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Homing In On Laser Weapons
Bloodmoon1 writes "I just came across this article at GlobalSecurity.org that gives a very good summary of the current status of solid-state lasers as weapons. It gives you a good idea of where the JSF Laser system is at and just how much time, effort, and money has went into this project. Also has some basic, but very sufficent, explanations of some of the science behind the technology."
Wouldn't a couple of mirrors ruin the whole thing? I mean seriously. Cover a missile in chrome and the laser would just bounce off harmlessly, wouldn't it? Wasn't that one of the main stumbling blocks to SDI?
A Navy ship could use the laser, with its beam traveling at the speed of light, to fend off even the fastest missiles. And ground troops could use a Humvee-mounted version of the weapon to instantly knock out incoming enemy artillery and mortar shells.
I would like to know how such a weapon will acquire/track/target an incoming projectile. (That was not sarcasm; I really would like to know.) Mortar rounds generally travel in a high parabolic path - think of the St. Louis arch. Larger artillery shells - such as those fired from a battleship - follow a flatter trajectory. The targeting system would have to acquire a small incoming object, predict the path it will follow, and fire within a few seconds. That looks like a daunting task.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
As someone who might one day fly the JSF (I'm trying to become a Marine Aviator...I have one of my first interviews next week *crosses fingers*) I'm kind of torn on this whole idea of a laser. The geek in me says that's too kewl! It's like Star Wars or something!
But then there is that overly logical Marine in me that says sounds unreliably. Much rather have a tried and true missile. This is is going to be very interesting to see when it actually goes into service how well it performs and is used. I could see this project either changing the way the military develops and uses weapons, or eliminating the whole idea for at least 50 years.
Derek Greene
The October edition of Aerospace International journal touches on this problem.
Yes, Geneva Convention bans blinding weapons (what party poopers), but accepts that combatants may be blinded as a side-effect of the use of a normal weapon.
So, while you can blind someone with it (e.g. a pilot) at a much longer range than the range you could destroy missiles/planes/etc, once you are within that lethal range blindeness created by the weapon would be a side-effect, not the main effect.
Bit of a grey area.
What is not reported here, but has been mentioned in Aviation Week and Space Technology, is Israel seems to have already fielded a chem-based laser missle defense system, apparently deployed on the Syrian border (at least that's where it was last reported anyway).
Another thing not widely covered in the normal monkey media: Gulf War II will almost certainly premiere our new "directed energy" weapon systems which have quietly been brought out of the labs over the past year or so. From the (admittedly basic) descriptions given to the non-monkey press by those in the know, the systems work with microwaves to zap electronic gear. They're mounted on precision guided bodies (not bombs per-se, but probably shaped a lot like them) and are one-shot items.
The idea is superpowerful microwave radiation can fry anything with transistors in it, even stuff buried deep underground. These things deliver a burst of microwaves that fry things within a (classified) limited range. It's not clear if they can be directed or if it goes off in a sphere like a ghostly bomb.
The reason they aren't already mounting these things on F-16s and just pressing buttons is a) the range is really short right now and b) they aren't directional enough yet and would end up frying the electronics of the shooter, which would be annoying to the pilot.
AMCGLTD.COM. Where cats, science fictio
the article states:
With such lasers, a fighter jet could destroy ground targets with pinpoint accuracy, significantly reducing the chance of injuring civilians.
uhmmm... no!
The problem with lasers is, that once they hit something the beam will reflected beam/beam fragments will be able to blind people in a LARGE area (as in a radius of several miles) around the target...
Soldiers will be able to wear protective gear...
Civilians probably won't...
Civilians lose...
If anyone has ever worked with really powerful laser you'll will know how strict the safety regulations are... and you'll know how difficult it is to find all the reflections from an experimental setup.
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
From the article:
"A Navy ship could use the laser, with its beam traveling at the speed of light, to fend off even the fastest missiles. And ground troops could use a Humvee-mounted version of the weapon to instantly knock out incoming enemy artillery and mortar shells. "
This is, of course, an arms race. So what happens when they're not firing missles anymore, but lasers?
I'm not suggesting it's a bad idea. I'd just love to see what protection they'll propose when our opponents get up-to-speed. I also have to wonder if there is a low-tech way of defeating it (remember when we spent millions coming up with a pen that would write in zero-G and the Russians just used pencils?)...
My
Limekiller
First off, understand that we're reading quotes from John Pike. A little Googling will clearly reveal his politics to be somewhat at odds with the current administration. However, for Pike to admit that these solid-state lasers are moving
into the "engineering" phase (second phase of weapons development - research, engineering, and production) is quite revealing. For him to acknowledge publically any high-tech weaponry as making significant advances is, to me, quite shocking.
Also understand that the arms race, which has existed throughout human history, is exactly that: a contest to see who can come up with the most effective weaponry the quickest. In this era of asymmetric warfare, nukes are useless. We've got a rapidly growing asymmetrical threat against which our current best practices and tools are less than ideal. New weapons and tactics are needed to counter such a threat.
As to the open market availability of weapons for terrorists, sure, there's scuds (pun intended) available. As long as there are countries such as Russia and China producing cheap, reliable low-tech weapons, and other countries willing to act as brokers for these groups, there will be a channel. This, however, is a poor argument against transformation of our armed forces to respond to such threats, including development of new weapons that give our military another advantage. And, given the technical sophistication of the level of some of these new weapons systems being developed, it'll be years before opposing forces can produce clones in sufficient quantity to be worrisome. Case in point: look how long it's taken many countries to become nuclear capable. That technology is nearly 60 years old! Lasers have been around since 1954 (microwave, 1960 for an optical laser) and we still haven't been able to weaponize them to any significant degree. And much of laser theory and practice is in the open press, unlike many aspects of the nuclear weapons programs.
