiechild]

Are you sure? As far as I understand it, they would only recover wounded buddies under fire, not necessarily dead ones. There's no point, honour or not, to get more people killed just to recover a corpse.

Throw ball bearings very, very fast

[leonbrooks]

A standard truck-mounted generator with a couple of little railguns on the roof would do the same job (by flinging a bucketful of ballbearings at the target in a second or so) for a lot less $$$ and would also make a really neat ripping noise when it fired.

Not as easy to steer as a laser but extremely difficult to defend against. Good for anti-aircraft as well, since colanders have poor aerodynamics. Anything not detonated by ball bearings doing many kilometers a second would be thrown well off course. Not that this is not necessarily an advantage, since certain nations are reknowned for just carpeting the target area with ordinance and knocking something off course might make it more accurate.

Re:Throw ball bearings very, very fast

[jandrese]

Gee, all we need now is a railgun that doesn't melt every time you fire it.

Re:Throw ball bearings very, very fast

[speederaser]

A "couple railguns"? Don't bet the farm on it. All the railguns I've read about were single-use. One shot per gun, one projectile per shot. Also, the projectile comes out the muzzle with a somewhat unpredictable shape due to the enormous forces involved, making long distance accuracy problematic (in air).

If you want cheap, the article mentioned a follow-on electric laser costing 25 cents per shot that did the same thing. Hell, any handgun larger than a .22 is more expensive than that!

I can see it now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tonight on FOX!! : When good lasers go bad!!

humane weapon

[poag]

A dirty big chemical laser mounted on a 747 using a mirror and smaller lasers to aim it. Here is a great use they havn't thought of. Or more likely wont admit. Simply sweep the laser across a body of troops. Anyone looking in that direction will have their retinas burnt out. The laser could be defocused to cover a larger area. Event the targeting laser could be used for this. Would be a great from of riot control.

Re:humane weapon

[child_of_mercy]

one word:

goggles

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. You guys prefer fantasy of reality.

More interesting

[pompomtom]

is the comment about the electric Humvee...

What are they worth?

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[TheCaptain]

Oh, yeah, they are SOOOOO even-handed over there at Fox. Not a whiff of bias there at all.


Actually...you've almost hit the nail on the head. It's kinda amusing.

Since alot of the media does seem to have a liberal bias, anything that doesn't have that bias will look more "conservative" when you compare the two.

I am glad Slashdot is free of bias as well. It lends so much to it's credibility. :)

futurism

[xah]

The article focuses to its detriment on lasers as a defensive armament. They are more likely to be used offensively, if history is any judge.

If the article is right, and the energy supply for these lasers continue to be expensive, bulky chemicals, we may see a return to the battlefields of the 19th century, when artillery, and not air power, was most critical to warfare. Supply lines would become more important than they are today. Battlefield tactics would have to change.

Why wouldn't they mount lasers on aircraft? Maybe the chemicals are too heavy?

Re:futurism

[Wyatt Earp]

Actually, the power for the ABL isn't an expensive chemical. And they are mounting the lasers on some aircraft. The ABL 747 is a case in point.

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/program/abl.htm

"The airborne laser would fire a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser, or COIL, invented at Phillips Lab in 1977. The laser's fuel consists of the same chemicals found in hair bleach and Drano - hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide - which are then combined with chlorine gas and water."

I would argue that artillery was only vital to the 19th century battlefield because "modern" military planning at the time focused on the mathmatical battle and the perfect geometric forts and cannon. Those plans were thrown out when the Panzers rolled over Poland and France in '39-40. Actung Panzer covers all of this.

Re:futurism

[xah]

Good stuff. I'll check out that book. Even tanks could be vulnerable, though, to a laser-equipped army, if the lasers fire fast enough and cut through depleted uranium.

The next step is to consider what would serve as an adequate defensive countermeasure to offensive laser weapons systems. Maybe high tech body armor. Albedo suits, anyone? image

Artillery shells cost more

[pmancini]

Look it up. Artillery shells from 105mm and up can cost more than $3000, sometimes a LOT more.

real genius

[passion]

great - if only the leonids were over afghanistan... then perhaps we could lure OBL out of his tent/cave, and zap him like in weird science...

now I'm hungry for some popcorn.... yum.

Re:real genius

[Anonymous Coward]

Not weird science. real genius - like your title says. Not a +2 comment.

Slashdot sees the error immediately.

[Futurepower(tm)]

I've read most of the posts, and so far I haven't seen even one that both takes this seriously, and believes it will work. Maybe all weapons proposals should have to go through Slashdot first.

Re:Slashdot sees the error immediately.

[martissimo]

it is pretty darned clear, that even though the cold-war is long over, the need for advanced equipment that helps our military/national security certainly isnt.

we have some great scientific minds in america, they can come up with some pretty damm cool ideas, some are gonna be a total bust, most will be mediocre, and every once in a while they probably just stumble on to something that is amazing. Without throwin money their way though, you will get none of it.

It may cost a lot of money, and sometimes you recieve some really useless returns on that money (im not saying that will be the case here, who knows what thoose laser advances may actually end up usefull in, maybe even usefull eventually as a weapon or anti-weapon weapon)

The thing is, would you rather not fund some of this work and wait until some other countries have access to technology more advanced than ours and try to catch up, or would you rather stay on the leading edge? The price to stay there may be high, and may result in spendin some cash on garbage here and there...but i'm personally willing to accept that cost

Re:More bias/social engineering from the hawks at

[Anonymous Coward]

>It's sad to have seen the name of a once-great US media company bought out by a "naturalized" foreigner whose intentions are simply to influence American politics

Hey , the rest of the world is amused about it. It sure makes a change from US organisations trying to influence every other country's politics.

By executions, spreading lies, bribes, blackmail...

If we only had this today...

[Rkane]

maybe the bonehead armed forces might stop bombing their own men.

Re:Expen$ive, not so.

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you didn't read the whole article. It went on to say that that was just the starting point. They have a new one that uses battery power and costs about $.25 per shot. Has a smaller footprint for the device as well.

The big unit generates heat akin to the surface of the sun, but stopping missiles doesn't require that much power.

I can see the day when these things are small enough to compare with handguns. (Batteries will have to improve a lot first though.) Include computer chips that detect people at the other end, and you can have your gun set to not shoot people, or target people.

Set the gun software right, and you can just wave the gun at the enemy, and it shoots 'em automatically. Program it to not hit people with transponders that match your side, and there is no more friendly fire to worry about.

If the device is fast enough, it might be possible to have it automatically detect incoming bullets aimed at you, and automatically vaporize them. Not quite shielding aka star trek, but not bad either.

A thought occurs to me

[glassware]

This whole thing is so fantastically Real Genius.

God: Think about it, Kent. What use is a phase conjugate tracking mirror? A big mirror needs a big beam.

Kent: I... I overheard Dr. Hathaway talking about a test out in the desert.

God: Good. Now, I want you to think about what you've done. And for the last time, stop touching yourself!

Re:A thought occurs to me

[JatTDB]

They need to get off their asses and put out a damned DVD release of that movie. I'm tired of my crappy VHS copy.

Sorry, it's patented

[hmckee]

The use of a laser to get a cat to move. is already patented. You may have to come up with a new idea.

-harry

Re:Sorry, it's patented

[indiechild]

God that's ridiculous. I can never understand why they allow patents like this. Any pet owner with a laser pointer will have discovered by now that they can "exercise" their pets like this. Hardly original!

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[NeuroManson]

Don't forget, the owner of Fox News is Rupert Murdoch... You know, the guy who owns The National Enquirer, and numerous other tabloids... Hardly worth calling a reputable source (ironically his tabloids are the sort that would have paid well for pictures taken of Princess Di by the freelance French papparazi that chased her to her death, and even more ironic, that shortly thereafter her brother gave them an interview on teevee)...

Mind you, this was common knowlege over 10 years ago when Murdoch took over Fox, the NY Post, et al...

THIS IS NOT FLAMEBAIT MORONS

[Audent]

I don't know the poster but what he says makes sense... I have a funny feeling it's been marked down as flamebait simply because it casts the US military in what could be perceived to be a bad light and that's a big fat no-no at the moment.

Friedly fire, and the blocking of it, are important issues for any soldier regardless of which side they're on.

These FF casualties seem so outrageous because of the way the US fights wars these days - from a safe distance. We see very few actual casualties caused by the other side because the US is so careful with its soldiers, but that makes the relatively few casualties we do see seem so high.
Can you imagine invading a country, any country 30 years ago and having fewer than 10 combat deaths on one side for the thousands on the other? It wouldn't/couldn't have happened.

Being able to shoot down errant bombs would be a great boon, however I don't think this system would cope with that any more than a ground2air missile would today but it's NOT flamebait to suggest it.

Re:THIS IS NOT FLAMEBAIT MORONS

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.. I don't know who marked this a flamebait put hopefully on moderation review they get some karma taken away. As for the original posters comment I believe the same thing except I don't think it will be this laser idea. There should be systems implemented into things like Hummers and the apache that will specifically prevent the weapon from being fired if it is a US vehicle. Most friendly fires happen when some guy is in a tank or chopper and doesn't know that the target he's firing at is on the same side. It's not really a hand to hand soldier shoots another one in the face type of incident. The problem with the idea above is that we need to STOP selling our equipment to other govt's and people for it to work. Then you also have the problem of someone stealing your stuff and you could add an override switch but during combat pressing yes to an override question will probably be the last of your worries.

I think we need a smaller lighter army.. meaning soldiers more heavily trained in arm to arm combat and the use of light weapons with throw away but reusable capabilities of the need arises. IE: on the m16a2's we have now we they should be lighter (light as hell alerady but they could be made lighter) and have multipurposes, you should be able to stick a flash light on top of it, flares, laser sights etc.. Right now all you can do is add a mini rocket launcher on top and the package then becomes known as the m203.

Anyway.. my 2 cents..

Re:THIS IS NOT FLAMEBAIT MORONS

[indiechild]

Some soldiers tend to think it's better to fire and risk killing a friendly than it is not to fire at all and possibly let an enemy get away. I think it's far better not to fire if in doubt, and preserve the lives of your own people. Friendly fire sux. As for the light weapons, a lot of US forces are being issued the M4/M4A1 carbine which does pretty much what you ask for... flashlight, night sights, optics, lasers etc. Plus it's lighter and handier than the M16A2, though a bit less accurate at long ranges.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[errxn]

And I suppose that Ted Turner, who founded CNN, is one to be trusted? Yeah, right.

I think that treaty is fairly specific

[Anonymous Coward]

It's supposed to prevent the use of lasers as blinding weapons. Nothing about lasers as weapons of disintegration.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[NeuroManson]

That could be said of ANY news agency... However, CNN researches it's stories far more often than Fox... They all screw up either way, so that's a moot point... I still trust a news agency that got it's "start" in covering the gulf war, far more than a news network that got it's start with 'Bigfoot could be your neighbor!!!', and 'Here's our big titted broad of the week!'...

What about good old reflection?

[Remote]

Ok, the system was reported to be able to melt down Katyushas. My bet would be that those were painted gray or olive green. What if one chrome-plates the damn thing? Would that make the rocket (or a shell, or a racing pigeon!) laser-proof? Would someone in the know tell me why this wouldnt be a protection?

Re:What about good old reflection?

[GooRoo]

Because you never reflect 100% of the energy no matter how polished your chrome is. One tiny little imperfection would be enought to destroy the whole thing if you hold the laser on it long enough. Either that or you hit it with a paintball gun first. : )

This is not unlike the stealth capability of our F117's one screw out of place and it's enough to wipe out the effective ability of the entire system.

Re:What about good old reflection?

[arkanes]

Yeah, but it doesn't HAVE that long to track you. They want to use it on mortar shells with a 20 second window. Assuming that you can cut even 50% of the power down, that means they've only got 10 seconds to destroy your mortar shell. On a side note, how fast can this thing pivot and focus? If it takes, say, 5 seconds to blow up a mortar shell, all you need to do is toss 5 shells at it (3 if you put chrome on em) and you've just taken out an enormously expensive laser for the cost of 5 mortar shells.

Re:What about good old reflection?

[Cerebus]

Of course, that would make the launch emplacement glaringly obvious in the recon photos...

Re:What about good old reflection?

[Knobby]

You don't need to reflect 100% of the energy! You only need to relect enough energy that destroying your missile requires more energy than your opponent has the ability to deliver..

The laser will be illuminating a fairly small area on the missile casing. The big problems are: Will burning a hole in the side to the missile destroy it? and if so, where does that hole have to be located?

Take the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.. The booster rocket was pushing hot gas through a hole in the side of the casing, and even after the booster rocket was jetisoned from the external fuel tank it continued to fly relatively straight for miles before being destroyed by mission control. Read that again.. The booster casing which was under phenomenal internal and compressive loads did not explode or really even change course with a hole in the side of its structure.. So what makes us think that burning holes in missiles will destroy them?

From what I've read the idea of the Air Force's Airborne Laser program was to hit missiles as they were launching and the cases were still under a compressive load.. In this scenerio, weakening the structure MAY result in a buckling of the case in a manner similar to applying a small dent to a soda can under compression..

Re:What about good old reflection?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have the Challenger facts wrong:

There was a leak in one of the solid rocket boosters. Solid, meaning the propellant was not gaseous mixture, instead solid material, therefore the leak was just escaping hot gas which was controlled by the pre-mixed of the solid propellant.

Burning a hole via laser into the body of a gaseous oxygen-hydrogen rocket results in...well does the Hindenberg come to mind? ;)

Re:What about good old reflection?

[Anonymous Coward]

3M makes a polymer reflective film transparent to radar that is 100% reflective in the optical range. metals are actually poor reflectors (~90% tops) so of course polished chrome would be insufficient. an optically reflective polymer film, on the other hand, would be easily reflective enough while not removing the low-radar characteristics of the previous design.

Re:What about good old reflection?

[Graymalkin]

You have your Hindenburg facts wrong :)
The Al doped fabric covering the thing meant to reflect heat from the sun as to not cause adverse boyancy problems (hotter gas expands and causes lift which is bad when you're trying to do something like land) was a chemical equivilent of thermite. That shit will burn a whole through concrete, solid steel, and flash fry an egg two feet away. When it caught fire the gas escaped and the Zepplin crashed, most of the hydrogen due to the heat escaped into the atmosphere and never burned. Also, rockets do not store their fuel and oxidizers as gases. They store them in liquid form because it is more space efficient. The burning a whole in one of those tanks causes alot of pressurized material on the inside of the tank want to escape from a teeny tiny hole in the side of tank to the far lower pressures outside of the tank. Usually the pressure leak will cause the rocket to rip itself apart because the high pressure stuff in tha tanks blew out the hole at several times the speed of sound exceeding the stess limitations of the container material. Sometimes however the fuel tank will rupture and when speeding through the tiny hole in the fuel tank heat up enough to ignite not only blowing the rocket off course but when the pressure in the tank drops enough the entire thing blows up in a fairly spectacular fireball.

Re:What about good old reflection?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about fighting wars with paintball guns? Nobody dies, and it would work as long as everyone plays by the rules (and sits out when they get "killed")

Re:What about good old reflection?

