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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."
I still prefer a good old missile! It feels more destructive to fire a rocket at your enemies instead of just flashing (a really *big*) light at 'em. :-)
keep quiet about the whole light and mirrors thing, I guess...
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?
Anyone ready to blow up a house from too much popcorn? :)
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "is hot on ... the notion of zapping people,"
Is it just me, or does this make someone else worried.
That man is kind of scary...
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
"The technology turns atomic particles into light with enough radiation to damage an object it encounters."
Umm... anyone know how that is supposed to happen?
But seriously, I'm sick and tired of science related articles being written by journalists with no clue about the science they're writing about. These articles should be checked for accuracy by the people the story is about.
Fancy a game of real-life Deflektor anyone?
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
The warning labels on the outsides of laser weapons:
CAUTION: DO NOT STARE DIRECTLY INTO LENS
-Evan
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.
The big disadvantage to large laser weapons is that they give away their precise position since laser beams travel in perfectly straight lines.
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Once their exact location is determined (in a matter of milliseconds) they can be targeted and destroyed.
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Cool, but expensive one-shot toys.
I am a Karma Library.
Does anyone know what wavelength these lasers are operating at? The article mentions that the lasers have a hard time piercing through clouds. It seems to me that an infrared laser would be more effective at piercing clouds than a visible one. Infrared solid-state laser technology definitely exists (the laser used in green laser pointers is in fact a 1064nm IR laser diode that is frequency doubled to 532nm).
"When can get my own light saber?"
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
I'll be able to walk into a store and ask for: "Phased plasma rifle in 40-watt range. "
Excellent... Oh wait. 40-watts isn't very much. Is that what the Terminator really asked for? 40 watts? Sheesh. I could just hook up a light bulb and start shining bright lights in people's eyes. Perhaps the idea is to convince them to stare into the bulb for hours on end (like several of my classes that I attended) and eventually go blind-ish...
I will be back...
I stick to walls...
Roughly, a laser works by changing one form of energy (provided by a "pump") into another (coherent light radiation). No "atomic particle" is turned into anything.
Instead of spending public money on researching new ways to blow each other up, I wonder if this technology could be put to better use, perhaps mounted on satellites as an asteroid defence system?
It's not entirely impossible that a large asteroid will head straight for us at some point... and somehow I don't think a re-enactment of Armageddon would work!
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.
At the pace Research is going, they're going to have their laser ready in a decade - just in time to match what was depicted in Akira (1988) with satellite SOL. One of my favourites movies btw. :)
Would be finding one that woulnd't be instantly vaporized when touched by a laser of that magnitude. Certainly paint isn't going to work as it would instantly oxidize and loose all reflective properties. Polished metals might help but they too would loose structural integrity. The mirror would have to be close to if not 100 percent reflecive of all the radiation being pointed at it and remain so for the duration of the attack. As far as using smoke cloud around missles as protection, they too need to see for guidance purposes, plus it would be almost impossibly to keep a leading smoke edge on something moving that quickly as the drag on the particles would loose the impulse of the rocket engine as soon as they were ejected, leaving the rocket exposed.
Lightning is 1,000,000,000 to 10,000,000,000 joules.
Basically they are trying to make a weapon that could blast the hell out of that tree in your front yard, but right now will have to settle for your cat.
To put this in prespective, the adverage person uses 64,800,000 joules a month, or 18 kilowatts... So for every time they fire this baby, they are blowing 50-100 bucks....
They essentially are what cause the blackouts in California.
Well, gee...I guess if you can power a laser pointer strong enough to blind you with a couple of AAA batteries, a 747 or Navy destroyer can supply enough power to run a laser strong enough to affect an incoming missile.
Hey... Then we could use the laser to heat up one side of the asteroid... and make it land on our enemies! GENIUS! :D
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
A 15 watt Argon Ion laser will punch holes in aluminum cans. It will also cause severe burns to peolple and go through clothes like mad.
Argh! Read the article. They're talking about mounting them on Spectre gunship and aircraft carriers, not someone's back.
