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Warfare at the Speed of Light
unassimilatible writes "From the They Said It Couldn't Be Done Dept., the Oakland Tribune reports that the Lawrence Livermore Labratory is ensuring that the Pentagon, inside of a decade, could be armed with a beam weapon that is near-instantaneous, gravity-free and truly surgical, focusing to such hair-splitting accuracy that it could avoid civilians while predetonating munitions miles away - perhaps someday even being mounted on Humvees."
Oakland Tribune
Warfare at the speed of light
By Ian Hoffman
STAFF WRITER
Sunday, October 19, 2003 - DOWN THIS tiled corridor, light does muscular, noisy work. Lasers dig dirt and weld metal. They pound aircraft parts into shape.
In Bob Yamamoto's lab, light devours.
He straps on emerald green goggles. A technician stabs a fire button and calls out the computer countdown. "Three
Then
In those two seconds, 400 blasts of light poured into slabs of clear, manmade garnet. Swollen in energy, the crystal's atoms then unleashed torrents of infrared light to ricochet 1,000 times between two mirrors and multiply, finally escaping as 400 pulses of pure, square beam.
Kilowatt for kilogram, this is
the world's most powerful solid-state laser. Its invisible beam drilled Yamamoto's inch-thick steel plate in two seconds. Add larger crystals and it will eat steel a mile or more away.
"What we're building," Yamamoto explains, "is a laser weapon."
After sinking 40 years and billions of dollars into beam weapons, defense scientists are on the cusp of what could be a military revolution -- warfare at the speed of light.
"We've made a quantum leap here," said Randy Buff, solid-state laser program manager for the U.S. Army's Space and Missile Defense Command. "We're anxious to get out there and do something."
No longer are laser guns the stuff of Hollywood and Strategic Defense Initiative fantasy. Instead of laser-guiding bullets and "smart" bombs, the Pentagon inside of a decade could be armed with a beam weapon that is near-instantaneous, gravity-free and truly surgical, focusing to such hair-splitting accuracy that it could avoid civilians while predetonating munitions miles away.
A laser arms race already is under way, chiefly in California. The prize is billions of dollars. Three families of high-energy beams -- powered by combusting chemicals, electron accelerators and crystals, such as Yamamoto's -- are vying for the Pentagon's eye.
Defense contractors are sniping at each other's designs, and corporate alliances are shifting. But no one seems to doubt that battle lasers -- perhaps mounted on Humvees, jet fighters and unmanned aircraft -- could knock down previously untouchable targets such as artillery shells, mortars, surface-to-air missiles and even cruise missiles at ranges of up to dozens of miles in good weather. In clear air above the clouds, a high-powered laser could lance out 500 miles to destroy rising ballistic missiles.
"If we had them today, they'd be at the former Saddam Hussein International Airport, making sure no one gets off a shoulder-launched missile at an aircraft," said Mike Campbell, a laser expert at General Atomics in San Diego.
By coaxing a huge power boost out of tiny laser diodes like those in CD players, scoreboards and supermarket scanners, scientists are squeezing unprecedented power out of lasers made of exotic crystals -- distant cousins of the world's first laser, which Theodore Maiman fashioned from a ruby cylinder in 1960.
The latest breed of solid-state lasers now are poised to break the dominance of giant, chemical gas-powered beams with compact, mobile weapons that can run off a Humvee's diesel engine or a jet fighter's turbine.
Experts liken this evolution to the shift from 1950s vacuum tubes to the solid-state transistors now driving everything electronic.
"We think the whole thing's going to go solid state," said Lloyd Hackel, chief of laser science technology at Livermore Lab. "Gas lasers are sort of the vacuum tubes of lasers. They work, but in terms of density, intensity and reliability, it's going to go solid state."
No coherent mili
gravity-free
Just as gravity is not free of the limitation that nothing may travel faster than the speed of light, nor is light free of the effects of gravity. The path light travels is affected by gravity; indeed, light can be completely trapped by a black hole.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
"No coherent plan" to use lasers in warfare?
...
Wrong, the DOD already uses laser rangefinders, laser-guided bombs, ring-laser gyros in submarines
Most likely they mean use of lasers as weapons, and it would be nice if it stayed that way. The inventor of the laser was recently quoted as saying that in spite of seeming like a death ray, he was unaware of any instance in which a laser had directly killed anyone, even by accident.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
This invention might lower the tragedies of war if we have the intell to discriminate accurately. It might also increase collateral damage/friendly fire if the device inspires overconfidence in those who press the trigger.
The military is heavily funding research into what they call "total battlefield awareness" which can be thought of as identifing every object in the battlespace. I think the idea behind this article is that if that research goes well, and the laser research goes well then we might finally be able to drastically reduce civilian casualities.
A large part of the problem is that most of America's adversaries purposefully mix their military forces in with civilians to prevent us from firing upon them. The pinpoint accuracy that laser weapons could give us might be enough to prevent our enemimes from using their own population as human shields.
GMD
watch this
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the weapon that the Battlecruisers use in StarCraft (humans) called a "Yamamoto Cannon"?
Oh, wait...it's a "Yamato Cannon". Fine, so I'm missing two letters.
Zodiac Survey
true, a physicist wouldnt say that. But, for all intensive perposes the beam is straight (atmospheric distortion and dispersion will affect the path of the beam thousands of times more than the curtature caused by gravity) so it is an effective nomenclature for people who are planning a battlefield or going to replace their projectiles
I wouldn't say it makes no sense; after all, a literal quantum leap is a discrete change of state, and thus contrasts with a continuous incremental change (drift). Schrdinger's Cat makes use of the idea (which, apparently, its author thought ridiculous) of a discrete change in quantum state that has a macroscopic upshot.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Nobody will ever read this because I'm late to the party, but... When I was in the Army, my battalion was deployed to secure Tuzla airfield as the first wave of the NATO force implementing the Bosnia peace accords. Part of that package was a couple of Q-36 "Firefinder" radars, which were supposed to detect incoming artillery rounds, provide early warning, and provide counterbattery targeting data to our artillery battery. Given that nobody felt the need to lob any artillery shells at us, it was amazing how many warnings we received - presumably from birds and other non-threatening objects (I was a rifle platoon leader, so I don't know the full scoop). Had we had such a laser on site, I imagine we'd have had a lot of roast birds around the perimeter. Further, the two radars we had, aside from servig as a massive radiation hazard to those of us wandering around, could only cover about 40% of the perimeter. All this to say that the above post has a point - we'll need far better detection and targeting equipment before the laser is useful for defense against incoming artillery. And we'll still need robust and redundant targeting procedures before the weapon can be employed in an offensive mode.
Would a gravity-free weapon (even with light) defy General Relativity?
Gravity is the curving of space-time and light travels through space-time - curved or not.
If space-time is curved, then light travels a curved path.
The entire near-instantaneous, gravity-free line is fluff. You can't send a beam faster than light and as long as the beam has momentum (which light does) then it will feel the effects of gravity..
Will the enemy start using mirrors?
It depends on the frequency. Regular mirrors work for visible light. Doing optics at other frequencies can be very tricky.
For instance, your see through microwave door is opaque to the microwaves.
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
As the general theory of relativty predicted (confirmed by numerous observations), even light is not free from the effects of the curvature of spacetime.
So this beam weapon can't be "gravity-free"!
Levels of rotational energy are quantum levels.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Power falls off as a function of both distance (scattering effects because you can't focus light beyond collimation) and the reflectivity of the surface. In terms of the cutting ability, you're probably more used to a profiler that has a cutting distance of around 25mm from the surface.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.