[GooRoo]

That's exactly my point. You don't have to reflect all the energy, but I don't have to hit it with all the energy either.

All the laser has to do is heat whatever surface it hits to a point where the reflectance starts to break down. Once you hit that point the reflectance index starts declining and the heat absorbtion starts getting even higher. It becomes a downhill tumble that quickly would destroy the object. All you have to do is hit a spot that is particularly non-reflective, ie a screw or seam, and then you can destroy the whole thing.

When all else fails, I just need a bigger laser. : )

Jeez, there's some scary stuff out there

[jack deadmeat]

Check out this link and go to the 'opticals' section for some laser stuff. An M-16 mounted version to blind people?

Man, google can turn up some freaky stuff.

Re:Jeez, there's some scary stuff out there

[Ziviyr]

Nice to know we're ready to fire on our own.

the case is the deadly part of artillery

[rebelcool]

the thousands of metal shards caused by the case blowing are what makes artillery such a good weapon against exposed infantry.

In essence, a very large grenade.

Yeah.

[mindstrm]

Maybe you should go out there to the battlefield and SHOW THEM how to do it right?

Easy to preach from the armchair, eh?

Re:Yeah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like you find it easy to preach from yours, 'father'. What is it with people like you who defend against observations? Caught up in the follow bush with no regard mentality? Oh well. I'll leave you to defending those who feed you. Make sure to try harder next time. You may eventually get somebody to not state their opinion.

Several points.

[rebelcool]

Unless you're referring to distant technology, virtually all of these are unlikely.

article says 25 cents (maybe dollars, I forget...) per shot.

It is cheaper to shoot a rifle. Plus these laser weapons are pathetically weak compared to a rifle. These weapons were designed for use on weak rockets and missiles travelling at high speeds in the air. The laser is only capable of heating and weakening the metal skin, which flight forces would tear a hole in, thus rupturing and destroying the missile. In an earlier post I questioned exactly how well these lasers would work on the much thicker and stronger skins of artillery shells.

To use one of these on a human is stupid and ineffective. Sure, it'll burn you..but why not just shoot the guy? More damaging and a quicker death.

As for the 'people' to get one, find me someone who can actually afford something like this. These weapons are enormous (they're TRYING to fit one on an 18 wheeler) and cost millions.

These lasers are useful city defenders against things like SCUDs. Not something Joe Q. Gunowner will own.

Re:Several points.

[scheming daemons]

These lasers are useful city defenders against things like SCUDs. Not something Joe Q. Gunowner will own.

As a person who has a gun-nut brother-in-law, I can tell you that you severely underestimate Joe Q. Gunowner.

If they make it, the gun nuts will get it.

The Montana militia will be using these on prairie dogs before you know it.

Re:Several points.

[Rogerborg]

• To use one of these on a human is stupid and ineffective. Sure, it'll burn you..but why not just shoot the guy? More damaging and a quicker death

For about the zillionth time, death is what you want to inflict in Quake. Wounding, crippling and especially blinding is way, way more effective. You target the economy, not the soldiers.

You must be blind...

[Anonymous Coward]

At least, I personally see the WSJ leaning somewhat to the right, while the NYT leans towards the left.

Doubt it.

[Axe]

Nothing in the foreseeable future can stop a coordinated nuclear attack from Russia, except for the common sense of the Russians, which was shown to be quite present. Even during the cold war, for all the hostilities, they have shown to care enough for their own well-being, and are not suicidal at all.

As for shooting down Katyusha rockets? (I think they mean "Grad" and "Uragan" systems). All you need to disable this system - is some morning fog. I would not rely on it functioning.

Overall, IMO, this is cool technology, that can make for some nice congress presentation and a hefty paycheck for R&D (which is always good), but it would be irrelevant in the foreseeable future..

Re:Doubt it.

[Algan]

Never been in a desert but I guess you don't get too much fog there, do you? And I have this feeling US is very concerned with desert conflicts these days

Re:Doubt it.

[Axe]

You may be surprised. And not just fog. Kabul, for one, gets healthy 10 - 12 days a month, for half a year of rain and snow.

Would you like to bet your life on clear skies and matte painting on the mortar shell? I would not.

Re:Doubt it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The price of gas has been going up these past few days...

Car Wars!

[ddillman]

I want one mounted on the front of my car, with a computerized targeting system. Cut me off in traffic?! ZAP!

An armed society is a polite society. -- Lazarus Long

Budgetary?

[Snodgrass]

ooooookay

Did the article remind anyone else of RA2?

[SynKKnyS]

The US Army using Prism Tanks and Prism Towers? =P

Fox News is far more slanted than any other networ

[HenryFool]

Is this a joke?

Fox News sensationalizes and editorializes much more than any other network. Just because Fox has a right-wing slant and the other mainstream television news networks are left-wing moderate does not mean that Fox News is *less* biased than the rest. However that is the illusion they try to sell. It absolutely astounds me that people believe they're getting fairer news from Fox. I guess PT Barnum was right; nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

All of their commentary is biased towards the right. "Hannity and Colmes" is far from fair. The program's representation from the left, Colmes, is more of a moderate than a liberal. He is a poor debater and not at all telegenic (it doesn't surprise me that Fox picked the creepy eyebrowed lazy eyed looking person to represent the left).

O'Reilly is my personal favorite. This quote from his show on March 3, 2001 should say it all. If you can't see the irony here you might want to enroll in a course on Fact vs. Opinion at your local elementary school:

"Tonight, violent demonstrations on the rise all over the world as capitalism comes under assault and America's college campuses are being besieged with socialistic messages. We'll have a report. The first 100 days of Hillary Clinton in the Senate. Did she actually do anything? We'll find out. And was Al Gore antagonistic toward some of his students at Columbia? That's the word. Caution. You're about to enter a no-spin zone."

You may also want to check out Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)'s series of articles on Fox News.

Is anyone else wondering.....?

[moonboy]

Is anyone else wondering why we are spending so much money on the missile defense system? This seems to have solved the problem of missile defense much more elegantly (and more cost effectively?) Maybe I'm missing something.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[andkaha]

Is anyone else wondering why we are spending so much money on the missile defense system? This seems to have solved the problem of missile defense much more elegantly (and more cost effectively?) Maybe I'm missing something.

The military industry in the U.S. is so big and employs so many people that they will have to come up with these kinds of technologies as an addition to the already existing systems, as a justification for continued financial support and of their importance and supremacy. They will not stop spending money on that ballistic missile system, that would look as a failure. The U.S. army is not very keen on admitting failures.

A quote from Noam Chomsky (interview):

The Cold War may be over. But these days, the policies remain the same, only the pretexts have changed. It is another reason why the US military budgets have been increasing year after year. It is not a defence against Russia anymore. It is against the technological sophistication of the Third World. The US believes that globalisation has deeply polarised the handful of rich and the poor worldwide. To keep the poor nations in control, you need new military systems.

The Noam Chomsky Archives

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[fawlty]

I haven't researched this, but I'd imagine that for ICBMs (big daddy nuclear missles) you'd want to blow them up before they get to line-of-sight of the ground. Thus, space-based missiles defense.

These ground-based, mobile defense lasers would be for local targets and short-range missiles.

I guess.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[haggar]

That may be true, or may not, but it's certainly NOT the answer to the original post. There are reasons why a laser wouldn't be able to shoot down an approaching tactical missile, one is the fading and dispersion of the light beam. The other, as someone posted already, is that the missiles would be out of optical sight for most of their journey. Etc.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[zulux]

Noam Chomsky: To keep the poor nations in control, you need new military systems.

Whats wrong with keeping the poor nations in control? The reason that most poor nations are poor is that they spend more time killing each other in their tribal-war-of-the-week than making stuff.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[Sinical]

Because they are way far away (in deployment time).

Because they don't work way far away (in distance: ~hundreds of miles or even fewer for more tactical stuff like this one: ABL is like 100 miles)

Because it's better to have multiple layers of defense (especially against weapons of mass destruction: ABL is boost phase, EKV is midcourse).

etc., etc., etc.

Err, ABL == AirBorne Laser (or similar) and EKV == Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[andkaha]

That may be true, or may not, but it's certainly NOT the answer to the original post.

It was surly an answer to the question of why the U.S. is spending so much money on new technologies, which was, as I understood it, what the OP asked when he wrote

Is anyone else wondering why we are spending so much money on the missile defense system?

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[andkaha]

The reason that most poor nations are poor is that they spend more time killing each other in their tribal-war-of-the-week than making stuff.

Nope. The reason that most poor nations are poor is that other nations wants them to be poor.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[zulux]

Nope. The reason that most poor nations are poor is that other nations wants them to be poor.

For every poor country that's opressed due to imperialists, there are ten that are opressing themselves better that any outside country could dream of.

Same with indivisual humans: most people find that their own worst enemy, the enemy that makes their lives miserable, is themselves.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[Anonymous Coward]

that which you are missing: it's birthplace was the starwars system of which you spake

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[andkaha]

For every poor country that's opressed due to imperialists, there are ten that are opressing themselves better that any outside country could dream of.

Do you really believe that?

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[zulux]

Do you really believe that?

It's not a idea that needs to be 'believed' - the evidence is overwhelming. If you discount Russia, there hasent been an impeialist power in twenty years. If any country sucks, they have only themselves to blame. Japan was NUKED back to the stone age - in two generations they are back on top. What the hell is keeping (choosing a random counrty) Kenya from making the same strides? I'll let you in on a secret: It's Not the GM/Microsoft/GOP/Alien conspiricy.

Thankfully there are only a few countires that suck. Some have harder lives that we do, but they are improving. Hell - your average person in the world, unless they give themselves AIDS, has a longer life expectancy than a 1700's head of state.

We humans have made a lot of progress in the last 100 years - just beacuse some people are a bit behind the curve dosen't meen that there some vast global conspiricy going on to keep people opressed.

Want a good life for masses? Stop picking on people who are sucessfull and start emulating any good ideas they might have. Mr.Chompsky is a smart man, but did you ever notice that all he does is point out problems. He hardly ever offers any solutions. I wish he did, maby he have a good idea. Instead, he's the same broken record, playing the "Blame America First" anthem over and over. It's a shame, A good mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[kin_korn_karn]

Want a good life for masses? Stop picking on people who are sucessfull and start emulating any good ideas they might have.
The third world does this. They also tend to take our ideas and use them against innocent people in the Tribal-War-of-the-Week or in acts of terrorism against our citizens.

You know, the USA was founded on, among many others, a principle of letting anyone become a citizen and open immigration - so what happens? A bunch of pissed off Arabs come over here, learn to fly at American private flight schools, and kill 5,000 people. We give the world air travel, and then they do this? I think we're justified in being slightly distrustful of other cultures now, which is a shame for the truly GOOD people that live in those other cultures.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[Happy go Lucky]

Nope. The reason that most poor nations are poor is that other nations wants them to be poor.

Okay, help me out: What POSSIBLE profit could be taken by keeping Afghanistan/Rwanda/Honduras/etc. poor? If any of those places have any real oil or other resources, they're sure keeping it hidden pretty well.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[Anonymous Coward]

We give the world air travel, and then they do this?

Excuse me?

Ever heard of Alberto Santo Dumont? Or Count Ferdinand Von Graf Zeppelin?

There is more to this planet than the USA.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alberto Santo Dumont is to the Wright brothers, as Quanza is to Christmas.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[andkaha]

If you discount Russia, there hasent been an impeialist power in twenty years.

I think the correct term for that statement is bullshit.

Russia hasn't even shown the least spark of imperialism since the fall of the union. I know it's a bit hard to accept to you, but the world's only imperialistic state today is U.S.A.

Japan had, just like Germany, the knowledge of how to build big industries. That helped both Germany and Japan back on their feets after WWII. On top of that, Germany were restricted in what kind of industries they were allowed to build, so naturally they built their country instead of their army. I'm not sure about the situation in Japan, but I assume that it was similar. The U.S. also had no interest in repressing either Germany or Japan, they provided innovations and intelligence. Your comparison is not fair.

Want a good life for masses? Stop picking on people who are sucessfull and start emulating any good ideas they might have. Mr.Chompsky is a smart man, but did you ever notice that all he does is point out problems.

Exactly what is wrong with pointing out the probelms. You know, ignoring them won't make them go away. Covering them up won't make everyone happy. By pointing to them and by discussing the probelms we might get to terms with them and maybe even learn something.

He hardly ever offers any solutions.

It's not his job to offer solutions. What he does is to educate the public.

Instead, he's the same broken record, playing the "Blame America First" anthem over and over. It's a shame, A good mind is a terrible thing to waste.

And don't you think he's right? Don't you think there's a reason that EVERYONE is more or less miffed and irritated about the way U.S.A. is behaving? When a country is worth a third of the world, they have a lot of responsibility and a lot to loose. When you behave as you do, no wonder the other two thirds gets annoyed.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[andkaha]

Okay, help me out: What POSSIBLE profit could be taken by keeping Afghanistan/Rwanda/Honduras/etc. poor? If any of those places have any real oil or other resources, they're sure keeping it hidden pretty well.

Afghanistan has, AFAIK, no resources, but they pipeline a lot of gas and oil over their land.

"U.S. interest in Afghanistan is stability with at least minimally competent government." (ref) Here, competent government means a government that can't inspire the Gulf countries to oppose U.S.A. or cut off their oil supply.

Honduras and Rwanda don't have any resources either. You don't profit from keeping them poor, you avoid loosing, just as in the case of Afghanistan, Iraq, Nicaragua etc.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[Happy go Lucky]

"U.S. interest in Afghanistan is stability with at least minimally competent government." (ref [csis.org]) Here, competent government means a government that can't inspire the Gulf countries to oppose U.S.A. or cut off their oil supply.

I suppose stability and competent government would make Afghanistan really, really poor. Oh, wait they're already not doing so well. They've had ten years of no superpowers being involved in their country. If it was US pressure that made them poor, then...wait, nevermind.

Honduras and Rwanda don't have any resources either. You don't profit from keeping them poor, you avoid loosing, just as in the case of Afghanistan, Iraq, Nicaragua etc.

Avoid losing what? Let me explain to you something about globalization: It's about expanding markets. You see, we in the US and the rest of the G-7 countries export a lot of stuff. We need people to buy it. It does us not one bit of good if we can't find markets. It does us no good if the people in those markets can't afford what we're selling.

Which leaves us in the position of being evil capitalist slavemasters out of the goodness of our hearts. I don't like being a capitalist without actually selling stuff and making money.

Or is that how they do research on these things today:
Step 1: Find something tragic or bloody.
Step 2:
Step 3: It was caused by the evil capitalists trying to make profit.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[zulux]

I think the correct term for that statement is bullshit.

Opps. Sorry, I diden't know I was dealing with a child. I'll use smaller words for you.

world's only imperialistic state today is U.S.A.


America my be considered by you to be 'corporate' or 'evil', but it dosen't have vassel states. Check your dictionary.

Japan had, just like Germany, the knowledge of how to build big industries.