I certainly hope not. Almost all of our smart bombs these days are laser guided. That provision wouldn't make sense anyway. Laser guided weapons tend to be much more accurate than their dumb counterparts (you can't radar or IR guide a bomb on cold ground building), so they tend to reduce civilian casualties by letting the military only blow up military targets. The system isn't perfect (especially when armies hide behind their civilians), but it's certainly a lot better than carpet bombing.
I read the internet for the articles.
This would be the first weapon mounted on aircraft/heavy machinery that the pilot/operator wouldn't have to worry about running out of ammo in combat! That's a pretty serious advantage, no matter what other shortcomings the weapon may have.
Assuming he has an infinite energy source on board too, of course. Otherwise firing the weapon will decrease range/endurance by increasing fuel consumption. Currently the opposite it true, because it reduces weight.
Okay, I'll bite. Where does E=mc^2 come into this? I've worked with lasers for a number of years, and I have yet to see any of my lasing medium converted directly to energy. Lasers operate by kicking atoms into an excited state (usually an excited electronic state) and then emitting light when excited atoms relax back to ground state.
For the record, small lasers don't require "gigawattage" to operate. I have a laser pointer that runs on one AA battery--I'll be giving a talk using it in a couple of hours. A laser designed for a weapons application would be larger. Still, I could assemble a carbon dioxide laser that could start fires from several hundred feet away and still be light enough to carry--and operate for a while on a moderately hefty battery back.
Granted, I couldn't destroy missiles with it, but the article discussses lasers that are mounted on aircraft or vehicles, or are part of fixed installations. You don't need a large power supply for even an extremely powerful laser if it only fires the very short pulses (microseconds or nanoseconds) that would be most useful for military purposes.
~Idarubicin
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
>What is great about to have yet another way to kill people?
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I never read anything that said solid state lasers would be used as anti-personnel weapons. I read that they would be used for defense, with the abilty to remove live missiles and mortars. Which, if you think about it, is a way to reduce the risk of loss of human life going into war.
Basically, these would be used as a defense mechanism in conventional war. Contrary to popular belief, military objectives during conventional war are not to inflict human casualties, but to eliminate the threat in the most efficient way possible. Loss of life does happen, however, and any effort to reduce the loss of life during war would be applauded, I would think.
-AAAWalrus
That's the same kind of logic that neutered our intelligence programs in the last 20 years. Suddenly, a couple planes get flown into our buildings and people like you start asking why the CIA didn't know about it. There was a time when our defense community had all the money it needed and we were on the cutting-edge of everything, with superior weaponry over everyone. We still do have superior weaponry, but with all of their budget cuts, we don't have the same volume of current research projects to stay on top. Go ahead, voice your "it's too expensive" point and neuter the US military, too.
History repeats itself... and those who don't learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them, too.
The weird thing is that the article mentions tanks as a possible platform. How can that ever be practical ? If I am not mistaken tanks rarely have a direct line of sight to their targets. If the laser is not airborne it's range would be very small compared to current weapons. Anyone with an actual understanding of how tanks operate in battle care to enlighten me ?
beauty is only a light switch away
A kilowatt is 3,600,000 joules, 10 kilowatts in respect is 36,000,000.
No. Joules are energy units; watts are power units. Power refers to the rate of change of energy. A kilowatt is a kilojoule per second. A kilowatt-hour (common unit of household electrical energy consumption) is 3.6 MJ. By comparison, a kilocalorie (the dietary Calorie) equals 4184 J.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I am not an American.
I am afraid however that the current US administration, with it's focus on using military force to solve issues, will polarize the political climate in the world even further than today and create a really nasty situation for _all_ a few years from now.
This will not be good for anybody, american or otherwise.
Only Al Quaida and their ilk will like it.
A polarization between the "christian world" and the "muslim world" is at the top of their wish list.
Mr Rumsfelt and his friends are hard at work making this a reality.
Huge mistake. And we might all end up paying for it.
They are creating legions of new enemies.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
If mirrors just don't work, then do you have to point the whole laser assembly? On a ship or tank, you might be able to direct a turret to the target, but that means targeting wouldn't be as fast as you would like. For an aircraft, you're probably going to have to turn to the target, which might make it kind of difficult to hit an incoming rocket.
