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More on JSF Laser System
An anonymous reader writes "Seems Lockheed Martin has won a contract to equip future versions of the Joint Strike Fighter with a 100-kW laser. Housed in a dome within the aircraft, the laser's turret would emerge for firing [sound familiar?], and the laser itself is spec'ed to achieve airborne and ground kills at a distance of more than six miles. The problem? According to this Aviation Week article, Lockheed Martin has to figure out how to dissipate 900 kilowatts of heat. Maybe the Finnish airforce could value-add to the OEM model." We mentioned this earlier.
Can I get mine with extra butter and popped from 6 miles away, please?
This project is utter foolishness. If we figure out how to operate a 1mW 6.2 mile laser on a fighter, that makes it portable enough to fit on a truck or tracked vehicle. With a greater percentage of a groud vehicle being able to be committed to power systems, a ground-based mobile laser will be ablt to outpower an airborne version, and likely be a LOT cheaper.
Outranged outgunned outnumbered airplanes are NOT what we want. We are trading decades or our airpower in for a few measly years of SAM and ground strike invulnerability. This direction is NOT smart for us.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Well, a watt is a joule/second.
.25 kilograms of water by 100 degrees. This is not particularily accurate but it gives you an idea of the power - water is not particularily easy to heat and if this laser could fire for even a few seconds on a fairly small surface area....ZAP!
A calorie is the amount of energy to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius and there are 4.19 Joules in a calorie. Therefore, 100 kilowatts = 100 000 W = 100 000 J/s ~ 25 000 calories/s which means we could raise 25 kg of water by 1 degree in 1 second. Now this would have to depend on the surface area of the target - it could be 2.5 kilograms of water by 10 degrees in a second or
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
... Or just boil some water and vent the steam. 900 Kw isn't much when it's not continuous, and boiling water takes a LOT of energy.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
At these levels of power, the reflective material would have to reflect virtually all light in order to be safe. And when I say "virtually all," I mean on the order of 99.999%. I believe a 12 watt laser can cut through sheet aluminum pretty handily, and aluminum is both somewhat reflective and highly heat-conductive. A kilowatt-scale laser should be able to cut through just about anything, shiny or otherwise.
Christianity is a religion of violence, historically spread through military conquest. The Catholic Church basically offers two choices for the "pagan:" conversion or death.
Jesus Christ can now take his place beside Charles Manson, another leader of a dangerous and bloody cult.
Jesus (and Mohammed) your grasp of religious history is awful. Islam's history of violence pales in comparison to the millions killed in the various heresies, pogroms and Inquisitions the Holy Roman Apolostic Cathlolic Church has either directed or tacitly supported since the Council of Nicaea. Men were burned alive at the stake for merely saying that Jesus may have been part human and part divine; entire cities were sacked and burned because the inhabitants dared to have a different definition of the Trinity than those in power. The rise of Islamic Fundamentalism dates from the late 1700s. The rise of Christian Fundamentalism can be dated from the end of the Roman Empire, when the academies of the ploytheistic religions were forced to shut down.
All religions have been turned to the uses of power and violence. Singling out Islam is part of the problem.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Islam is a religion of violence, historically spread through military conquest. The Koran basically offers two choices for the "infidel:" conversion or death.
Dead wrong.
Go find a copy of the Koran (hint, it's on-line several places) and find me a single passage that says unbelievers must be killed. Guess what: it ain't in there.
Quite the opposite. What you'll find is lots of statements about how Allah will punish the unbelievers, and quite a few that tell the believers to take care not to incite the unbelievers, but to live alongside them in peace, unless the unbelievers try to stop the Muslims from worshipping Allah.
And history bears this out as well. Historically, Islam is a far less violent religion than Christianity. For example, consider Moorish Spain. Although the conquest of Spain was violent (that being the accepted manner of expanding your territory), the Muslims at the time did *not* force the Christians and Jews to convert. In fact, from the point of view of the Jews, the Moorish occupation was a golden age, one of the few times that they were pretty much completely free of oppression. Not only were they not killed, or forced to convert, both Jews and Christians managed to gain high ranks within the government.
When the Christians finally managed to eject the Moors, *they* gave all non-believers three choices: convert, leave or die. And they often neglected to offer the second option. You may have heard of a little bash called the "Spanish Inquisition".
I'm not slamming Christianity; I'm Christian. I'm making the point that the teachings of Islam are *not* inherently violent. Everyone knows that Christ preached turning the other cheek, and yet supposedly Christian people have repeatedly perverted his doctrine. Islam teaches that violence against another man is only permitted when that man is trying to stop you from following Islam.
There are a some violent and despicable people in the world who happen to be Muslims and have chosen to use the rhetoric of "Jihad" (specifically, the lesser Jihad, which is the fight for freedom from religious oppression) to justify their hatred and their murders. The term doesn't fit the application, but that has never bothered propagandists.
You can't negotiate with people who want nothing more than to see you dead.
True, but keep in mind that the number of Muslims who feel that way about Israel is small relative to the Muslim population. Don't try to smear all Muslims with that same tar. Most of the Arab world has sympathy for their Palestinian brethren, but that's a far cry from wanting to see all Israelis (or all non-believers) dead.
As for the Israel/Palestine conflict, neither side is totally right, and neither side is totally wrong. The Palestinians have a legitimate beef about wanting their land back, but they should have figured out by now that they're not going to get all of it back and been content to accept some of the numerous offers to share. Their use of terror tactics is despicable in the extreme. On the Israeli side, their deep hatred ensures that there will never be any kind of peaceful settlement, and they're guilty of frequently applying excessive and indiscriminate force. Israel was the embattled underdog, trying to pull something good together after thousands of years of oppression but they've turned into a bully that causes many of their own problems by overreacting.
In short, it's a mess caused by hatred and selfishness on both sides, and although the debate is often wrapped in religious clothes, the core problems are racism and land, not doctrine.
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