Whats wrong with the Kenyans. Is knowlege too difficult for them? I think not. Kenya just needs some help with their democracy and education. America bashing, as popular as it is with people with too much time on their hands, won't kelp Kenya one bit.

It's not his job to offer solutions.
Chompsky doesen't offer solutions because 1) I suspect that he doesent have any. 2) offering solutions would take time away from blaming America for everybody elese problems.

EVERYONE is more or less miffed and irritated about the way U.S.A. is behaving?

If everybody is so pissed off at America, then explain why everybody wants to immigrate here. Emplain why, as an American, people treat very kindly when I travel aborad. They may not treat you well when you travel - but I digress.

And don't you think he's right?

On some things yes. His point of view worth cosidering, espically his thoughs on linguistics, but I place Chomsky with the likes of Ann Ryand and Jesus Christ. Their viewpoints are educated and interesting, but their followers tend not be able to think for themselves. I suspect that Chomskys views would change if he traveled more and wasen't so Ameri-centric. As much as I like America, our influance isen't great enough to make the world a paradise or a hell. To think so is arrogent on Chomsky's part, and demeans the progress third world countries have made for themselves.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[andkaha]

America my be considered by you to be 'corporate' or 'evil', but it dosen't have vassel states. Check your dictionary.

How do you define imperialism? Do you include cultural imperialism, economic imperialism, and/or strategic imperialism, or do you want to restrict it to colonialism? Is it something that has to include overseas actions, or does the U.S. actions in South America count?

Whats wrong with the Kenyans. Is knowlege too difficult for them? I think not. Kenya just needs some help with their democracy and education.

It's kind of differenty, isn't it? (And I thought you meant Kenya, the country, not its citizens). Kenya has nothing very much to offer the western countries. It's sad, but most developed countries are just not interested in Africa at all, it's not a reliable market. Post-war Germany and post-war Japan on the other hand, promised much more. And what's more, their geographical location made them more interesting and reliable. If anyone was interested in getting the poor African states back on their feet, they should write off their debts.

Oh, and another interesting thought: Democracy, funny word, eh? There's no real definition of it, or at least no agreement on any of the definitions that exists. And why is democracy always considered to be a good thing? Is it because it gives people the ultimate freedom of choise? Why should every country be a democracy? Is America a democracy? Can you tell a state to be democratic?

Chompsky doesen't offer solutions because 1) I suspect that he doesent have any. 2) offering solutions would take time away from blaming America for everybody elese problems.

So why is it bad to point out errors? If there were easy solutions, why hasn't anyone implemented them yet? Being the only superpower, the U.S. has to be able to take some verbal opposition. Especially from its own citizens.

If everybody is so pissed off at America, then explain why everybody wants to immigrate here. Emplain why, as an American, people treat very kindly when I travel aborad. They may not treat you well when you travel - but I digress.

I wasn't talking about U.S. citizens, I was talking about the U.S. Of course you're treated well when you go abroad, you're a guest.

On some things yes. His point of view worth cosidering, espically his thoughs on linguistics, but I place Chomsky with the likes of Ann Ryand and Jesus Christ. Their viewpoints are educated and interesting, but their followers tend not be able to think for themselves.

Interesting. I wonder why you don't put any PR companies up there? ... or any educated presidents?

I suspect that Chomskys views would change if he traveled more and wasen't so Ameri-centric.

Where did you get the idea that he wasn't travelling? He's travelling all over the world to give lectures. Of course he's U.S.-centric, U.S. foreign policy is what he's interested in and what he talks about. That's why he travels all over the world.

Re:Is anyone else wondering.....?

[zulux]

If anyone was interested in getting the poor African states back on their feet, they should write off their debts.


Well, you and I agree on one thing at least. It was a twofold mistake to give money to most undeveloped nations, we should have spent the money on their education; and the current debt load is crippeling their stuggeling economies and making them follow the odd (if not bad) policies of the IMF.

So why is it bad to point out errors?

Beacuese it's not constructive if you don't follow it with possible solutions. It's not helpfull. Infact, Chomsky has probably done more harm to the cause of anti-walmart-nike-mcdonalds-globalisation than anybody - he makes the perfect Goldstein for todays Big Brother. I respet people like Ralph Nader, who can not only diagnose, but make reasonable prescriptions. I don't agree with Mr. Nader half the time, but he'd be welcome in my house anytime.

Democracy, funny word, eh? There's no real definition of it,

I was useing small words for you. See my previsous note on why. Representational governemt seems to work well - all the prosporous, civil and pleasent countries seem to have one. Maby there's a better form of governemnt out there, but statistically, it's the best there is for now.

PR companies up there? ... or any educated presidents?

PR companies only hold sway with the stupid and greedy. I don't really care for either group - so if a PR company can convince a stuipd and/or gready person to part with their money then more power to them. Presidents are elected by the people, serve their time, and return to the people from whence they came. They are not that remarkable in the scheme of things. Only little people are impressed by the shiny polish that their campaign staff smears on them.

Will it just hit missiles?

[gutigre]

What if a bird gets in the way?

Re:Will it just hit missiles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dinner

FoxNews--oxymoron?

[Anonymous Coward]

What did they pay to have this posted?
Further evidence of the Decline of Slashdot...
-1 Troll

Rules of War

[OSgod]

Some weapons (say 50cal machine guns) can only be used against equipment and not soldiers.

Of course theirs always the technicality that they are wearing and riding equipment... just aim for the uniform.

Mecha plans under way...

[(H)elix1]

Laser, check...
Water cooling, check...
Meth Fuel cell, check...
Ginger platform, check...
Power Glove, check...

Now I need an autocannon, more legos, and I'm set

Re:Mecha plans under way...

[Ziviyr]

Laser, check...
Water cooling, check...
Meth Fuel cell, check...
Ginger platform, check...
Power Glove, check...

Now I need an autocannon, more legos, and I'm set

What? No jump-jets?

Mmm.. bugs..

[Axe]

.. I would just love debugging this software.. When QA find one - they are DEAD!! Sweet..

Re:Mmm.. bugs..

[FunkSoulBrother]

I bet it's programmed in Ada.

Fox News if fair, balanced, accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

It is hard to find a more reputable source than Fox News. They tend to let ideology get in the way of facts much less than the other news services.

The criticisms of Fox News tend to be based on someone not liking O'Reilly's "manners" when he is confronting a liar, or someone disgruntled that Fox does not give much support to their own extreme ideology.

Well..

[Axe]

..Any Laser have a couple of mirrors in it - beam bouncing between them, getting amplified.. They do withstand the beam just fine.

You do not need to protect your mortar shell for too long.

From what I heard - russians made a nice laser system on a tank platform. Used infrared laser, pumpud by an jet engine exhaust. Worked fine, expt for the fact that it is a big fucking stationary target with an awful infrared signature - can be detected and knocked out in a nick of time. It is exposed, and countermeasures are cheap and effective. It is not a fast plane in the sky. It would not work.

Re:Well..

[sigwinch]

..Any Laser have a couple of mirrors in it - beam bouncing between them, getting amplified.. They do withstand the beam just fine.

The laser can afford a platinum-on-sapphire mirror cooled with 1000 liters/minute of liquid argon. Plus the mirrors can operate at a lower power density and use lenses afterward to increase the power density to cut-through-tungsten-like-a-hot- knife-through-butter levels.

Idea: build little corner reflectors that can be fired with a mortar/howitzer. The laser boys will be unhappy when 90% of the optical power bounces back to their general vicinity. ;-) At the very least it'll raise the supply and support costs for the laser units.

New military systems

[andkaha]

"We basically put the temperature of the sun on the target and within short order, it explodes," Wilson said.

Yay! New cool technologies to scare underdeveloped countries with!

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

it doesn't matter. all the news stations get their news from the same source anyways (upi, ap, reuters). it's been through so many filters by the time you see it, who cares who you get it from.

Mini-Me!

[DigitalEntropy]

Stop humping the laser!

Yes, the are that delicate - to a laser

[Un1v4c]

As an ex artillery guy, I can speak from experience.
A standard 155mm HE round weighs in at 103lbs. The shell itself is nothing but steel with a grid-like pattern etched on the inside (for shrapnel).
The thickness varies from about 1/2" to 3/4" thick (at the bottom next to the propellant). Other than that, they're just filled with gunpowder.
At the tip is a fuse (there are too many types to list), and just below that is a small bag of quick burning powder to kick things off.
If this laser is heating things up as hot as they say, that baby is going to blow pretty quick no matter where it's hit.

I have collection of shrapnel I picked up at the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, that's where I got a look at the innards.

As a side note, by themselves they're not all that fragile. I dropped one on my foot (almost everyone does at some point), and apart from the two seconds of deafening silence following, we loaded it up and it was 12 miles away in a few seconds. Then I proceeded to scream like a bitch. Big toe was smashed something awful.

Re:Yes, the are that delicate - to a laser

[hughk]

Another person has commented that most real shells use HE, black-powder may be used for practise rounds but otherwise it went out a very long time ago.

The point is that the shell must be detonated to explode. The shell is also spinning very quickly (much faster than a rocket), so heat is dissipated. The shell is thick so the thermal mass is high.

The other point is that as you and your toe noted, shells are heavy. There is some serious inertia there, so knocking it to one side isn't easy.

So if you can't blow it up in flight or knock it seriously to one side, then its a no-no. You may be able to seriously screw up proximity-fuse though. However, most of the bits are well inside the shell.

Mortar rounds are somewhat lighter (the mortar is a man-portable weapon, so it can't fire very big rounds). At the top of their trajectory, they may be easier to deflect, but this may only work if the mortar and target are relatively close so there is comparatively little forward motion (at the top of the arc, the vertical motion is 0).

Re:Yes, the are that delicate - to a laser

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I've seen on video (thanks to The Discovery Channel) a laser not unlike what this article talks about vaporize a 6x6x2 inch chunk of titanium in less than a second. I mean the chunk was almost completely gone(there appeared to be two small pieces left in the vise that was holding it in place). I doubt that artillery or mortar rounds are made out of titanium skins, which would mean they would be even weaker. While yes the spin would dissipate the heat over a larger area it would still have more than enough applied to the shell over the period of the lasers fire to break through a mere 3/4 inch thick shell.

Basis for Future Weapons...

[masteroveride]

Just a quick question... how much interference does our atmosphere create for these lasers? Now the reason I ask is that everyone is talking about how this is the basis of the starwars project and all. But what would the difference in intensity of the beam would a laser at sea level and a laser at geosynchronous orbit? eh, food for though...

Re:Basis for Future Weapons...

[haggar]

You have a very good point there. In fact, lasers are very susceptible to air pollutants, expecially aerosols. This means that they would be very ineffective in urban areas, expecially in China and US.

Treaties

[Convergence]

Weapons treaties are there to be ignored by a the parties signing them.

THink of it, you sign a treat to (say) not research biological weapons for offensive purposes, say, like Russia did. Then, you secretly violate the treaty, and now you have weapon the other side doesn't have. Its happened in the past, it'll happen in the future.

Weapons treaties only penalize the honest countries. Dishonest countries won't care. At least we actually do (for the most part) obey our treaties.

Re:Treaties

[Anonymous DWord]

I mostly agree with you, but I'd like to know a couple of things:

1) Name an "honest" country- i.e. one that has the ability to make such weapons and chooses not to (I suppose Canada is one, for nukes);

and

2) Name a treaty (either military or environmental) that the US has signed that it's obeyed.

This is not meant as flamebait. I'm seriously curious what sort of answers people can come up with.

Re:Treaties

[Anonymous Coward]

"At least we actually do (for the most part) obey our treaties."

Well, this century anyways...

Re:Treaties

[Anonymous Coward]

Germany, Japan, Italy, and a bunch of other european coountries.

There are only something like 9 countries which have nukes.

Re:Treaties

[child_of_mercy]

Nukes are expensive

countries like Australia and Canada choose not to build them to save money, safe under the Anglo-American nuclear umbrella.

Re:Treaties

[seann]

wat you say?
i have nuke in basement
you come see???

Re:Treaties

[Wolf nipple chips]

At least we actually do (for the most part) obey our treaties.

Oh yeah, like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty?

Re:Treaties

[Anonymous Coward]

Gasp! Russia doing something bad, evil, and/or wrong? Impossible! Every Good Liberal knows that only Americans ever do anything bad!

Re:Treaties

[Anonymous Coward]

Garbage.

Russia did violate biological weapons treaties. Do you know why? Because when they signed those treaties, they were able to guage just how far ahead the Western powers were in terms of biological warfare, and realized they had some catching up to do.

The US consistently ignores treaties as much or more than other countries. Which is deplorable, because as the most powerful nation in the world it's very difficult for other nations not to follow...

Re:Treaties

[attackiko]

>At least we actually do (for the most part) obey our treaties.

Oh.. you must be from Switzerland?

Re:Treaties

[xnyx]

Follow Follow Follow Follow, Follow the Yello Brick road....

Inspiration to join the military.

[KhanReaper]

Facetiously:
U.S. Army now comes in rainbow flavored lasers!

Also funny:

[Nindalf]

Arthur C. Clarke was a scientist who, among other things, wrote a paper explaining and introducing the principles of geostationary communications satellites before he sold his first hard science fiction story.

Tom Clancy got his degree in English, and worked as an insurance broker before he became a military drama novelist.

Re:Also funny:

[Seehund]

Also, unlike Clarke, that Clancy person doesn't write his stories on an Amiga.

Re:Also funny:

[Anonymous Coward]

Along with composing the idea of the geostationary sat., he also tried to patent it. The patent office said that it was too improbable. When the first one went into orbit and he tried again, they said that it already existed. Funny patent folks.

RE: BAN ALL WORK ON BLINDING LASER WEAPONS NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Blinding laser weapons already exist on the drawing board. As the frequncies can be varied no defense short of covering your eyes with metal will protect you from permanent blindness. It is due to this, I believe, that the treaty referred to above was negotiated and signed. These weapons are horrific and inhumane in the extreme; they haven't been discussed much because NOBODY BUT PSYCHOPATHS WOULD WANT TO USE THEM (and they'd be small and portable - retinas don't need much light to destroy them) ; but the never-ending flood of dollars to weapons labs has the tech boiz looking for anything, no matter how barbaric, to develop. And profit from.

Useful-Use on People Much SOFTER

[Christopher B. Brown]

If you fire a high-powered laser into somebody's eyes, it will do an eminently good job of blinding them.

That is going to be more expensive to the enemy that has to retrieve and treat the people than killing people outright.

(Reminiscent of another thread; in Children of Dune, much of the story revolves around who is the "prophet" that had his eyes burned out by what they called a "stone-burner," and whether or not this man was Paul Muad'dib Atreides...)

Israel is trying to hack these

[K-Man]

This report claims that Israel is trying to hack around range restrictions in the control software. That begs the question, what is the range of one of these? I suspect it may reach quite a ways.