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
Anti-personnel lasers are illegal -- not laser-guided weapons or weapons meant to be deployed against shells, missiles, aircraft or what-have-you.
I am just wondering who gets hurt when you miss. Most misses will end op somwhere in the universe, but in air to air combat lots of shots will end up vaporising somethig different as intended. Normal bullets fall down after some kilometers. A missle will blow up when it realises it missed target but light wil go on and on and on.
Ofcourse it will loose power by widening of the beam and diffraction at air molecules but I think it will be leath for a longer distance than anyhing else.
Hans Wessels
Stealth material generally works by absorbing the energy. The two defences won't be able to co-exist.
Wonder what the Geneva Convention will be modified to say about this.
Some missiles spin anyway. The Sidewinder missile was intentionally slightly unstable and spun so that it flew in a spiral. Its seeker had one degree of control, up-down relative to the center of the spiral. When the heat source it was looking at was near the center of the spiral, the spiral would narrow down towards the target. When the heat source was not near the center of the spiral, the spiral would broaden out in a cone until it reacquired the heat source. Fairly early in its development a filter was added so that it would ignore anything with the precise infrared signature of the sun.
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
Or did anyone else of Project CrossBow when they read this headline? "There's no defense like a good offense!"
Method of processing duck feet
So Saddam would have to wear a big stupid looking reflective hat?
Haha...
Imagine his public appearances, try being taken seriously as an ruthless dictator with that thing on his head.
In particular when they fire on him and his hat lights up like a disco ball and vaporize random bystanders.
Or... would he see that as a good thing?
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
overly logical Marine
must resist... joke... too... easy...
Please explain to me how a more high tech military could have prevented the INS and airports not catching the terrorists, and prevented them from slamming civilian planes into buildings. Go ahead... I bet if we only had SDI that would have never happened! Damn you tree huggers! Damn you all to hell!
"History repeats itself... and those who don't learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them, too."
Indeed it does. As long as we continue to install illegitimate leaders into countries and play them off against each other, we will always be the enemy of the people ruled by those leaders (or in fact, the leaders themselves...).
I've said it before and I'll say it again...an open society will always be prone to such attacks, by the very nature of being an open society. That is the price we pay for the freedoms we have 99.9999% of the time.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I believe you meant the BeDazzler
Qoute the poster:
if they developed such a weapon, would it be as potent during day as during night?
for instance, my laser pointer can shine around 200 metres at night, but only 5-10 metres during the day.
based on that observation, this might only have a limited effect during the day?
What you see is a signal to noise effect. Scatteded daylight reduces the apparent strength of the beam without reducing the actual strength. Try this experiment:
1: Get in the car an get on the highway
2: Roll down the windows
3: Set the radio volume to a comfortable level
4: Roll up the windows
The radio will sound apparently louder because the amount of noise is reduced. The actual amount of sound the radio puts out does not change. Science is cool.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
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.
Please explain to me how a more high tech military could have prevented the INS and airports not catching the terrorists, and prevented them from slamming civilian planes into buildings.
I never said the miltary could have prevented the September 11 hijackings. What I did say is that the intelligence community had its hands tied for years. They saw budgets cut and limitations on who it could associate with and use as informants. Would that have absolutely stopped the tragedies? No, but maybe it would have.
I was drawing a similarity with the military. If you continue to read other posts (emphasis on "read"), you may notice that there was some information about Isreal using laser technology for defense. My point is that other countries, including dictators who have full control over miltary spending, are catching up. That is not a position that you want to be in.
an open society will always be prone to such attacks, by the very nature of being an open society.
So, because we're free people, we should ignore defense? What stops an open society from protecting itself?
That is the price we pay for the freedoms we have 99.9999% of the time.
Yeah, but the people who get shafted from the other 0.0001% would probably disagree with you. Who are you to decide they're freedoms get sacrificed because it's an acceptable trade-off for your spending ideas.
A Navy ship could use the laser, with its beam traveling at the speed of light, to fend off even the fastest missiles.
Pity about those torpedoes though huh! Launched by enemy submarine/ship/plane/whatever.
A laser will be useless under water.
