Slashdot Mirror
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."
Kent, Stop playing with yourself.
"The ignorant fight to win, the wise win before they fight." -Sun Tzu
Hold Your Fire!
Too Late!
You Vaporized Kenny! You Bastard!
can you point it at a mildly victorian house from on board a jet fighter and fill the house with popcorn?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The evoloution of Thinkgeek's line of optical toys: 1. Red Lasar 2. Green Lasar 3. Lasar capable of pre-detonating munitions from miles away. (But no one will buy it because it is neither green nor capable of being seen in the air.)
"We're anxious to get out there and do something."
Always reassuring when someone in the US Army makes such a statement...
A laser arms race already is under way, chiefly in California.
...
Wow, Goverminator hasn't been elected for 2 weeks and Skynet is already flexing its muscles
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Leaving aside the technical issues of "can you do it," there are the political and moral issues of "should you do it." Precision guided, 100% accuracy is fine until you target the wrong point. The notion that we can have zero collateral damage assumes that we can distinguish between combatants vs. innocents and allies with high accuracy.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
And yet it can't be used defensively?
How about the following quotes?
"What we're building... Is a laser for cutting through mountians (roads, mines etc.)"
"What we're building... is a laser to defend our skies, country against missles"
"What we're building... is a laser to cut underground bunkers on the moon"
"What we're building... a giant popcorn popper"
This is kind of sad, when we just exploit technology with weapons in the forefront of our minds and not research or domestic uses! I mean I know they're from the DoD, but with war on their minds, goodness knows what else they're up to.
But would the detonating munitions know to avoid civilians as well?
Would a gravity-free weapon (even with light) defy General Relativity?
Will the enemy start using mirrors?
"... it could avoid civilians while predetonating munitions miles away..."
So it can avoid civilians who are miles away from the munitions? Even the few dumb bombs dropped on Iraq avoided most citizens in Kuwait...
I think (that you know) that it means munitions miles away from the LASER could be predetonated (pre- as in before the enemy sends them our way).
But the real question here is how whether they're implying that the civilians could be detonated too, separately without the munitions, now that we'll have got a big friggin' laser gun...
Absent human intent and use, technology stays on the shelf. Getting on a moral high horse about new weaponry will not stop people from deciding to war on each other, It will only ensure that they use more primitivw weapons.
War won't diappear if we're afraid to use new tools. People will throw rocks at each other if they have nothing else.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Tin-foil reflects ... we're not stupid.
Look a monkey!
you are constantly at risk of the laser beam bouncing back and obliterating you.
If you stand next to a solid surface, like a tank, and fire a conventional automatic weapon at it, you had better be wearing some serious bullet proof armor.
The main problem is that any reflecting surface can act as a mirror
Mirrors do a great job of reflecting low power light. Put a sufficiently high powered pulse laser on the scene, and the behavior of reflective surfaces becomes "non-linear" in the sense that it will simply burn through them.
and turned the h20 into h202 which is deadly hydrogen peroxide
Which is regularly used as a mouth wash, and easily noticeable because it tastes like crap and fizzes in your mouth.