Pentagon sources said Israel wants this technology for a variety of reasons, virtually all of which are harmful to U.S. interests. The Nautilus laser was given to Israel to protect against Katyusha rockets, which are short-range, relatively crude weapons. The laser system?s source code, not made available to the Israelis as part of the original agreement, contains mission-limiting restrictions on the laser?s range and strength

Re:Yes, they are that delicate - to a laser

[Un1v4c]

Hell, read up on them yourself...
Chamberlain Manufacturing Corporation - M107 HE Projectile

Re:Fox News is far more slanted than any other net

[Anonymous Coward]

ah you must be bill self who was getting his panties in a bunch over billy O

There's LOTS of stuff you can burn...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

"These lasers also have a drawback--their energy comes from large tanks of industrial chemicals, which have to be mixed until they glow, like an outsize high-school science project. And they are so bulky that one weapon fills a large aircraft, or a small building. "

Does this jive with the fox news article?

Yes. But it doesn't tell the whole story.

The lasers they're talking about are spinoffs of the Star Wars missile defense system. They had to get a LOT of energy into a beam quickly, to shoot down missiles while still in space, or to bounce off a mirror in space to get them on their way up. One shot, one dead nuke, so cost wasn't much of an object.

Neither was portability: You had either a fortified underground bunker as big as you wanted, or a satellite in zero-G.

So they did something very strong, effective, big, and expensive.

But lasers are EASY. Excluding superradiants (which are easier, if you've got the materials) all you need is a couple of well-alligned mirrors, one of 'em slightly leaky, with an "inverted population amplification light amplification medium" between them.

For "inverted population light amplification medium" read "smoke from a fire".

The medium must have the following characteristics:

It has a state transistion (an "excited state", a "ground state" or less-excited state, and an allowed transition between them) with an energy difference corresponding to a usefully energetic photon.

It must have significantly more of its atoms or molecules in the more-excited state than in the less-excited state. (This is the "inverted population" part.)

It must have ENOUGH of a surplus of more-excited particles to produce a usable amount of power if you extracted the energy difference by de-exciting enough that you're down to 50/50 (or de-exciting them all if there's a further transition that drains the less-excited state).

It must be transparent and reasonably uniform (i.e. non-distorting) at the light frequency corresponding to the state transition.

When you burn darn near ANYTHING the resulting molecules start out excited. If they meet the other criteria you've got a suitable medium for a chemically-pumped laser.

Burn a suitable fuel in a long, thin, rocket flame and run the exhaust at right angles between the pair of mirrors. You'll have a laser beam coming out as long as the flame lasts. Chose the right material and a large fraction of what would have been the heat of combustion ends up in the laser beam.

Now there are some fancy and deadly fuels (fluorine comes to mind) that make an exhaust where the bulk of the energy can be extracted by a single transition. This is nice and efficient. And you don't want to be ANYWHERE NEAR them when in use, due to the toxic nature of the exhaust. So if you're going to be shooting down a nuke from a fort in the desert they're fine.

But there are LOTS of others that are simpler, and might be more suitable for a battlefield.

I expect that eventually we'll see a chemically-pumped laser rifle or pistol, about the same size as a normal rifle or pistol, with an optical cavity where the barrel would be, powered by cartridges of solid fuel that are fed by a mechanism similar to the one that feeds cartridges consisting of case/primer/powder/bullet.

Re:There's LOTS of stuff you can burn...

[markmoss]

The fundamental problem with laser weapons is power density. A brass cartridge full of smokeless powder has very high power density, although it works just once. Nothing electrical that can generate power or store it for a few days comes within 100 times that power/weight ratio. (Capacitors might be within 10X, but they can only store power for a short time, so they'd have to be recharged from something else on the battlefield. And you really wouldn't want a long recharge time.)

The chemical laser is one way of getting around the power problem -- instead of chemical reactions to explode and push a slug, it uses a chemical reaction to directly put molecules into the "excited" state (charged with energy and ready to release it as light). So you get pretty high power density, not as good as with a gun, but maybe good enough considering that gunfire misses about 99.9% of the time in combat, and lasers probably won't.

Besides that, at present lasers are not very efficient -- that is, more than half of the energy put in winds up as heat in the laser system, so the laser system has to dispose of more unwanted heat than the target does. This is not too big of a problem if you are using a semi-truck sized laser to shoot 6-inch artillery shells and rockets, but it means that a hand-held laser would burn your hands before it burned through the enemy's uniform. The chemical laser systems might have an advantage here; they are more efficient than other high-power lasers, and maybe most of the waste heat can be exhausted as hot used chemicals.

Finally, weak lasers are effective if you point it at their eyes! You certainly want most of your platoon armed with something with real stopping power (like guns), but give a couple of guys lasers to discourage the opposition from looking straight at you and you've got a big advantage in a firefight...

Re:There's LOTS of stuff you can burn...

[blafasel]

man, you don't know shit. stop pretending. show me your magical chemical reaction that provides you the few hundred kilojoules of free energy difference, all locked up in ONE semistable excited state.

Assault weapons are designed to wound.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

So what are you looking for, a "humane" way to kill people?

The ideal antipersonell weapon doesn't kill the target.

It wounds him sufficiently that it takes him out of action, along with about six other people to take care of him.

It wounds him badly enough that the other people WILL take care of him (so essentially that means he probably dies if he doesn't get help), but

It wounds him in a way that, if he gets help and survives, he achieves essentially a full recovery - after a convalescence that keeps him out of the fighting until it's over.

Permanently blinding a hundred-thousand-man army with lasers is trivial. But after you win the war you have a hundred thousand blind people to take care of - and a hundred thousand families that will be itching to make war on your grandchildren.

Re:Assault weapons are designed to wound.

[sigwinch]

But after you win the war you have a hundred thousand blind people to take care of...

Who says they have to be taken care of?

...and a hundred thousand families that will be itching to make war on your grandchildren.

Blind them too. The primary goal of modern warfare is not to stop the present enemy, but to teach future enemies not to start fighting in the first place, and a blind city would make a pretty damn effective object lesson. I don't buy the "humanitarian" argument that being blinded or crucified is worse than being burned alive (Dresden) or nuked (Hiroshima).

Re:Assault weapons are designed to wound.

[Weezul]

Civilians do not let their armies use weapons which result in "wounds." We prefer body bags which get burried to blind people.

If your laser blinds people for a significant period of time a significant number of cases will be permenent. If you want temporary damage to large numbers of people you need to go with non-leathal bilogical weapons. An insect swarm might work if you can't get approval for bacteria.

Re:Assault weapons are designed to wound.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who says they have to be taken care of?

The moral convictions shared by most westerners.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[beefstu01]

Well this has turned into a lively debate.

Lemme tell you all right off the bat that I find Fox News to be the best news channel out there for the analysis. If you want current events, take your ass over to CNN, but aside from current events, Fox is simply the best. O'reilly, Hannity + Colmes, etc... are good because the host engages the guest, instead of the Larry King Live way of "uh huh, yep, right, correct."

Does Fox sensationalize? Yes. Do NBC, ABC, CNN, etc... sensationalize? Yes. I see Fox as even with all the other organizations in that aspect.

As with people saying that Fox News is right wing, I've gotta say that you all are dead wrong. As Obi-Wan once said "It's true, from a certain point of view." Fox tries harder than any other news channel that I've seen to play it right down the center. Now, it is in my honest opinion that the mainstream media (CNN, NY Times, etc...) are skewed (however slightly) to the left (PROOF!!!!->Republican senator has a small slip of tounge, all hell is let lose on him. Democratic senator starts calling blacks "Niggers" and being offensive to the minorities that he/she represents, they get a pass from the media. I don't recall who this was exactly, but give me some time and I will dig it out).

Now, when the mainstream media is slightly skewed to the left, and then suddenely a player comes in playing it right down the center, where is is in relation to the Liberal Media? That'll usually be the opposite of your left hand, and there comes the accusations of Fox Being RIGHT WING. And to disprove any right wing theories of yours, I would like to point out that Fox News just hired GERALDO RIVERA as a correspondant. Now he isn't leftist, I don't know who is.

Just so you know, Fox wasn't around at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, so get your facts straight. Oh, and just to clarify, who the hell did you think did 9-11? Lucifer? Christ! If Bin Laden bombed our embassies, the Cole, etc..., what would his next target be? SOMETHING BIG IN THE HOME COUNTRY. Think for a second and you might find out that intellegence comes from it.

For God's sake, Stay away from MSNBC and Larry King.

[/RANT]

Battlefield Lasers

[Joleemar]

I don't think this technology could have come at a better time. As I see the news and that we killed and injured a number of our own men with friendly fire this technology perhaps could have saved some lives. The problem lies in whether the enemy will have the technology as well. If they do, we will spend millions of dollars to bomb them and they will be able to deflect everything.

Re:Battlefield Lasers

[Stonehand]

Well, as the old axiom goes, get there FIRST with the most.

Hm. I wonder how accurate these things are at tracking guided munitions, in contrast to pure ballistic foo. Katyushas and mortar rounds don't change course to take evasive action, but something like the JDAM with which we hit our own (and our allies, who lost more) is an actively guided weapon whose trajectory might therefore be harder to predict.

Plus, the firing platform was a lot more mobile, making it harder to predict subsequent trajectories, I'd suspect. Hrmmm.

Good for tank vs tank

[serps]

Seems to me that the first vehicles you'd see this used offensively on would be tanks. Armor columns already need large supply trains for fuel, spare parts and ammo, so swapping out your shells for chemicals isn't a problem.

Why tanks? Well, tanks are designed to blow up other tanks. (You use artillery to nuke static emplacements) They shoot projectiles, which are unguided, so you must lead the target (by up to 30 m, depending on range and velocities). If you instead have a mounted laser, you can reduce the lead by at least 90%, leaving you an almost certain kill. If your laser isn't powerful enough for a one-shot kill, then keep training the laser on them.

The delivery platform exists, and the reason is there. All that is needed is an opportunity.

Re:Good for tank vs tank

[Graymalkin]

Keeping a laser trained on enemy tanks won't work so well with chemical lasers. They don't like to run for a long time because there's only so much reactive chemicals you can fit in the firing chamber and still get any emission from them. Lasers are powerful against stuff without alot of armour like airborn munitions but against something with a real defensive system they're going to have much less effect. Penetration with a laser is entirely dependant on the material and the laser's wavelength. You don't just have one laser fits all, as anybody who works with industrial lasers. Some wavelengths have next to no effect on certain materials because they absorb the radiation too well. It'd suck if your tanks for their asses kicked because the enemy force covered their Toyotas with tin foil or painted them differently. KE weapons are the way to really inflict some heavy damage. Lets hear it for railguns mounted on an M1A1 chassis!

apes with sticks...

[Anonymous Coward]

THE SECOND BOOK OF APES, CALLED
APES

CHAPTER 1
When he had come upon
the earth, the ape was
naked and afraid. For comfort he
picked up a stick, chewed the
end to a point, and stuck it in a
nearby living thing.
2 When the living thing died,
transfixed by the stick, the ape
ate of its flesh and soon con-
ceived a great hunger for
death of other living things.
3 Thereupon the ape made
many pointed sticks and stuck
them into great multitudes of
other living things, including,
on occasion, other apes.

CHAPTER 2
For seven times seven gener-
ations of their race, the apes
stuck pointed sticks into seven
times s4even generations of other
living things.
2 And there were seven times
seven kinds of apes, and of this
number there were brown apes,
and black apes,
3 And green apes, and red apes,
and white apes, and yellow apes.
4 And there were small apes,
and tall apes, and wide apes, and
narrow apes, and thin apes, and
fat apes,
5 And swift apes, and slow..

The apes do unto one another APES

Apes, and strong apes, and weak
apes, and clever apes, and dull apes.
6 And of this number, all were killer
apes.

CHAPTER 3
And when seven times seven
generations had passed, the
land fell barren and living things
of all kinds died in great num-
bers from thirst and hunger and
from pointed sticks.
2 And as the living things grew
scarce in number, the apes be-
came afraid.
3 For if all other kinds of living
things died, there would be noth-
ing left to kill,
4 Except the other apes, all of
whom were killer apes, well
armed with pointed sticks.

if you want more of the text go to
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/ Re ligion/boomerbible.html

really great book
you'll enjoy it that much more if you are familiar with the Philadelphia area

blinding lasers, not toasting ones

[mikeee]

I believe that treaty only bans blinding enemy infantry with lasers.

If your lasers can incinerate them, you're ok!

Umm...

What about friendly fire?

[chuckw]

Will these things be able to protect us from ourselves?

Re:What about friendly fire?

[markyd]

Unlikely, the American military has a habit of shooting / bombing the wrong targets and giving them even more powerful weapons isn't going to help with this.

I think I'm right in saying the British lost more tanks to the Americans than the Iraqis during the gulf war.

The thin line between defense and offense

[Anonymous Coward]

Toast a rocket for $3000 or toast the rocket launcher for $3000 (OK, $9000, it takes three shots). What do you think it will be used for? AAA guns get converted to anti-tank and anti-personel weapons very quickly.

God I love our motivations for technilogical progress.

Coil Guns don't

[dmaxwell]

A rail gun vaporizes a thin conductive coating on the back of a shell and electrostatic repulsion of the vaporized coating thrusts the shell forward. This vapor is very hot so it wears away a good bit of the rails on it's way out.

A coil gun is a different sort of electropropellent. The "barrel" of the gun is a multitude of coils laid in a row. The coils are driven by banks of capacitors in rapid sequence. They work just like a solenoid except that a sequence of coils is employed for greater acceleration. A working coil gun can be fired many times as no hot plasma is involved in accelerating the shell.

The problem is that it is much harder to build an effective coil gun than it is a rail gun. The timing of the coil firings must be timed precisely. Fire a coil too soon and the shell is braked rather than accelerated. Fire it too late and little to no accelleration is imparted at all. Secondly, it takes a number of coils to do this. One big coil won't do much since it is pointless to increase power once the (ferrous) shell has been magnetically saturated. So multiple coils have to kick the shell up to speed. A lot of coils isn't the problem in and of itself. Each coil will need a large bank of capacitors to itself, this will serve to make the weapon very bulky. The capacitor banks also have to be recharged between firings. It will also take some doing to cool the system. Ever play with a home made electromagnet? It's going to get HOT.

So to recap, the device will have sophisticated sensing and timing requrements for the coils; the generator and capacitor banks will be bulky; getting a high rate of fire is problimatical and it will require a large cooling system as well. I haven't mentioned any sort of targeting system or the engineering requirements that will be imposed on the shells either.

Basically, a battlefield practical electromagnetic mass driver is at least as hard as this laser system.

Our current weapons are already cruel.

[Anonymous Coward]

We use just about some of the most cruel ammo around. If you're not convinced, just go to www.fas.org. We put things like incendiary powder inside .50 cal bullets, for example.

Not that this is a bad thing. War is cruel.

Mechwarrior

[astrotek]

We get closer to having mecha everyday.

Naval Applications

[mcelli]

I think the real military application of this is in the Navy. Mixed with modern biotechnology, there is a huge potential for sharks with lasers attached to their heads.

So What?

[broody]

So far the only new technology we seem to need in the 'war on terror' is some kind of method to discover the location and identity of those in caves, some tunneling bombs to hit the deeper caves the 'bunker busters' cannot reach, and a box cutter defense system. We're hardly fighting a high technology enemy.

