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Anti-Missile Laser Weapon Successfully Tested
xPertCodert writes "A latest attempt to build a futuristic laser weapon appears to be a success.
Joint Israeli-US developed laser destroyed a large caliber rocket in a latest New Mexico test. The press release also contains links to some interesting video and photo material, related to THEL (Tactical High Energy Lasers) defense systems."
Most of the pictures are dated 2000. I suspect that in four years since those pictures, the project has made significant advances. However, those results and pictures are likely classified.
Oh, by the way: FIRE THE FEAKIN LASER!!!
This laser works in the infra red. Bicycle strips and most other materials that are reflective in the visible band will not be reflective against this laser. They will absorb heat nicely and go kaboom.
They will be touted as the perfect solution to a problem with heretofore only imperfect solutions (until, say, a passenger aircraft is accidentally shot down of course).
The biggest differences between this and previous missile defense systems are cost and multiple-use capability. You're not talking about using multi-million dollar missiles to shoot down incoming missiles, so you don't need to be so selective about when firing the thing off. And if you miss, you can try again ... and again.
As a defensive tool, these are, quite honestly, awesome. As an accident-waiting-to-happen in the hands of an overly-enthusiastic operator, they are, well, a little bit scary I guess.
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
Because it is wasteful and will lead to another arms race.. So a U.S.-Isreal team develops. Now. someone will develop energy absorbing/reflecting/deflecting/whatever missiles. Then another defense system, then another missile to defeat it. Wash Rine, and Repeat, and we have another cold war.
Instead of using the money to develop new defense systems, they could have used the money to tackle the underlying social problems that cause the "bad men" to be mad at us in the first place. This way, we solve the underlying problem that facilitated the need to create the defense system. Its much more effective to plug the hole in the bottom of the boat, instead of just continuously bailing the water out.
Both Soviet Russia and the United States had comparable amounts of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the other several times over by the late 1960's. What was preventing them from simply firing the missiles and ending the war forever was the fact that the other side could, and would retaliate. Even the Soviets were not willing to spend a significant amount of their population concentrated within urban areas for the chance of total victory.
When the Soviets announced development into an ABM (anti ballistic missile) system in the Stragetic Arms Limitatons Talks in 1969, it was not well recieved by the United States. The existance of such a system would mean that there would be no imperiative at hand for one side to annihilate the other and claim victory. The US, at this time, put research into such a technology as well, though notably less advanced than today's (it was called "setinel," and consisted of a pair of missiles designed to intercept), it was scrapped because it could not guarentee that major urban areas could be protected.
Such a situation still exists today. The number of nations that have nuclear weapons is higher than ever, not just the Soviet Union and a handful of other nations outside of the US. To think that the United States would never do such a thing like annihilate an entire population is to be naive. There were such plans during the Cold War to literally wipe Russia off the face of the planet. To other nations, this system poses a greater threat than nuclear proliferation, as it nullifies their political leverage in the world arena.
I have a question: From the video, it appears that the beam is invisible. The reasons for that are pretty obvious. I just wanted to ask, is it possible for a laser beam to get so hot that it causes the air inside of it to turn visibly vapourous? Just wondering if we'll ever see a beam like that so powerful it leaves con-trails like plains leave or something.
"Derp de derp."
I suggested bicycle strips because they have a fascinating property. They are made of zillions of little sphericle beads, with a refractive index of approximately 2.0. Such beads have the interesting property that light shining into them is reflected back directly at the source. For amusement, go get a laser pointer and point it at some bicycle strips, and you will notice that your hand holding the laser pointer is painted with laser light, regardless of the angle you hit the strip from.
So if I want to beat laser missle defenses, I go into the lab and make milspec beads with a refractive index of 2.0 in the right infrared range, and the lasers suddenly don't work so well.
Bonus: make the reflective layer 1 inch thick, and make it boil when heated, and you get ablative armor: it fogs the missle with a clound that blocks the laser. IIRC, idea due to Charles Sheffield (RIP).
