Posted by
michael
on from the also-useful-for-making-popcorn dept.
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."
Re:This raises some frightening questions
by
Anonymous+DWord
·
· Score: 5, Informative
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.
-- "If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Re:Not too hard.
by
Knobby
·
· Score: 5, Informative
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..
Slashdot Mirror
http://lasers.llnl.gov/lst/helstf.html
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.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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..