Re:So What?

[Stonehand]

Useful against low-tech foo as well. A mortar round filled with sarin is pretty low-tech, and you *really* would like to intercept it before it gets anywhere near. Sometimes you *need* high-tech to counter low-tech. For instance, you can "counter" a nuclear missile via MAD, but that won't *stop* a nuclear missile if the other guy simply doesn't care (either believing that he won't be identified, or won't be hit for other reasons, or doesn't mind being vaporized in the name of a greater cause). Stopping an attack tends to be a far harder problem than replying with a symmetric attack.

'sides, think ahead. We'd be monumentally stupid to ignore the potential for enemies more powerful than the Taliban. For instance, there is a fair probability that there'll need to be a Desert Storm II eventually; and if Pres. Hussein believes that the next time, we *won't* stop before deposing him, he may decide that with nothing left to lose he might as well pull out all the stops. Or what if North Korea implodes due to famine, and perhaps the tensest DMZ on Earth explodes? Or...

Re:So What?

[Ziviyr]

Sometimes you *need* high-tech to counter low-tech. For instance, you can "counter" a nuclear missile via MAD

I don't believe I'm reading this... Mutually Assured Destruction will neither stop an incoming nuke nor necessitate higher tech stuff.

If anything M.A.D. will only thoroughly piss off the country that fires off a single nuke (having little else to do, a cease fire won't do them much good, nor do I think they would care about the environment at that point), and before the end of the day could easily be the difference between one nuke and a few hundred nukes raining down on us.

Theres a reason for the acronym...

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

The senator you're referring to is Robert Byrd.

And sharks could have these on their foreheads!

[JMZero]

Hmm.. not much to say here now. Congo was a poor movie. No sea bass.

Math makes this hard against artillery

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say you're shooting a battalion 3 round mission, or 18 howitzers x three rounds each, on a time-on-target mission. The first 18 rounds are coming in all at once, from different locations. The next 24 rounds come in as fast as the gun bunnies make them go, and should be off in a minute. That's a lot of shooting.

Now, let's say it's not anything fancy, but straight HE/Quick. These things detonate when they impact, and there's not a lot to destroy or mess up on them. If it's a VT fuze, it has a cool radar in it (they detonate 7 meters above the dirt), so it has some electronics. But who thinks you are going to keep the laser on the tip of the round long enough to damage that?

Oh, and since it's light, unless you throw in some sort of Star Trek phase modulation, the enemy will develop a filter so it can see the beams shooting up. A little triangulation, and you'll see a couple batteries of MLRS rockets coming in fast. Very expensive rubble.

Lasers as a defensive weapon

[Animats]

Lasers are still weak, large, and expensive compared to existing offensive weapons. But because they can be aimed accurately and have a very short flight time, they have potential against incoming ordnance. That's why they're looked at as defensive weapons.

Artillery duels stopped being fun when the first Fire-Finder radars were developed, and shooting back became far more effective. The current U.S. Army performance standard for counterbattery fire is that within one minute of incoming artillery fire, counterfire should be hitting the source. So the days of fixed artillery are over. Fixed artillery dies after getting off a shot or two. Current US doctrine is "shoot and scoot"; get off a few shots and run like hell.

Re:Lasers as a defensive weapon

[xah]

I see your point. Still, a laser battery's location could not be detected by Fire-Finder radar.

Re:Lasers as a defensive weapon

[itarget]

The beam would certainly show up on infared as it heats the atmosphere. A direct line pointing back to the source.

Environmentally Sound

[MADCOWbeserk]

"Electric Humvee", only $.25 of electricity per shot! Better watch out they're turning green. How I long for the good old days of diesel spewing Humvees and depleted uranium munitions.

Picture little blue recycle bins on the front lines, "Don't throw that shell in the regular garbage, that goes in the blue bin" "Did you just throw pin in the grass, do you know how long it take a firing pin to biodegrade?

As opposed to old school military sorched earth attitude, "mmm napalm, burn baby burn."

Kinda funny that most wars are fought over oil.

Awarded for ...

[mallie_mcg]

How long will it be before we see some soldier awarded for bravery/intelligence/something else by using one of these manually to start frying enemy troops on the battle field, and saving the day. (If it were a Disney movie replace soldier with dog/cat/bird/kid^H^H^Hbear/electrical storm)

Then what, smaller and better lasers, and bigger lasers?

Sounds cool tho!

What the fuck is wrong with you?

[autopr0n]

1) These lasers are huge. They are talking about systems that are deployed on tractor trailers or on modified 747s. Why would you launch this into space?

Why would you NEED to shoot them into space? You fire the laser from the ground and hit the sat like that. I mean you can *see* sats in space with a telescope (sometimes just with your naked eyes) People use lasers to measure the distance to the moon in centimeters.

The whole rest of your post is based on the idea that you'd need to launch the laser into space to fire it, witch is just a ridiculous.

Re:What the fuck is wrong with you?

[Stavr0]

Why would you NEED to shoot them into space?
Because the atmosphere distorts light, the pollution would absorb most of the laser's energy. Basic physics.

Why are you spamming us with silly questions? Is it because you're trolling SlashDot to peddle your porn website, perchance?

Why laser pistols?

[Christopher Thomas]

I expect that eventually we'll see a chemically-pumped laser rifle or pistol, about the same size as a normal rifle or pistol, with an optical cavity where the barrel would be, powered by cartridges of solid fuel that are fed by a mechanism similar to the one that feeds cartridges consisting of case/primer/powder/bullet.

While this would probably work, I'm having trouble seeing why someone would use this instead of a gun.

The big problem with lasers is that you can do a lot more damage to a target by hitting it with a fast-moving slug than by heating it. Lasers are useful when you have a target that's far away and moving erratically enough that you can't fire slugs at it, but personal weapons are usually used at much shorter range. This suggests a chemically-pumped kinetic slug weapon might better fit infantry's needs... which is what they currently have.

As for shooting down missiles, one of the more interesting ideas in the Star Wars project was guided bullets. If you can guide a bullet - or even a countermissile, as is currently being tried - accurately enough to shoot down an incoming rocket, this method will likely be cheaper than using a laser to destroy the same rocket.

There might still be scenarios where you'd rather use a laser than a slug-based weapon. I'd certainly be interested in hearing suggestions (I certainly don't claim to have thought of everything; it's just that lasers aren't the best solution for the scenarios that I _have_ thought of).

Re:Why laser pistols?

[Weezul]

Lasers are useful when you have a target that's far away and moving erratically enough that you can't fire slugs at it, but personal weapons are usually used at much shorter range.

Think big ass sniper rifle for special forces.

But people would buy em' for cool factor (and point and click mentality). Paper targets on a shooting range. Burning the dear's butt might be considered more humane. Heck, red neck laser tag: put on your anti-red gogles. Tag! It stung so you noticed!

You know ESR would buy one with his 35 mil.. er.. 35 cents.. from VA.

Re:Why laser pistols?

[Anonymous Coward]

At least in real life laser weopons won't a) move slow enough that the rebel scum can deflect them with their light sabers, and b) create perfect tracers indicating my location (unless there's thick fog or smoke.

Re:Why laser pistols?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the lasers to wipe out decoy warheads.

Re:Why laser pistols?

[Rogerborg]

• I'm having trouble seeing why someone would use [a laser small arms] instead of a gun [because it doesn't do a lot of damage]

Kill a man, it takes a couple of man hours to bury him.

Wound, cripple or blind him and you put a long term drain on your enemy's economy.

It's simple economics. Instead of "Kill 'em all!", the strategy is "Wound 25% of them, then wait."

It's an unpopular strategy with the trigger pullers. When the British army went from the 7.62m SLR to the 5.56mm NATO round SA-80, it was vastly unpopular, and despite repeated modifications, it's still not loved (although the plastic furniture on it is no longer melted by QM-issue insect repellant...). One British special forces guy forced to try out the SA-80 in the Falklands reported shooting an Argentinian 3 times at bayonet range but failing to disable him. In the event, the British guy had actually fitted his obsolete bayonet, and stabbed the Argentinian. The baynet snapped. He had to cut him to bits with the broken edge.

It's a nasty story, but it illustrates that the people commissioning weapons have very different priorities from the people using them. In fact, special forces (and paramilitaries like SWAT) are the only troops who are still allowed to pick weapons for their stopping power. If it comes to the point where Joe Grunt is being used, then it's become an attrition war (or garrison duty, which isn't dissimilar), and Joe is going to be armed with something that's a compromise between robust, reliable, and cheap enough (weapon, ammunition and servicing) to perform effective recon by fire.

Which, now that I think about it, pretty much precludes lasers in the immediate future.

Re:Why laser pistols?

[Anonymous Coward]

One British special forces guy forced to try out the SA-80 in the Falklands reported shooting an Argentinian 3 times at bayonet range but failing to disable him. In the event, the British guy had actually fitted his obsolete bayonet, and stabbed the Argentinian. The baynet snapped. He had to cut him to bits with the broken edge.

As a former marksman with sniper training on both the 7.62 SLR and the 5.56 SA-80, I can only express surprise. The SA-80 has incredible hitting power from its high muzzle velocity - 1.6 times as great as the SLR. And it's the shockwave travelling behind the bullet that gets you. Faster shockwave, more power.

Your source for this British Special Forces Guy Hacks Argie to Death story? The Falklands War was in 1981 and the SA-80 only came into use in 1985. It is of course prefectly possible that special forces personnel were already using it, but it does seem a little strange.

P.S. Bayonets will never be obsolete.

Re:Why laser pistols?

[Rogerborg]

• As a former marksman with sniper training on both the 7.62 SLR and the 5.56 SA-80, I can only express surprise. The SA-80 has incredible hitting power from its high muzzle velocity - 1.6 times as great as the SLR

I make it 940m/s (SA-80) to 838m/s (SLR).

• Your source for this British Special Forces Guy Hacks Argie to Death story?

Buggered if I can find a reference. I can't even remember what service he was with. For what it's worth, if I was making it up, I've have made up a service as well. ;-) I really do recall reading about this, but I'm damned if I remember where. It may very well be rubbish, it was probably fifteen years ago.

• P.S. Bayonets will never be obsolete.

Absolutely. Sorry, I should have put that in "quotes". I meant to imply that whoever specced/made the bayonet probably thought that it was obsolete and only there to lengthen the weapon and stop it slipping under soldiers' armpits.

• The Falklands War was in 1981 and the SA-80 only came into use in 1985. It is of course prefectly possible that special forces personnel were already using it, but it does seem a little strange.

Er, well Falklands was April-June 1982. Now that I think about it, the SA-80 / Enfield L85A1 was initially specced to fire a 4.7mm round (maybe a copy of the caseless 4.7mm in the HK G11 when it appeared to be the Next Big Thing) and it had to be re-engineered to fire the NATO 5.56mm. It's conceivable that the 1982 version was even a 4.7mm. What the politics would be in trying to persuade special forces (collectively or individually) to use a prototype weapon, I would only imagine, but the US has done it recently with the Saber 203 laser illuminator/"dissuader" (to get back On Topic). By "dissuader", I mean that the Saber 203 is quite capable of blinding a target at close range. Temporarily, they claim.

I'm not slagging of the SA-80, but my point is that it was designed by commitee, built by the lowest bidder, and it's taken 15+ years to get a version that finally looks like it'll deliver on the original promise, with the improved SA-80 A2.

We might see anti-personnel lasers on the battlefield at some point, but by this measure, they'll take a good while to actually achieve their initial promise, particularly in terms of reliability.

Well, not me.

[autopr0n]

WTF would I do with a anti-artillery laser? Seeing as how I'm not constantly dodging mortar fire, that is. And if you did shoot it at other cars stuck in traffic you'd just be stuck longer, and then stuck in jail.

Re:Well, not me.

[indiechild]

Heck, why not spend precious R&D on the *bigger* threat out there: small arms projectiles, i.e. bullets! After all, small arms account for the majority of deaths and injuries in most conflicts.

Why not go straight for a weapon that defeats bullets? =)

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

most folk are smart enough to make their own decisions (what's the Fox News slogan-- "We report, you decide."-- this was more than true after 9/11; they presented a number of possibilities right after the attacks happened, and left it to you, THE VIEWER, to decide).

If most folks are that smart to make their own decisions, then why are they now thinking the government has their best interests in mind and will leave all the important decision making to the government without questioning them? Sure, they may present all sorts of angles, but they always seem to pick the most offending to represent liberals, which is terribly biased reporting to begin with. Yup, you may choose any color as long as it's black. That's why I and many others despise Fox News.

WARNING, do not look directly into the beam

[Anonymous Coward]

WHAT BEAM ?
AHHHHHH, MY EYES !!!!!!!
(this asshole looked directly into a 100 Kw ultraviolet laser beam which can't be seen)

Special Forces Blind the Enemy before killing them

[Anonymous Coward]

Special Forces can now use their bayonets and knives to stab the enemy to death.

I can only imagine...

[carpe_noctem]

Recall that the M-16 machine gun (primarily used by ground troops during the Vietnam War) was actually in existence during World War II, though it was classified at the time. The military's technology usually seems to buffer itself from the civilian population by a measure of about a quarter century (give or take a decade). So, if they're telling us that they've developed laser battlefield weapons, God only knows what they've developed that we *don't* know about.

Re:I can only imagine...

[Happy go Lucky]

Recall that the M-16 machine gun (primarily used by ground troops during the Vietnam War) was actually in existence during World War II, though it was classified at the time. The military's technology usually seems to buffer itself from the civilian population by a measure of about a quarter century (give or take a decade). So, if they're telling us that they've developed laser battlefield weapons, God only knows what they've developed that we *don't* know about.

Your point may be valid but your example is not.

The M-16/AR-15 takes the 5.56mm NATO round, sold as the .223 Remington in sporting goods stores throughout the US. The only problem is, that round wasn't introduced until after Korea.

The AR's designer, Eugene Stoner, started out with a rifle in 7.62x51 NATO/.308 Winchester and used that design to build the AR-15. However, That round didn't exist during WWII either.

You just can't please some people

[DNS-and-BIND]

Jesus...there's always going to be mistakes made. Friendly fire is as old as the wooden spear.

I think it says a lot that nowadays the worst thing that the anti-military folks can say is "i'm shocked by how many of our own soldiers we're killing". Funny, I'm shocked at how few of our soldiers have been killed by the enemy (current score: 0). Just goes to show you how some people's minds work. Sad, really.

Re:You just can't please some people

[h0rus]

That's because those are the only casualties that have occured. As you put it. Also the result of friendly fire. So we should just ignore that they exist? The fact that the only casualties have been the result of the bombings? Yeah. That's an excellent attitude.

Re:You just can't please some people

[Sebastopol]

"...the anti-military folks... ...Sad, really."

What?! At what point did you think I was anti-military? Don't be so quick to judge. I totally support the war (especially leveraging the N.A. rather than putting our own troops at risk), I just never expected the death tool from friendly fire to be higher than that inflicted by the enemy.

Sad, really, how some people just draw their own conclusions from their own malicious bias.