Crispin
Terrorism is not the only threat out there. Not all countries are friendly with all other countries. China, for instance, may make a play for Taiwan at some point in the future.
North Korea may shoot another missile across Japan's bow.
I'd imagine both of those countries would like to have this type of defense.
IR and radar guided missiles were gimmicky at first, too. GPS was pie in the sky. The airplane istelf was considered to be of little military use at first.
OBTW, it's also for artillery size shells, not just ballistic missiles.
We're not talking about ICBMs here. This is aimed more at Katyusha batteries, a WWII truck-mounted launcher for 48 tube-launched unguided rockets. Those things had a range of about 5Km back in WWII. Their accuracy is poor, but they're cheap and can fire many rockets in the general direction of the target. Syria uses Katyusha batteries, and has been developing improved versions.
Patriot anti-missiles are too expensive to use against those things. The defenders would run out of Patriots long before the attackers ran out of Katyushas. So there's a real application for a laser weapon here. It won't stop all the incoming rockets, but cutting down a few thousand to a few hundred is a big win.
That's really swell for Isreal, but what about North Korea raining down fiery death from above with ballistic missiles that can hit Alaska? Also, I'd like to know how the laser would operate in more realistic conditions, like say, with multiple rockets... what's the firing rate? The way our money's being spent, we'll all be eating dog in a couple of years...
"To throw bombs from an airplane will do as much damage as throwing bags of flour. It will be my pleasure to stand on the bridge of any ship while it is attacked by airplanes." - Newton Baker, US minister of defense (1921)
"The other guys are 'hostile', but it's the US's fault. hmmmm."
When will people learn that being righteous is not always a good enough reason to do something. Pissing off someone with nukes and reasons to use them is a bad thing. Being right wont matter when you're dead.
"As to the MAD part, MAD is presently kind of irrelvant. US, Britain, France, & Russia have nukes and the long range, accurate delivery systems. And currently, we are all more or less friendly. and building down the nuke inventories."
MAD is irrelevant, eh? What about china? What about power shifts in unstable countries,like Russia. Some intelligence even says North Korea has ICBMs capable of hitting the west coast. even if they dont, you should never bet your security on the delusional hope that the other side will never make any progress in their weapons systems.
Oh and its a good thing we're building down those inventories, now we'll only be able to kill each other 2 or 3 times over, and not 6 or 7.
Any defensive system like this is only going to protect against a certain percentage of missles. It just makes the attacker throw more nukes at you or develop some type of counter-measure (i.e., reflective surfaces, dummy warheads, etc etc). The defensive side isn't about to sit idle when this happens, so it needs to sink resources into developing its own counter-counter measures. You now have an arms which provides you the same protection as before, but now with less resources in both countries economies. The peace types would rather see this money be used for less nefarious purposes. Things like education, health-care, save the spotted owl, etc etc.
Actually, the History Channel just ran a show that touched on missile defense systems. The concept is to target incoming missiles in their first two stages... during launch and in float before reentry. Of course, this was for ICBMs, but I imagine the idea is the same for lower trajectory objects. Exactly because of what you're talking about here. What this means for proximity of the laser system from the launch site, I don't know.
Problem with small arms fire is the warning time frame.
An inbound missile usually gives a few minutes (radar). With a sniper shot, the first indication is the bullet itself, since it's supersonic.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Did any of the missles have radio beacons or other tracking devices as in previous test? Until missle or laser defense systems can shoot down a missle without onboard beacons to help with aim the damn things seems prety useless to me.
The problem is beam attenuation in the atmosphere. The longer the distance, the less actual power is delivered on-target. There's also curvature of the earth, which makes the range, even from the ABL, an issue. ICBM's accelerate very quickly, so there's not much time to detect, aim, and destroy the target before it's out of effective range -- if it ever gets into effective range in the first place.