The Terminator asked for a Phased Plasma Rifle in the 40 Megawatt range.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Because space battles between ships that look like black spheres against the blackness of space aren't very interesting.
It's a very affordable FX budget though!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
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
I'm curious, when was the last time the US installed a puppet government?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
At the end of the article, the author casually mentions that a direct energy weapon could be mounted on the AC-130. I think this is a highly likely scenario.
The AC-130 mounts extremely heavy weapons (105mm Howitzers, Miniguns, etc). It seems like this is a more likely platform for early laser weapons.
That *fwoosh* was the sound of his point completely going over your head. Note that he referred to intelligence programs...
Prior to Sept. 11, the intelligence agencies were remarkably unpopular with numerous politicians, in particular the more left-leaning Democrats who had some influence due to eight years of administrative control under Pres. Clinton. Human intelligence, in particular, suffered -- hell, the attitude was that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was time to reap the "peace dividend" and focus on domestic issues rather than security. The Clinton administration also proved remarkably optimistic in foreign policy, for the most part giving only the occasional token Tomahawk to bin Laden, pretending that the Palestinians and Israelis actually had a meaningful peace process (bringing back Arafat from exile in Tunis, in the process), pretending that the IRA/Sinn Fein and the UK had peace (the IRA refuses to disarm, and Trimble threatened to withdraw; basically the whole shebang there is in danger), and so forth.
Unfortunately, "optimism" and "security" aren't compatible, unless you include the word "imbecile". The FAA, for instance, for quite some time optimistically let people bring in 3" knives past "security", and if you forgot to bring one, the airlines often had metal steak knives on board just in case. Hmmm. The same attitude (screw security, it's not going to happen) showed itself in the incredibly slow takeup of bomb-detection machines (because false positives from nitrogen-heavy products would cause delays and weaken the bottom line), unsecured cockpits, flight attendants instructed not to resist...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Ummm, ABL on a 747 with the entire body filled with laser and chemicals is expected to have a 100 shot capacity, far from unlimited. On the other hand it is a heck of a lot more then you would get from the same volume of conventional interceptors (though possibly less then a railgun, not sure on energy density)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Here.
And how are you going to know when to let off your smoke bomb? If the plane is undetected (Stealth bomber, perhaps) the laser hits instantly - boom. If you detect the incoming plane and let off your smoke bomb, it can wait the 2 minutes it'll take for the smoke to blow away.
Afghanistan. Karzai. This year.
The Geneva Convention outlaws the use of weapons specifically designed to blind humans (it's considered inhumane - can't maim people, only kill them).
Being able to blind enemy troops wasn't the purpose of the laser, thus it's perfectly legal... the blinding is just an added bonus.
Like you said - loopholes.
The simplest way to invite war is to not be prepared for it -- either in terms of actual power, or psychological capability.
/had/ the power. Militarily weak nations have, historically, been treated as such...
One of the reasons why the Great Powers were able to roundly abuse other nations is that they
And when nations, in the name of international law and peace, turn the other cheek to an aggressor when those same laws are abused, the results are generally obvious -- the aggression continues. Condemnations have never practically stopped a massacre, nor have battalions been routed by a tongue-lashing, while negotiations fail when there is genuinely nothing to discuss because there is nothing of perceived satisfactory mutual benefit regarding an issue.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
A bit of Karma whoring here, wish I'd gotten online sooner so that people would see this much earlier:
TheHigh Energy Laser Systems Test Facility (so-called HELSTF). Let's see if Tom's webserver can survive this...This is the laser test facility for the army and navy at White Sands Missile Range. They've got the world's most powerful laser (MIRACL: Mid Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser) there.
Being developed for them, by Livermore by the same guys that are doing the National Ignition Facility is a solid state laser. It works.
Also at HELSTF, and the first functional laser weapon, is Tactical High Energy Laser (aka THEL, and I hate that URL, btw...)
Search TRW for more stuff on lasers as well as Lockmart and Boeing, of course.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Of course, this would leave the ship totally blind, but hey...
Dyolf Knip
Lemme know when they get a working railgun ready for army troops and I'll be the first one to sign up. I'm an excellent shot, and I've got 6 years of Quake experience to prove it! Bet I can kick Rumsfeld's ass in Rail Arena!