Re:You just can't please some people

[Anonymous Coward]

you bible thumping gun nuts are all the same, you don't even see the obvious:

by your logic, the United States is more of a threat to our troops then the ENEMY!

Why?

US troop casualties by enemy: 0
US troop casualties by US Troops: 8

Re:You just can't please some people

[DNS-and-BIND]

Well, the campaign is going smashingly well, America's enemies are in full retreat, and all anybody can talk about are the miniscule friendly fire statistics. Sounds pretty unfriendly to me.

Re:More bias/social engineering from the hawks at

[arthurh3535]

[[Congress is already leery of "star wars" (the SDI kind), seeing how there is so much pressure to deploy the damn thing, when star wars misses 3 out of 6 targets in *lab* conditions.

Now they want the same unproven technology on the ground. Fox runs nothing but editorials against "government pork" and "big government" EXCEPT when it serves the war hawks or their stock portfolio. ]]

Interesting. There is no failure or redesign in any of our (being citizens) projects?

Oh, wait!

We're *human*. That means we know we aren't perfect and we aren't going get it right the very first time trying to do a complicated thing!

Or did you *not* fall down while you were learning to ride a bycicle?

And the rest of this 'article'? Sounds like someone has their pet conspiracy theory.

Newsflash----

Not even Fox Network took the 'Moon Hoax' seriously. Sure it was titilating and it was a huge uproar.

Got decent ratings too.

But if you're blaming NASA's problems on FOX, you aren't looking in the right place.

Most of its problems are within congress and management

JUST Fox News?

[rela]

Granted, Fox News is pretty fluffy and silly and politcally biased, but, well, sorry, that's pretty common with news media.

What's the big deal about this one in paticular? (I mean, how many 'oh fox news sucks' posts so far?) That they're biased differently than your used to? Or that you agree with?

Is it that hard to understand that there is no such thing as an unbiased journalist? People are human. They have their biases. Keep the grains of salt handy always.

Aegis is considered to be a sophisticated system.

[Futurepower(tm)]

There was NO intention on my part to say it was a conspiracy. I don't think that. I was just saying that there are a lot of things that can go wrong with an automatically guided laser.

My point about the Vincennes is that the recognition radar was not sophisticated enough to show the difference clearly between a fighter and a large commercial aircraft. People on board genuinely thought they were being attacked. They would not have thought that if they had a better recognition system. That is significant because Aegis is considered to be a very sophisticated system. If that is close to the state of the art, then we can expect problems of the same nature with laser weapons.

Re:American lives expensive?

[rela]

Who made up the title to this subthread?

Are NON-AMERICAN lives not as expensive?

Geeze.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[errxn]

That could be said of ANY news agency...

What, that they were started by Ted Turner?

However, CNN researches it's stories far more often than Fox...

And you have documented proof of this, I presume.

I still trust a news agency that got it's "start" in covering the gulf war, far more than a news network that got it's start with 'Bigfoot could be your neighbor!!!', and 'Here's our big titted broad of the week!'

Uhh...WTF??? I suppose you "researched" that, too.

Great belief in the power and efficacy of weapons

[Futurepower(tm)]

Regardless of the problems in Saudi Arabia, the situation there is many, many times better than it is in "similar" countries such as Iraq and Iran.

Senator Biden, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, disagrees with you. He said in a recent interview that the government of Saudi Arabia exists only because it is supported by the United States. This is effectively saying that Osama bin Laden's main complaint is justified. (HOWEVER, note that bin Laden's violence is NOT justified.) A transcript of the interview will be posted later at http://hevanet.com/peace.

This is all relevant to the discussion of laser weapons in that something is out of control. There is a much greater belief in the power and efficacy of weapons than there should be.

I read about 60 Slashdot posts when the story was young, and I didn't find anyone who took the new weapon seriously. Many discussed reasons why it wouldn't work.

X-rays are refracted.

[Futurepower(tm)]

X-rays are refracted and dispersed by the water vapor in clouds. Very short wavelengths might work, but I don't think they are feasible.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[aminorex]

I would point out that CNN has CIA beaurocrats providing
editorial "advice".
http://davesweb.cnchost.com/cnn.htm

"FoxNews, The Most Biased Name in News" - FAIR.org

[Kraft]

Thank you thank you thank you for pointing that out.

I have a grudge with Fox, and this article didn't help either. I totally avoid it for any "War on Terror" news.

Recently Fair And Accuracy in Reporting wrote a special report titled:
The Most Biased Name in News: Fox News Channel's extraordinary right-wing tilt (note that's it's written before sep.11).

Now that I am at it, CNN is no saint either, that's for sure. I feel like screaming BIASED! at the TV when I see Lou Dobbs et.al. wearing Stars and Stripes on their suit. All reporting is "WE need to fight this enemy...", "Protect OUR country...". So much for International.

No thank you, I will stick with:
- guerrillanews
- mediachannel
- and for TV, EuroNews or even BBC

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[errxn]

It's not Fox News's fault that they can't find a liberal viewpoint that's not offensive.

Microwaves as crowd dispersal weapons

[Von Rex]

It's already in the works.

Here's an interesting experiment on using microwaves to heat up crowds of dissenters.

The Air Force Research Lab has already set guidelines for acceptable pain levels for use against civilians, though some say the levels are too high as they could cause eye damage. Testing against human volunteers has already begun.

Re:Microwaves as crowd dispersal weapons

[Autonomous Cow]

volunteers? what kind of person volunteers for this?
Isn't that sort of like volunteering to test the shark-bite suit? (here's your sign).

cost-effectiveness

[whanau]

Perhaps the money would be better spent on extremely rapid rocket counter battery fire, like improving the MLRS system so that it has longer range and is response time is improved. I doubt an enemy will bother shelling US troops if they know that a rain of rockets will be landing on their head before their first shell hits the ground

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

You Want the BBC, sir.

How long till we have an Obilisk of Light?

[markyd]

How long until we have Obilisks of light defending all major buildins around the globe then?

Mark - 'GDI unit approaching'

Here's what I was told by an instructor.

[Hektor_Troy]

Being hit by a .50 cal projectile (fired from a Barret Light Fifty) will kill you. So will not being hit, if it passes within 5 cm of you, because the windshear(?) will rip off rather large portions of your body.

I rather doubt this, but that's what he said.

The local police use lasers...

[thogard]

Who cares if the army uses dangerous lasers, since
the local police use them on the highways.

Most of the speed detection lasers use mirror tricks to get around the class 1 vs class 3 requirements. Class 3 can cause blidness and IR lasers are the worst since your eyes natrual protection wont kick in. Since 21 cfr 1040 says you have to detect at the souce of the laser, all you have to do is make the source window larger than the test sensor but still have the beam converge elsewhere and be dangerous.

But the cops still point IR lasers at drivers on high speed roads in the name of safety.

Nothing compares to social engineering

[Anonymous Coward]

Train some guys to fly,
Tell them it'll bring them closer to their God,
Put them in one of the enemy's plane
and kill 3000+ more people.

Easy, cheap, really efficient, and no need for big-ass science...

Just rememebr, K_eep I_t S_tupid S_imple

:)

Thats cheep compared to cruse missiles

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats OK
Cruse missiles cost $1million a throw and we've been firin' 'em at tents

Have you woken up to this yet?

They OVERHEAT.

[Anonymous Coward]

Todays lazers are incapable of melting a shell.
They don't have sufficient energy to do that so it would take a really long time and that would defeat the purpose.
What they really do is heat up an enemy rocket to the point of explosion. we've wanted to try that in Israel on the border with Lebanon.
The Hizbulla terrorist organization operate from Lebanon and they used to launch short range rockets at us (20 km, called "Katyusha").
America tried for us a stationary system that intercepts several such rockets, but the lazer overheats and demands a great deal of power.
Maybe in a few years time...

Re:They OVERHEAT.

[Anonymous Coward]

... lazers ...

Light Amplification by Ztimulated Emission of Radiation?

Shooting Skippies

[Anonymous Coward]

No worries,
I'll have one for the back of the ute thanks..

I've actually seen this in action on a video

[ret]

In my phsyics class in highschool my teacher showed some video that showed these lasers in action. This technology apparently has actually been around since at least the 70's, although apparently not in use. In the video we were shown they had a large laser cannon, almost like a mortar, but with laser, and blew up a military jeep with it. My guess is it was a far less efficient version of the technology that they weren't going to use in actual battle situations, because it was unheard of by anyone I know of, including military people, but if they were wanting to keep it secret, it obviously would not have been in a highschool physics video.
--

Re:hard part; not so; air may be transparent

[guybarr]

actually, for the laser to be efficient, it MUST
emit light which is hardly ever absorped in air.
therefore, no superheating of air...

PETA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why whould People Eating Tasty Animals care?

Re:More bias/social engineering from the hawks at

[Sleepy]

Interesting. There is no failure or redesign in any of our (being citizens) projects?

Oh, wait!

We're *human*. That means we know we aren't perfect and we aren't going get it right the very first time trying to do a complicated thing!

Or did you *not* fall down while you were learning to ride a bycicle?

You might have had a point if you selected a better example, but you failed. "Civilian projects" do not spend upwards of 80 BILLION dollars in just the TEST phase. In science, at some point in testing, you will always arrive at a conclusion that the project is either not feasable, too expensive, or the technology is not ready. After almost 20 years of failures, I'd say it's all of the above.

The closest thing I could think of to your comment would be Boston's Big Dig. Sure, it's expensive as hell and has a lot of waste, but at least *civilian* projects like this are financially accountable, and nothing is filed as "secret". More importantly, and this is my counter-point.. there was plenty of evidence the tunnel would work. They just keep running these SDI tests to keep the pork flowing, and maybe sneak in more appropriations when the public is too busy worrying over terrorism.

In other words, the beef with SDI/star wars isn't over the trials, it's because they're PUSHING for Congress to ORDER the thing, when no one YET knows if it works. Oh yeah, and then there's the cost issue, and how much more likely a nuke would be suicide bombing than some fearless leader launching a missile at us... (I think our arsenal pretty much guarantees the latter will not happen)

Newsflash----

Not even Fox Network took the 'Moon Hoax' seriously. Sure it was titilating and it was a huge uproar. Got decent ratings too.

Nice to see Fox supporters shrug off gross acts of irresponsibility in the name of politics and profit. "We report - you decide" is the Fox motto, but it should be "We decide -- you agree (and your conscience can be clear because you heard it on TV)".

But if you're blaming NASA's problems on FOX, you aren't looking in the right place.

Most of its problems are within congress and management

In my opinion, the only problem NASA has is *intereference* and fiscal sabotage. And yes, I can lay that squarely at the feet of conservatives, who can think of nothing more than profits from privatized space exploitation. Hell, Nasa's detractors in Congress are the same bastards who feel nothing wrong about privatizing our POLICE forces, if they could get away with it.

The only thing "wrong" with NASA management is they will spend whatever it takes to protect their people, accidents notwithstanding. You won't for example see a mining corporation install multiple fail-safe devices... "it's just part of the job".

Mirrors = no good

[kazzuya]

They are one of the main problemes that USA encountered while trying to build a laser defense system long ago.
Russians were making specular missiles. They are not 100% reflective, but that surely helps reflect great part of the energy.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[NeuroManson]

"What, that they were started by Ted Turner?"

Nope, that they are often open to massive gaffs when it comes to accuracy...

"However, CNN researches it's stories far more often than Fox...

And you have documented proof of this, I presume."

Ahhh, the old "Provide proof on paper" argument... Well, can you provide proof otherwise? And can you provide documented proof from a reputable source? There aren't any... Sorry, try again...

The truth is, that Turner built his news network up from a relatively meager start as an independant UHF station in Atlanta, and until the gulf war, they had very little in the way of real visual presence (except for those who HAD cause to watch it)...

Just because you don't study history or the actual information, or have an attention span that exceeds 5 minutes, doesn't mean it isn't true...

"I still trust a news agency that got it's "start" in covering the gulf war, far more than a news network that got it's start with 'Bigfoot could be your neighbor!!!', and 'Here's our big titted broad of the week!'

Uhh...WTF??? I suppose you "researched" that, too."

No need, go to the average supermarket and dig up a copy of the National Enquirer, and read the indicia, you'll note that it's owned by 'American News Corporation', a Rupert Murdoch company... Also owned by Murdoch is the Sun, a Brit publication, and here's your documented proof as well, take a look at their actual website if you don't believe me: http://www.thesun.co.uk/

The list of Rupert Murdoch owned publications can be found at http://www.newscorp.com/index2.html (warning, Flash heavy)

I rest my case...

EM weapons

[Fenresulven]

Not really applicable to TC, but during WWII the japanese developed an EM weapon utilizing radio waves focused into a high power beam. Apparently it was capable of stopping a trucks engine at a range of about 50 meters and killing rabbits at 30. And remember, we're talking 40's technology here.

Re:Aegis is considered to be a sophisticated syste

[saider]

Causes
1) Airbus IFF was not active.

2) Airbus was off course.

3) Airbus did not respond to voice queries on several channels.

4) Vincennes did not broadcast warning on Air Traffic Control channel.

5) Vincennes had no way to visually ID the Airbus.

6) Vincennes' helicopter had been attacked by gunboats.

It was just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

From the Washington Post...

The Pentagon at first denied the Iranian claims, declaring that information from the fleet indicated that the Vincennes, equipped with the Aegis electronic battle management system, had shot down an attacking Iranian F14 jet fighter. But after sifting through more detailed reports and electronic intelligence, Reagan directed the Pentagon to confirm there had been a tragic case of mistaken identity in the war-torn gulf.

Crowe, in his hastily called news conference at the Pentagon, also backed up the skipper of the Vincennes and faulted the Iranian airline pilot. Crowe said the Airbus had flown four miles west of the usual commercial airline route from Bandar Abbas to Dubai and that the pilot ignored repeated radioed warnings from the Vincennes to change course.

Why and how the Vincennes mistook the bulky, wide-bodied Airbus A300 for a sleek, supersonic F14 fighter plane barely a third the transport's size will be the subject of "a full investigation," Reagan promised. A military team under the command of Rear Adm. William N. Fogarty of the U.S. Central Command will leave this week to begin that investigation, Defense Department officials said.

The shootdown of the Airbus represents the biggest loss of life on the strategic waterway since the U.S. warships began escorting Kuwaiti tankers in and out of the Persian Gulf last July. Pentagon officials then said the increased U.S. naval presence would have from a "low to moderate risk" of provoking confrontations with Iran.

But in the past year, although the United States and Iran are not in a formal state of war, there have been a series of brief but fierce sea battles in the gulf between the two countries' military forces. Vigilance and readiness among U.S. forces intensified after the near-sinking of the patrol frigate USS Stark by an Iraqi fighter-bomber on May 17, 1987, in a missile attack that killed 37 sailors.

Yesterday started out as another sea battle, and ended with what the Vincennes commanders misinterpreted as a "Stark profile" attack on the high-tech cruiser. Crowe in his briefing and other Navy and Defense Department officials offered a detailed version of how the shoot-down occurred.