I am not a physicist, but I believe that even the infrared laser beams would be scattered by rain or fog droplets, making a laser practically useless under such situations. Since the power of lasers as weapons is dependent on all of the light waves traveling in phase and in the same direction, something as simple as a drop of water could scatter laser light in all different directions, disrupting the beam and rendering it tactically useless.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
if you hit a mirror with a powerful enough beam of laser light, the small fraction of light that's absorbed (no such thing as an ideal reflector) will rapidly ablate the mirror coat, and then you're screwed. [...] a 100KW IR laser will vaporize pretty much anything that's not *perfectly* reflective, i.e. anything we can build with current technology.
So you make your mirror subsystem disposable, and eject the spent mirrors like shells. Assuming you can get the desired result before or during the ablative process, you've got one shot, one mirror. We're used to such constraints with bullets and shell casings, and some disposable, portable ground-to-air missile systems, why not with mirrors?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Outside of space telescopes and cleanroom labs, have you ever seen a 99.92% reflective mirror _stay_ that way? A smudge of oil on the surface would vaporize instantly, heating the mirror up and deforming it slightly. This causes the mirror to not be quite so reflective, so it absorbs even more heat, etc, etc.
Fortunately for the US military, the only practical defense to a laser would be something that could instantly conduct the heat the laser generates around the rest of the vehicle; the parts not being fired at become a giant heatsink. I don't know if electrical superconductors are also heat superconductors, but either way, such a material is much further away on the horizon than high-power solid state lasers.
Dyolf Knip
you demonstrate disdain for an aspect of human nature. unfortunately, no matter how disgusting this aspect of human nature that is war, it does not make that danger go away. discussing war is not supporting war, it is merely recognizing that war can and might happen. are there assholes out there who enjoy war? certainly. but the vast majority of people recognize war as an unfortunate aspect of human nature, and prepare for it, even though they don't like it. why are you criticizing them? if you meet a real asshole who loves waging war for the sadistic love of anarchy, verbally bitch slap the sadistic grin off his face. in the meantime, learn a little more about human nature before you start heaping your disdain upon slashdot.
;-P
the do-nothing attitude about war that you demonstrate leads to disgraceful events in history like hitler's gambit for the sudetenland before world war ii. if you don't know what i am talking about, do some googling and learn what an avoidance of war really means: just creating the conditions for an even greater, deadlier war at a later time. you can't push war away and hope it will go away. if you push war away, it simply festers and the conditions for it grow worse until it finally does punch through and there is no avoiding it at all. you have to face war when you recognize it, deal with it, and move on. you can't avoid it. nobody likes this, but you can't hold it against them for recognizing reality for what it is. don't shoot the messenger just because you don't like the message.
if some person or country aggressively approaches you with war on their mind, you cannot save yourself by capitulating to their every demand. nor is a "let's hold hands and sing campfire songs" attitude going to change the attitude of some very evil people in this world. you have to defend yourself from them or you actually encourage them to be more aggressive if they get the idea you will not oppose them with force, if necessary. do i like this? no. but not liking it doesn't make this obvious truth go away. that's just reality. face it.
there is nothing wrong making jokes about war either. humans make jokes about all sorts of bad things, like priests abusing boys, that are just plain evil, but serve to psychologically relieve our nervousness. more basic psychological human nature for you to try and understand.
by the way, your obvious arrogance is perhaps a more dangerous aspect of human nature than any discussion of war on slashdot could ever be. more evil flows from human arrogance, that you seem to have gallons of, than perhaps any other human failing. there are wonderful, accurate, logical, straightforward arguments against war to be had out there, but your arrogance demonstrates none of that, and your mean-spirited words only serve to reduce the power of those who argue rationally against war.
your meanness is just mental masturbation, making you feel better about yourself at the expense of other people's respect for you. by talking about "the average cow grazing in Wal-mart" you reveal a hatred for the common person on the street. i have 1,000 pounds more faith in those "cows grazing at walmart" to make the right decisions about life and liberty than i do in an obviously mean-spirited, common-person hating, arrogant and smug person such as yourself. think about that before criticizing what you see as "warmongers."
look at your own evil before criticizing the perceived evil in others. arrogance such as yours has spawned more useless horrible wars than anything else has. you have blind self-love that leads you to treat others arrogantly. news flash: sunlight does not shine out of your butt. you are only human too. your arrogance puts you far closer to the human evil that spawns war than a thousand austin power jokes and bin laden ass-kicking tirades ever could.
that's my rant for the day.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Okay, question: why don't SWAT teams and the like have laser sniper rifles? Sure, they'd be bulky, and require external power supplies. Sure, you'd have to make sure they fire OUTSIDE the visual spectrum to prevent blindness. But, for a hostage standoff sitation, where you've got hours to get your people into place, wouldn't having a weapon that would be 100% accurate by virtue of traveling at the speed of light, unaffected by gravity or air currents, be really useful?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
We need to let this tech linger in the background for a good long while. Rumsfeld is wrong, other countries will steal this tech and duplicate it within a few short years (see Russia and A-/H-bombs). Then we will not be able to do airpower projection, and our ICBM nuclear threat may soon ring hollow because if you can mount it on a plane you can mount it on an AA vehicle and put more juice on the ground vehicle then the airplane.
Like Britain creating HMS Dreadnaught, this technology will be the seeds of our strategic decline.
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