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Offhand, I don't think there's any rational government in the world which would pass up military research that would reduce their own probable casualties, unless it's of such a nature that it violates their value system (for instance, using thermonuclear weapons to annihilate Afghanistan instead of risking troops would not have gone over well in the United States, I suspect, even though it would have reduced US casualties).
The age of the bonzai charge and bravado over brains is long gone.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
say "Front toward enemy" on them. The picture is vietnam-era; they might say "This side toward enemy" now.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
It's a bit tangential, but here's a bit on how the Northern Alliance and Taliban had difficulty conceiving of US military capabilities (unless certain GIs were pulling the leg of _Frontline_'s interviewer). Some may find it amusing or disturbing...
... I think Will has summed it up best. This whole situation
...
(from Frontline):
U.S. Special Forces ODA 595
ODA 595 fought with warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum in northern
Afghanistan.
read the interview [blank.gif]
[blank.gif]
You said earlier that Dostum thought you had a death ray. What can you
tell me about that?
Mark (Capt.):
Due to the altitude that the aircraft was flying with the laser-guided
munitions, when it dropped its ordnance the bomb was falling for a
minute and half to two minutes. If you timed it just right, as the
laser target designator is engaging and [targeting the] enemy
position, you let your Northern Alliance commander take a look through
the laser target designator. He sees it going, but he doesn't see the
bombs fly into the target. He hears that chirping noise from the laser
target designator and then the enemy position explodes. They believe
that we have the death ray, and this was a myth that we were willing
to perpetuate. Every one of us on our rifles carried a smaller laser.
We let the Northern Alliance guys look through our night vision
goggles.
is like the Flintstones meet the Jetsons. And those guys could not
fathom that we have some sort of aiming device that would allow us to
hit a target at night on the first round.
Will (Sgt.):
I think something that's key in all this is that both Northern
Alliance and enemy communications were, for the most part, CB radios.
They would be arguing with each other in the heat of battle. The
Taliban would be saying, "nanny, nanny, boo, boo" and the Northern
Alliance would be saying, "hey, we're coming to get you." They would
also tell the Taliban about this death ray. At Kunduz, we were
negotiating back and forth to try to get these guys to surrender. They
were saying, "We'll surrender, we'll march into your camp, but we want
to keep our guns." Dostum finally said, "Put your guns down, take your
jackets off, march in here or we're turning the Americans onto you
with the death ray." Instantly you could see the guys bend over. They
put their guns down, they took their cloaks off and they started
marching in, in single file right up into the middle of our perimeter,
because they knew that it was over if that death ray was coming out.
Mark Capt.:
This was also perpetuated by the presence of the AC 130 Spectra
gunship. They had a female fire support officer that was on the radio.
Dostum heard her voice and he brought Mohammed Fazal, who's the former
Taliban chief of staff. He's trying to delay this surrender in Kunduz
while his forces are attempting to recapture Mazar-e-Sharif. Dostum
brings Fazal near the radio so that he can hear this female voice.
Fazal hears her voice as it's being explained to him, through the
translators, that we have the angel of death overhead, from the AC 130
gunship. Dostum explains to him that we have the angel of death
overhead and that we possess the death ray. If they don't surrender
now all of their troops will burn in hell. Fazal jumped on the radio
and his men were surrendering within minutes.
I wonder how well-informed the foot soldiers of the likely US enemies are, and whether an invisible missile/building-destroying laser would have a serious morale impact...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
From the article:
Lasers do have one big drawback. The beam is not very effective in inclement weather and requires greater levels of energy to pierce thick clouds.
Yay for temperate rainforests!
It's not a matter of the US being militarily weak and
therefore vulnerable. If the US was some 4th world
neighbor to an aggressor then maybe that argument
would hold. We have more to offer with our tech abilities
than to develop ways of effective killing. If we took our
tech prowess and applied it to other endeavors, say
helping feed the hungry, providing them with a means
for clean water, an education, just helped them improve
their lives instead of raping what resources they have
and then turning people into dust, maybe then the incentive
for aggression would be minimized or eliminated.