At 2:10 a.m. EDT, the Pentagon said, three Iranian Boghammar gunboats fired on a helicopter that had flown off the Vincennes on a reconnaissance mission. The helicopter flew back to the cruiser unscathed. The Vincennes and a smaller warship, the frigate USS Elmer Montgomery, a half-hour later closed on the gunboats and put them under fire with 5-inch guns, sinking two and damaging the third.

At 2:47 a.m. EDT, the Iranian Airbus with almost a full load of passengers took off from Bandar Abbas, a big Iranian naval base on the northern coastal elbow of the Strait of Hormuz. The field at the base is used by civilian and military aircraft and recently had become the center for Iran's dwindling force of F14s, a twin-engine, two-place fighter that the United States sold to Iran during the rule of the shah.

Two minutes after the Airbus took off, the far-reaching radars of the Vincennes Aegis cruiser saw the plane was coming its way. The skipper of the ship, operating under liberalized rules of engagement that call for U.S. captains in the Persian Gulf to fire before being fired upon to avoid another Stark disaster, warned the approaching aircraft to change course, according to the Pentagon.

The Vincennes and most airliners are equipped with identification of friend or foe (IFF) electronic boxes that query each other across the sky to establish identities. The Vincennes' IFF questioned the Airbus IFF via telemetry, but received no response. A response would come in radio pulses that would be deciphered and displayed as an identifying number on the ship's combat information center consoles.

Failing to raise the Airbus by IFF, the Pentagon said, the Vincennes broadcast its warnings by voice radio, using the emergency UHF and VHF channels that aircraft crews would hear if they followed standard practice of monitoring those frequencies. Crowe said three warnings were sent over the civilian emergency channel and four over the military one, called "Guard." The Pentagon said the Vincennes could have issued the warning over the air traffic control channel but did not.

"The suspect aircraft was outside the prescribed commercial air corridor," Crowe told reporters. Defense Department officials said later that the Airbus was four miles west of commercial air corridor. "More importantly," Crowe continued, "the aircraft headed directly for Vincennes on a constant bearing at high speed, approximately 450 knots."

Without becoming specific, Crowe said there were "electronic indications on Vincennes" that led the U.S. crew to conclude the approaching airliner was an F14. "Given the threatening flight profile and decreasing range, the aircraft was declared 'hostile' " at 2:51 a.m. EDT. The airliner at that crucial moment was on a course of almost due south, 185 degrees, and descending toward the Vincennes from an altitude of 7,800 feet, according to Crowe. Visibility was no more than five miles, Crowe said.

Three minutes later, at 2:54 a.m. EDT, the Vincennes launched two Standard surface-to-air missiles from its deck. The missiles whooshed toward the twin-jet airliner, which was nine miles away and not visible to the naked eye because of the haze hanging over the gulf. The Standard missiles homed in on the heat of the quarry's engines and at least one of them exploded when it pulled abreast of the Airbus. Such a missile hit usually slices an aircraft apart and turns it into a fireball of burning fuel.

It's Missle Command!

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about it. Rockets falling down from the sky... you shoot lasers up to destroy them. All you need is that really freaking annoying trackball and your ready to go!

Think about it! You can defend a whole garison with just one kid and $20 in quarters.

A sophisticated system did not deliver enough info

[Futurepower(tm)]

Why and how the Vincennes mistook the bulky, wide-bodied Airbus A300 for a sleek, supersonic F14 fighter plane barely a third the transport's size will be the subject of "a full investigation..."

There is a point here: A sophisticated system did not deliver enough information to allow the crew to distinguish between very different targets. I think they are not doing that much better now, and that limitation is a limitation for laser weapons.

Cannot work because of the laws of physics

[Futurepower(tm)]

The problem seems to be that the U.S. government spends money on weapons that cannot work because of the laws of physics, as earlier posts have mentioned. This seems to be a case of government corruption; these are largely secret, high-profit deals.

THEL.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I submitted this article last year when TRW was testing THEL. Slashdot rejected it then. Why is it popular now?

Re:THEL.

[Anonymous Coward]

Informer
by Snow

What's up man! Hey yo what's up!
Yeah what's goin' on here.
Sick an' tired of five-oh runnin' up on the block here.
You know what I'm sayin'?
Yo Snow, they came around here lookin' for you the other day.
Word? Word! Bust it!

Informer, you no say Daddy me Snow me I'll go blame,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Detective mon said Daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Informer, you no say Daddy me Snow me I'll go blame,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Detective mon said Daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky Boom Boom Down.

Police them come an' now they blow down me door,
One him come crawl through, through my window,
So then they put me in the back the car at the station,
From that point on me reach my destination,
When the destination reached, it was the east detention, where them
Whipped down me pants, looked up me bottom, so
Bigger they are they think they have more power,
They're on the phone me say that on (every) hour,
Me for want to use it once an' now me call me lover,
Lover who I'll be callin is the one TAMMY,
an' me love her in me heart down to my belly,
Yes me Daddy me Snow me I feel cool an' deadly,
As the one MC Shan an' the one Daddy Snow,
Together we-a love'em as a Tor-Na-Do.

Informer, you no say Daddy me Snow me I'll go blame,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Detective mon said Daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Informer, you no say Daddy me Snow me I'll go blame,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Detective mon said Daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky Boom Boom Down.

Listen for me, you better listen for me now.
Listen for me, you better listen for me now.
When me rockin' the microphone me rock it steady,
Yes sir, Daddy me Snow me are the article don.
But in the in an' the out of a dance them they say where you come from,
People them say you come from Jamaica,
But me born an' raised in the ghetto that's the one I want you to know,
Pure black people mon that's all I mon know.
Yeah me shoes are tear up an' me toes used to show,
Where me born in on the one Toronto, so

Informer, you no say Daddy me Snow me I'll go blame,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Detective mon said Daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Informer, you no say Daddy me Snow me I'll go blame,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Detective mon said Daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky Boom Boom Down.

Come with a nice young lady. Intelligent,
Yes she's gentle an' irie.
Everywhere me go, me never left her at all.
Yes, its Daddy Snow me are the roam dance mon.
Roam between a dancin' in a in a nation-a.
You never know say Daddy me Snow me are the Boom Shakata.
Me never lay-a down flat in that one cardboard box.
Yes say me Daddy me Snow me I'll go reachin' at the top, so

Informer, you no say Daddy me Snow me I'll go blame,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Detective mon said Daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Informer, you no say Daddy me Snow me I'll go blame,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Detective mon said Daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky Boom Boom Down.

Why would he?

Me sittin' 'round cool with my dibbie dibbie girl,
Police knock my door,
Lick up my pal,
Rough me up an' I can't do a thing
Pick up my line, when my telephone ring.
Take me to the station,
Black up my hands.
Trail me down, 'cuz I'm hangin' with the Snowman,
What I'm gonna do,
I'm backed an' I'm trapped,
Slap me in the face an' took all o' my gap.
They have no clues an' they wanna get warmer,
But Shan won't turn Informer!

Informer, you no say Daddy me Snow me I'll go blame,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Detective mon said Daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Informer, you no say Daddy me Snow me I'll go blame,
A licky Boom Boom Down.
Detective mon said Daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky Boom Boom Down.

They have something that does...

[Svartalf]

It's called body armor or vehicular armor.

While it's not 100 percent effective, it DOES stop most types of small arms fire (Especially some of the new body armor types- they'll stop stuff like 12ga. sabot slugs at point-blank range.).

If you're talking about a Star Wars shield generator type affair, you're going to find it's going to be easier for us to make beam weapons for a while yet as the technology to make useful, efficient force fields is still essentially in the stone age level of development.

And then...

[Hoi Polloi]

If this thing ever proved to even work never mind be practical they'd have to turn around and immediately devise countermeasures for it. A device that was reasonably portable and not terribly expensive to make/use would be immediately copied. The US military's current strategy of knocking out air defenses with cruise and HARM missiles and then attacking from the air at will would be seriously compromised.

At the very least a strong enough and accurate beam could "blind" optically guided munitions.

Maybe they should just leave the genie in the bottle.

Re:Aegis is considered to be a sophisticated syste

[Anonymous Coward]

And you think the STARK attack was bad, get on your web browser and find out what happened to the USS LIBERTY during the 1967 Arab Israeli War: http://home.cfl.rr.com/gidusko/liberty/

Re:Better idea

[trcooper]

Strap the PETA folks up with explosives, and guide THEM with the pen lasers.

Easy countermeasures

[Hoi Polloi]

If the target is made highly reflective (anti-stealth!?) then the beam must be either extremely strong to apply a massive pulse to a small area or able to apply energy to the target for a certain minimum period of time. Extremely fast pulses that compress the energy into a very brief but powerful pulse probably wouldn't work as the plasma generated by the high temperatures would absoarb any further energy from the pulse before the plasma could disperse, thus acting like a kind of insulating layer. You'd end up pitting the target at best.

Since a massive pulse precludes any current mobile technology one could imagine then the 2nd route would have to be taken. The target has one VERY easy countermeasure in addition to being reflective, SPIN. Having the missile rotate is easy and will cause the beam to distribute it's energy over a large area. Artillery shells already do this (spin) and the explosives used in munitions require a shock and not just heat to detonate.

Another defense would be a layer of ablation material that simply burns off thus absoarbing the energy of the beam long enough for the target to survive. Something with a high heat capacity and high melting point (ceramics?) would be good for that.

I don't see this research producing a kill device, maybe a blinding one though. Optical detectors (CCDs) in guided munitions can be pretty easily fried if you can aim the beam that well, of course that would be more of a threat to a hi-tech dependent military than a 3rd world army.

Re:Easy countermeasures

[Kargan]

Wouldn't it depend on how big the beam is, though, too? I mean, if the beam is large enough to encompass the whole shell, it doesn't matter how fast the shell spins...

As far as missiles go, they're mostly made of propellant (flammable/explosive) and electronics (knock those out, the missile doesn't know where to go). Obviously hitting the warhead would work, too, but that's usually not very big in comparison to the overall size.

FOX, our news is now 100% shame free!

[Hoi Polloi]

Ok, so corporate welfare is good and personal welfare is bad? Good, glad the politicos straightened me out on that.

The end of the Cold War must've been the worst thing that ever happened to the military-industrial complex. No wonder within months of the end of the Soviet Union the president was talking about "rogue nations" (i.e. anyone who dares oppose us). You can't lavish $ on Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney, etc without a boogie man to keep the voters blind with paranoia. It is no surprise that most of the top military staff and government staff end up as consultants and board members of these very same companies when they leave the government. We need a law forbidding them from working for any defense contractor for X years after leaving their government job (sort of like a non-compete contract).

or a la "History of the World part I "

[Adhoc]

Only a MIRACL can save us now! *fwoosh*

Re:"FoxNews, The Most Biased Name in News" - FAIR.

[borzwazie]

Umm...FoxNews is biased? and your guerrillanews with a headline like this:

"Bush's Racial Coup D'Etat and Intell Shutdown

Did Jeb Bush fix the Florida election long before any votes were cast? Did President Bush shut down the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies' investigations into terror networks prior to 9-11, leaving America wide open to the attacks? "

Or this:

Like the best muckrakers, he is angry, opinionated and armed with a tireless desire to expose the truth.

Nope, no opinion bias there either :P At any rate, the parent topic here is about lasers, not politial bias...on topic please.

Re:More bias/social engineering from the hawks at

[Rogerborg]

• this is a LOBBYING EFFORT to raise taxes for yet another military boondoggle. It's just pretend news

Yup. Let's not forget that during the Gulf War, the press was reporting that Patriots were shooting down 90%+ of the Scuds raining down on Kuwait and Israel.

As it turned out, what the military was very carefully claiming was a 90%+ "interception" rate. The press cheerfully interpreted that as "shooting down". In the enquiries afterwards, it turned out that "interception" meant that the Patriot had exploded in the vicinity of the Scud. When pressed as to how many Scuds had actually been shot down by Patriots, the number of confirmed kills turned out to be of the order of zero. Zilch. Nada.

And also let's not forget that early laser tests were carried out on flimsy target drones painted black.

So when I read an article saying that a laser has "destroyed" 25 Katyusha rockets, I take it with a huge pinch of salt. Where did the word "destroyed" come from? 25 out of how many launches? What colour were they painted, and what modifications had been made to them (like covering them in thermite to simulate "future enhancements" to the laser)?

I'll believe it when the grunts say it's working, and not before.

Re:"FoxNews, The Most Biased Name in News" - FAIR.

[ghoti221]

All news is spin. You can't present the news without presenting spin -- true objectivity doesn't exist. Everybody has their own agenda to sell. And after reading your links, I find those websites (guerrillanews/mediachannel) are just as biased as Fox and CNN, just in different ways. Same with the BBC.

Do I have a solution? No. I try to watch a variety of sources, even the ones you don't like, synthesize them, and come to your own opinion. That's all anybody can do.

Re:"FoxNews, The Most Biased Name in News" - FAIR.

[phasic]

yeah, guerillanews and mediachannel? And you're complaing about FOXNEWS as being the most biased name in news?

Please, just admit it that your biggest complaint about foxnews is that it shows a conservative voice. I would find it hard to believe that if a news organization titled heavily to the left (like guerilla news and media channel) you would be screaming about fair reporting. You're absolutely not concerned about objectivity, you only use it as a pretense to complain about "right wing" media outlets, and that is disgusting deception.

All americans should seek media that shows both sides of the story, and everyone must ALWAYS keep an open mind about issues...NO MATTER HOW DEDICATED YOU ARE TO YOUR POLITICS. Locking yourself into liberal only news sources hurts all of us in the end.

I also find it ridiculous that your biggest complaint about CNN is lou dobbs, when it is widely regarded to be a LIBERAL biased news organization (and this is well documented). Somehow THAT didn't come up in your discussion about bias.

Here's a nice photo of the THEL

[a_an_the]

http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/US-Israel/thel2.h tml

Wouldn't want to be looking down the barrel of that

Expensive High-tech vs. Desperation

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm...

We spend billions on high-tech defense per year to protect ourselves from missles and other expensive weapons, while terrorists attack us by hijacking airplanes (for free) and sending us anthrax (which can be grown for free, pretty easily if you know how).

All the metal detectors in the world won't protect you from plastic and ceramic knives hidden in someone's shoe.

How many people/organizations have access to enough money to buy/make missiles and artillery? How many people/organizations have access to a box-cutter or a dead cow?

Not yet it doesn't

[ctimes2]

These lasers require a lot of power. Only if your target lives near a power plant would it be feasable. Plus, they're huge. Plus, they're not that common. If this was used against a person, it wouldn't be hard to figure out who did it (because how many of us have these things in the garage). And finally, bullets will be cheaper for a long time to come. It just isn't a practical way to assasinate someone, and won't be in our life time.