But no. There's money to be made. Fsck them, we deserve
to rule the world. I've got a Book right here that says
God thinks it's our destiny. Face it, the US is a deranged,
sick country and we deserve to get our asses kicked
into the stone age.
Well, heck, if that counts, I'm all for puppet governments!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
take 10,000J/.1 seconds and you would also have 100KWatts as well, which do you think will do more damage and bust through the mirrors?? his 500mJ, 500ns so called 1Megawatt laser or the 10KJ 100 millisecond one?
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
Efficiency of mirrors aside, keep in mind the purpose of war is to kill people. Sure, having a nice shiny surface for laser defense can work (in principal) but it also makes you really, really, really visable. This would make you a great target. So, if we can mount a laser and make all the bad-guys dress in shiny suits, GREAT. The the camo guys with guns can just clean up. Any solution can't be that one sided.
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
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
do against human carried warheads?
Or the next terrorists with suitcase nukes or truck bombs?
I mean we already have dozens of ways to stop trucks and commercial air planes.
The ABL is a great defense against WMD _missels_, but we have better defenses against _states_ that might launch missels: massive retaliation. From US vs Irag epsiode 1 to India v. Pakistan, evidense is MAD works.
Meanwhile, the ABL will not work well at all against human carried warheads, the most common forms of attack we are likely to suffer, the only real defense against these is to make the lives of the cannon fodder more pleasent than the glory of dying for the cause...
1) Where do you get this "several miles" figure? Show me some math that supports that assertation.
2) Bombs do a great job not only of blinding people, but deafening them, maiming them and, oh yes, KILLING them. They are much less targeted than a laser.
3) Civilans always loose out in a war.
The point of this is more precise weapons, so we can destroy only the target and not cause collertal damage. Smart bombs are good, much better than just carpet bombing, but a bomb still destorys a large area, and flings shrapnel over a larger one.
I fail to see why people get so alarmist about lasers, they will incur much less colleratal damage than bombs, which is the whole reason we are interested in them. We already have more than enough weapons that can destroy large areas of stuff, nuclear weapons being the ultimate in that category. We have been working on, and continue to work on, weapons that are more precise, that can destory one specific target and not touch anything around it.
perhaps not. If an array of powerful enough lasers used for missile defence was refracted into a larger number of beams that just circled and changed refraction angle until the coverage area approaches that of a series of overlapping cones, you could conceivably take out all the ordinance at once.
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
What the hell does "basic, but very sufficient" mean? Is that like "minimal, but extremely adequate"? Or more like "average, but radically normal"?
/. guys. Not that anyone else cares, I'm sure.
Just thought I'd point out this lapse in editing, on both the part of the submitter and the
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
turns atomic particles into light with enough radiation to damage an object it encounters
Umm... anyone know how that is supposed to happen?
You use a hammer and a chisel to split a beer atom in order to get bubbles in the beer. This process is pronounced "Emk".
First of all, as far as laser defense systems; Consider the possibilities of a cooling laser or similar. Second, lots of water, but I've commented on that elsewhere. Third, cold plasma seems to be easier to generate than we thought, ALA star trek shield tech. Maybe that's the real answer. The neat trick is magnetic bottling to hold it in place...
Second, on the subject of laser anti missile systems, this has been speculated about for a long-ass time. Battletech had AMS systems on 'mechs for a while which were like baby phalanx systems, and then later the LAMS, the laser version. And of course, think back to star control, the earther ship had a laser-based antimissile system, which was really handy against those guys who could launch fighters at you. It's been a while :(
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would expect that he was talking about something that shoots hot plasma at you, not a laser. But how much plasma is 40 watts worth? And do you have to buy it in little canisters like they're always using in ST Voyager?
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
That's the intent, yes. However, one friend of mine was in a unit which happened to posess a laser-like system capable of causing only temporary blindness, and they were forced to detune it (and use it merely for illuminating targets) for legal reasons. Hence, I'm inclined to believe that the actual law is in effect a bit more extensive than its intent would allow for.
Emphatically, yes. Actually, for nearly all pulsed lasers, there's almost no other way to get to a high power--and pulsed lasers are by far the 'big guns' (pardon the expression) of the laser world. Using capacitors allows one to deliver a very large amount of energy in a very short time, which works just great for a weapon, as long as you aim the thing accurately.
It's also possible to shorten already short laser pulses using nonlinear optics, but that's beyond the scope of this post. ;)
~Idarubicin
There are some issues which just cannot be negotiated, and which have absolutely nothing to do with material conditions or welfare. There is no middle ground, for instance, between those who advocate a secular constitutional republic and those who prefer government by strict interpretation of implementation of Sharia law and Wahhabiist principles, because these two outlooks are completely incompatible... and I would suggest that the bin Laden family wealth provides an obvious counterexample to any hypothesized moderating influence of prosperity. Numerous of the Sept. 11 hijackers received educations at respectable institutions in the West, and none were of the poor, downtrodden, oppressed variety that al-Jazeera likes to play over and over. Non-rational ideologies (in contrast to, say, pragmatism) can make for inevitable conflict, because they are often incompatible.
Such irrational leaders even become leaders of states. Mullah Omar appeared to have been firmly convinced that Allah would bail him out, for instance, and drive out the infidel. The government of North Korea seems to still believe in Stalinism. Many of the Middle Eastern states are knowingly playing with fire by funding schools of thought more radical than their governments...
War and conflict are inevitable, given a sufficiently large and contentious population. The relevant question is not how to bring about world peace -- you cannot -- but how you deal with the wars that will arise. Then, it becomes very useful to have the best military technology and training, so you can deal with it on your on terms and not via, say, wasteful WWI-style charges.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Marines say, "Mine is not to reason why ... Mine is but to do or die." It seems to be implicit with the Marines that I know that whatever Uncle Sam provides for them is just fine, no questions asked.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"These are the same fuck-weasel types who question if it was legal to have the military assist in the search for the sniper. Don't know, maybe we should let him pop a cap in someone else while we debate."
Yes, let's throw away our laws and traditions whenever it's convenient. I questioned why the ACLU (of which I'm a member) would have a problem with the military stepping in to help with that investigation. Know what I did? I kept an open mind and read their position statement on the issue. After realizing that it is, in fact, illegal for the military to perform law enforcement and that there's a VERY good reason for this, I had to agree with them that the military had no place getting involved. Listen, we fight/invade/bomb countries who use their military for civilian law enforcement. Iran does it, the Taliban did it, the Israelies do it - the United States of America does NOT do this. There was no question about whether it was legal for the military to assist; it's flatly illegal. They were questioning the people who said, "oh, it's ok to do it just the once" because that's how every dictatorship/totalitarian regime/hellhole society gets going. Little by little you erode the rights of the citizenship and gain more and more control until no one can possibly challenge you. You know, we could have a crime-free society if we forced about 1/3 of all citizens to join the military and had inspections of every man, woman, and child along with all places public and private, and then simply killed anyone who did anything wrong. We'd eliminate drug abuse quite easily by just searching everyone and everything all the time, mandating daily drug testing for all citizens, and shooting anyone who disobeys also. Then we can put up cameras in every room of every building, as well as public places too. We'd eliminate crime within a year! The ends do NOT always justify the means. If you believe otherwise, how's this grab you: we could raise the average IQ in this country quite easily. Sounds great, right? How, you ask? By simply testing everyone's IQ and shooting everyone who tests below a certain level. Now, I don't agree with everything environmentalists say, not by a long shot, but I also think that just because something sounds great ( "hey, we can catch the sniper faster if we use the military!" ), doesn't mean we should jump right into it.
Think my examples are ridiculous? Tell that to the several million people who were murdered at the orders of a man who slowly rose to power in a country called Germany in the 30's and 40's. He started out small, "make the jews wear stars!", grew a little bolder, "make the jews live in ghettos!", and finally ended up killing millions. He didn't go from point A to point C in a day; he didn't do it in a year; he slowly made small changes over a period of more than 15 years which took a fairly normal (albeit poor) European society and transformed it into one of the most brutal and nightmarish places in the history of the world.
Please may God grant we never see that here in the States, or anywhere else ever again. We need to recognize immediately when someone's trying to take us from point A to point B, so we never get to B or (God forbid) C.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."