Battlefields are a whole other story. But, since most warfar is becoming guerilla warfare you won't see many large battles where you'd have the good fortune to have a few of these laying around with generators, and nothing big to shoot at (like planes, tanks, etc.). Which is why the Navy is so interested.

ctimes2

Re:More bias/social engineering from the hawks at

[bigwig10001]

If you live in NYC, you know that as shocking as FOX can be, it pales in comparison to the once respected NY Post. My jaw actually hangs open reading it. It can be amusing if you lose perspective and read it like a scientology or moonie pamphlet instead of being what passes for news. The news articles (what few of them are left) are encased in the rabid editorials surrounding and dwarfing them. Plus, they have Mallard Fillmore, a comic strip that is basically Rush as a duck. It is a matter of years before we get a topless page two girl like the Star in London.

Note: Murdoch bought the Post a bunch of years ago. His son (I think the bald one) took over around last yr., and it has gotten noticeably worse since then.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[errxn]

Ahhh, the old "Provide proof on paper" argument... Well, can you provide proof otherwise?

Damn right, it's the old "Provide proof on paper" argument, and I'm still waiting to see some. You made the claim, you provide the evidence to back up that claim. See, *that's* how it works - not by demanding that those who question your claim provide proof to the contrary - they didn't advance the argument in the first place. Although, I must admit, Jesse Jackson uses your tactic with great success when he undertakes one of his racial extortion schemes against some company with big coffers.

As far as the "bigfoot" business goes, sure, Murdoch owns those kinds of publications. You are absolutely correct. So what? Beside that, exactly what does that have to do with Fox News? Associating Fox News with the ubiquitous "bigfoot" story is like associating the show "Not Necessarily the News" from the old TBS days with CNN (and yes, I LIVED in Atlanta, and I'm pretty familiar with the Turner history, so don't EVEN...). Or any stupid thing a Braves player does. Or some crap on one of Turner's old billboards from the days when he ran that company. Or, dare I even mention it, ANYTHING that comes out of good ol' Hanoi Jane's mouth. So, my friend, if you want to play the "guilt by association" game, I'm afraid that you are already at a disadvantage, and insulting my perception of history or my attention span is not going to change that.

I am not a lawyer, and, given the arguments that you have presented here, you should be glad that you aren't either.

FAIR isn't fair... and it is racist.

[Anonymous Coward]

The group FAIR in the past has attacked certain media figures (mainly for the crime of not being far-left) with huge lists of "quotes" that turn out to be mostly fabricated. They also have a radio show called "Counterspin" where they spend much of their time in racists rants attacking news media people for the color of their skin.

Re:FAIR isn't fair... and it is racist.

[andkaha]

Oh, could you please supply me with a valid reference. I will be much pleased to read it.

...except that it works.

[Anonymous Coward]

"fighting for peace" does often work. This is usually in the cases where the action is defensive with the goal of stopping aggression. Many examples: US vs Nazi Germany and Japan is a big one. Gulf war? Saddam started it. the US "fought" to end it, and Iraqi troups are now within Iraqi borders, and there is peace in Kuwait once again.

Innocent?

[EnglishTim]

I thought the term 'innocent' in this context was normally only used to describe civillians. Although not by implication 'guilty', it is generally accepted that dying is recognised hazard of a career in the armed forces, and to a certain extent, "Those who live by the sword die by the sword". Although it is a noble thing to risk death and mutilation for the good of your country, killing others, even your enemies, can at best be described as a regrettable necessity; hence the innapropriateness of the adjective 'innocent' when applied to combatants.

Re:"FoxNews, The Most Biased Name in News" - FAIR.

[Kraft]

(also answer to ghoti221 and borzwazie)

I completely agree that remaining unbiased is not possible. But it gets my goat when it's presented as unbiased: commentaries aren't.

Guerrillanews and mediachannel were mostly thrown in there for the interested reader to get a counterbalance. The Institute for Public Accuracy might have been a better addition to the list.

Guerrillanews is more of a commentary site than anything else. Of cause you can find speculative qoutes, if you look for them, but what I appreciate about the site, is they bring on people with non mainstream views. Sometimes they are dumb, but at least they don't read from a government press release. It's deliberately opinionated, but not presented as something else.

And for mediachannel, it links so many interesting articles on "both sides of the camp". Like interviews with CNN journalists and editors.

That being said, I don't look at Guerillanews for breaking news - for sure. I read news papers, magazines and check out a range of channels. I completely agree that one source won't give you the entire picture, and that all you can is look around and make up your own mind.

My biggest complaint about CNN is NOT lou dobbs. At all. Did you read the article I linked to? Here's another complaint. There's much more.

And for CNN being regarded as being liberal biased news - hmm... let me guess. You are American and you don't have a passport, right ;) ? And even if CNN is liberal biased news, who cares? That's really not the point.

I'm glad that you see the Fox bias, because Fox always claim that they are not.

> Please, just admit it that your biggest
> complaint about foxnews is that it shows a
> conservative voice. I would find it hard to
> believe that if a news

I'm more conservative than you imagine. I'm a capitalist, for globalization etc. If all the media was libral biased, I would have less of a problem with Fox, because it wouldn't be such a big problem in terms of ratings. I just don't see that as the case now, so if one is to seek "alternative" news sources, they will generally (in the US at least) have to look a bit to the left.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[NeuroManson]

Nope, you decided to insultingly demand proof, I demand you prove otherwise... I provided mine, and thusly you claimed a 'guilt by association' bent... Wrong... It isn't a matter of guilt by association, it's a matter of OWNERSHIP...

For example, how often do you see anti-Disney or anti-MPAA news on ABC News? None? Golly gee, wonder why? Because they're OWNED by Disney? Because *gasp* the once honorable news division of ABC is actualy having their reports respun by their corporate owners to satisfy their corporate owners? Golly gee willikers!

Fox News is owned by a corporation that's known for producing supermarket tabloids, and you thus expect that their business isn't bound under the same practices of sensationalism and oft times personal bias? Sorry kiddo, the real world doesn't work that way... Fox News learned to make their business by appealing to the lowest common denominator, which in American society is almost equal on either side of the political coin... If they cannot appeal to the liberals (CNN and MSNBC), they'll try to appeal to the conservatives, including by supporting every conceivable pie in the sky concept produced by the military industrial complex... Irregardless of the facts, with the very same level of sensationalism and inaccuracies their tabloids use...

So stop defending them, they aren't paying you enough, go back to reading up on Bat Boy or whatever... You've proven nothing other than your capacity to scream "You're wrong wrong wrong!" just as loudly as the evil liberals you're obviously so biased against...

Two words:

[Galvatron]

Light speed. Literally, a laser is a point and click weapon. Whereas a rifle bullet will travel at Mach 2 or so, giving someone a chance to duck, if they anticipate the shot, a laser can hit anything you can see.

Another excellent reason, of course, is lack of recoil. Both of these factors will increase accuracy by an unbelievable degree.

Here's another use

[ruiner13]

Can it be adapted to mount on the roof of my car to ward off bad and or slow drivers? It would shave hours of of my weekly traveling.

They already had a design like this

[Galvatron]

It was an automated system that aimed for the eyes, but got cancelled due to bad press.

Re:Aegis is considered to be a sophisticated syste

[Anonymous Coward]

The poster pointed out that the ship *did* make the correct decision. It was the human that failed in this system, not the electronics.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding, let's go kill some more babies with those damn liberals.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[DarkEdgeX]

Shrug, just as offensive as CNN is to conservatives-- you guys are just pissed they finally got a news channel of their own. (Having had the lock on all the major networks and other media outlets, this must be a real let-down-- now you can't force-feed your point of view on the rest of the world, with no way for dissenting viewers to refute it publically.)

Besides, like I said in my first post, FoxNews was one of the only networks running news (LIVE news) 24/7 advertising free after the attacks on 9/11. You could switch it on at 2 or 3 am (Pacific Time) in the days (and I think even weeks) following the attack and get live updates on what was going on.

Re:hard part; not so; air may be transparent

[isomeme]

actually, for the laser to be efficient, it MUST emit light which is hardly ever absorped in air. therefore, no superheating of air...

Air is indeed almost transparent at the wavelengths of interest -- notably visible light -- but it is not *perfectly* transparent. And even 0.1% absorption of a beam designed to vaporize a significant portion of a steel artillery shell in a fraction of a second is going to be auite suffient to superheat the air along the beam path.

Re:"FoxNews, The Most Biased Name in News" - FAIR.

[phasic]

I was born here, lived here all my life, and I have a passport, so there =P

Of course commentary isn't unbiased, that should be obvious to everyone. But as even fair.org says, the straight news reporting part of foxnews
IS generally regarded as fair. However, fair's analysis of bias is often times flawed and at the worst outright ridiculous. They don't even mention Zahn or Cavuto AT ALL (who are not at all conservatives) but represent a large share of the prime time programming. They take little qutoes here and there.Attempts by Fair to discredit the liberals on fox are pathetic. As if Mara Liasson saying that "Jesse Jackson gets away with a lot of things that other people don't" proves that she's not really a liberal, or perhaps just isn't as radical as many want her to be. As a strong conservative, I've had my mind changed many times while listening to fox's liberal commentators. You would think that as a student at MIT, my ideas would have solidifed already, but they haven't...such is the nature of keeping an open mind.

CNN IS liberal biased not necessariliy in its commentary, but in something far more subtle and deceptive...their story choice. They're hemorrhaging conservative viewers to foxnews because of it. The other three big networks are guilty of it as well (Be sure to read Bernard Goldberg's book Bias) How about all the ridiculous statistics on AIDS and rain forest depletion that were given to us years ago by big media (and now debunked). Where is this conservative bias in big media you speak of? I just don't see it.

You make it seem as if all media is conservative biased and you have to turn to guerilla and mediachannel JUST to find some bits of radical thinking. And I did read the article before I posted, so I know what your grievances are with CNN, although those two points are so minor that it is ridiculous to absolve them from a liberal description because of them. There are an incredible number of liberals who wear american colors and have no compunction calling them terrorists, yet they are still incredibly liberal.

Horowitz is radical, and gets very little airtime elsewhere. So there are more radical voices on foxnews, liberal ones too if you watch. How many times I've seen the leader of the black panthers saying bush triggered the collapse of the world when he came into office, i can't remember.

Just because you're for globalization and you're a capitalist does not at all make you out to be more conservative than I would imagine. Those are two things that don't mean too much in today's mainstream thought.

Bottom line, keep reading your guerilla news, but be sure to tune into fox once in a while to get some balance. An above all, keep an open mind.

Did not give enough information to the people.

[Futurepower(tm)]

Yes, but the detection system did not give enough information to the people. Presumably, this would be the same for laser weapons.

Perfection in one?

[arthurh3535]

The thing that people are mising is that the technology is in its infant stage.

They even *expect* it to not work perfectly. If you are building something totally brand new, you should expect a few bumps along the road.

I guess only cynical naysayers think that enough money should be spent to do it right first, no matter what.

The funny thing is, they probably learned just as much from the misses as the hits.

What do you mean, we missed?

[Bootros]

Ok, so you've got a huge laser, you point and you shoot. What happens if you miss? Sure the odds are slim of anything else being in the line of fire *past* the target, but I can just see a satelite suddenly having a solar array clipped off it via a stray shot.

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[Profe55or Booty]

well... i just thought that i would post this link.

http://www.fair.org/reports/fox.html

that's really all.

Is Anyone Else ..

[johnnie]

reminded of Bush XLI?

.. or Bill Murray, for that matter:
"Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars,
If only you could bar wars, let this one stay..."

Re:They already had a design like this

[markmoss]

It was an automated system that aimed for the eyes, but got cancelled due to bad press. Oh my. That would certainly upset those people that imagine war can be made more humane... But the reality is, to fight a war you either kill people or wound them. Wounding is more effective, because then their buddies have to stop fighting and take care of them. A laser in the eyes would be very, very effective in this way. I think, unlike most non-fatal gunfire wounds, laser blindness would be quite permanent. If we deployed this system, the next country to get crossways of us would wind up with their streets full of blind beggars afterwards -- a hell of a drag on a third world economy, and assurance that what happens when you p*ss off America would be remembered for a century, at least. Is that good or bad???

I wouldn't like to be flying close air support!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't like to be flying close air support!

Tank plinking a waste of effort....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a laser of such capability the last thing you'll use it for is tank-plinking.

It seems that more fruitful applications would be mounted on, say, large aircraft for application against other aircraft at distances of >100km (if you can melt through 12 inches of steel at 2km you can kill a thin skinned aircraft at much greater distances), large fragile installations (radar, C3I masts, SAM batteries), soft-skinned vehicles, lightly constructed buildings, and of course in an anti-missile (and anti-ballistic) role.

Argument: other, thin-skinned targets for such a laser are more abundant, often more valuable, and easier to both find and kill at greater distances. Conclusion: leave tank hunting until last.

alistair_morley@hot.nospam.mail.com

Re:"Fox News" != "News"

[errxn]

Okay...I'm gonna go over this ONE more time, and hopefully...I say, hopefully...you will get it.

You originally stated that Fox news does not research their stories as much as CNN. This was your statement, your argument, your claim. And, as any debate instructor worth his or her salt will tell you, when you put forth an argument, it is your burden to support that argument. The burden of proof lies with YOU, not the opposition.

However, you have provided exactly ZILCH in the way of corroborating evidence to support your claim, but instead have resorted to shrill and capricious ranting about who owns what, which has nothing whatsoever to do with this, and you somehow think that the responsibility to provide the facts which support or refute your spurious claims lies with everyone else.

BZZZZZT. Sorry. That answer is unacceptable. Now, calm down, stop your ranting about Disney, Bat Boy, and the military industrial complex, and try to come up with some rational, logical evidence that supports what you originally said. Think you can do that? Well, I guess we shall see.

I, for one, am not holding my breath in anticipation.

Re:More bias/social engineering from the hawks at

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh... some moderator was be offended by my anti-Fox comments, and marked me down as troll.

This is a perfect illustration of why moderation sucks, and should be fixed.

It seems to me that negative moderation should cost more than positive, which would cut back abuses.

And if that moderator gets undone (through metamoderation), they should be banned. Trolls can be moderators too!

Many kinds of rail guns

[leonbrooks]

A rail gun vaporizes a thin conductive coating on the back of a shell and electrostatic repulsion of the vaporized coating thrusts the shell forward.

Well, that's one kind of rail gun. Another kind is basically a coil gun in reverse, where the current across the rails makes a field which pushes against the frame. True, the projectile would get kind of hot, but you do get a lot more than one shot per gun. This is the kind that I have in mind, plus maybe a stage or two of coils for tweaking on the way out the end of the gun. Give it to the Australian military as a project and they'd build the first useable one for a few million (-: the Yanks would need a few (tens of) billions to do the same thing :-)

Coil guns have often been proposed for space launching devices (as in, tonnes per shot), but the big bummer there is also heat. Much of the heat in that huge flame spat out by rockets is necessary, unless you're dealing with Buck Rogers levels of efficiency in your equipment, no matter how the launching is done. Dissipating even a few percent of that much energy in a fixed, solid structure is not easy.

Re:hard part; not so; air may be transparent

[guybarr]

what do you mean by 0.1% absorption ? over what distance ? if 0.1% is absorbed over say, a 10 kilometer long beam will this be enough ?
in other words, what are the cross sections, lengths and radiation density involved ?