Systems like THEL are battlefield weapons, meant for relatively short range. They're meant to replace Patriot- and Arrow-type systems. ABL is a theater weapon, meant for much longer ranges and much bigger weapons, but still of dubious strategic use when dealing with a launch from, say, the interior of China or Russia. They are of much more use dealing with launches from states like North Korea or Iran.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Well, what it's most likely to knock down are conventional, biological, and chemical warheads, since only Israel is a known nuclear power at the moment. Iran is likely making a run for the bomb, ducking inspectors when it can. There's a worry that if push came to shove, a few IRBMs might get sent from Iran to Tel Aviv. This may be able to knock them down before they can detonate. It's much easier to clean up the mess from a few radioactive bits than from a detonation.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Actually I wonder when a version that is capable of destroying small arms fire will be out. When the technology reaches this level troops will be almost invulnerable to many forms of attack including snipers.
At this point, it would be much easier to individually target each member of the opposing army. It would be more effective to just pick off the officers. Better yet, just take out whichever bastards at the top who started the damn thing in the first place.
Actually, lasers are really an "old" technology now. There is very little room for minaturization. Lasers require a LOT of power to do the damage this current breed does, and they require one-use fuel canisters of exotic gasses for each shot. The energy required to make a laser an offensive weapon is unbelieveably high. You can't sweep one of these across a battlefield because the fuel charge will last only a few seconds as it lases. The power comes from a storage device like a capacitor, and there is a recharge period for re-use.
The arms escalation that would result will likely be better missles, smaller missles, smarter missles. Reflective coatings and decoys are a better investment. You will probably see more types of terrain-hugging missles with longer ranges and cheaper production costs. The only way to defeat an anti-ballistic system like this is to be able to send an overwhelming number of cheap, hard-to-hit cruise-type missles. A crude $5000 cruise missle is the best weapon. For a million dollars you can send 200 at your enemy en-masse. Try shooting down 200 targets that are only 3-400 feet off the ground and moving erratically. If all you need are 10 to get through, you have a very good chance of success.
You are correct that this will lead to an arms race, but I think you are wrong in the direction it will take. These types of defense systems will be passe' in 10 years because it is too easy to counter them with non-ballistic alternatives.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
It depends how you define "winning".
700 american soldiers have lost (their lives) in iraq, but america hasnt lost.. yet.
No side really wins in war - but the objective can fail. In iraq and other occupation situations the occupying army will always fail their objective of occupying, look at vietnam and israel. Israel is only still standing because of the regular injections from the US and look at the meagre resources of those who are against them.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
Supersonic != fast.
.50cal bullet, ~3000 ft/sec. Consider a very close range shot from 300ft. You have 100ms to respond to the threat correct?
Supersonic ~ 335m/s Light (Radar, etc.) ~ 300,000,000 m/s
Consider the muzzle velocity of a
100ms is a long time.
Normal RADAR has crappy resolution, this is a problem. 40GHz RADAR has ~7.5 mm wavelength, which is far too large for accuracy. The solution of course would be to move to a higher frequency detection method. Some of the research done in the 10^12Hz range might be promissing in another decade. Or something in the 10^14 to 10^15Hz range (IR, visible). Any of those would give the required accuracy to track a bullet sized object.
Processing time for tracking is negligable. Positioning and pointing of the beam shouldn't be to much of a problem either, not given ~100ms to do it (and if it is then one could just limit the angle of effect for a single system). The problem it seems would be outputting enough power to have a noticable effect on a non-volatile slug in that small of a timeframe.
Lots of problems sure, but not totally impossible to consider in the not so distant future.
Building a better backup.
Zettabyte Storage
To quote myself "The problem it seems would be outputting enough power to have a noticable effect on a non-volatile slug in that small of a timeframe. "
It was tacked on in the end there, easy to miss I suppose.
It's a point that a bullet is an inert kinetic kill weapon. In order for the system to be effective it would have to either vaporize the bullet, or vaporize enough of it to knock it significantly off course. I'd give you a better answer, but I don't feel like looking up the thermodynamic stats for lead. It's dense though, so it's probably going to be a pain in the ass.
Building a better backup.
Zettabyte Storage
Phalanx only works if you are in range of the target. In other words, they are great if you want to stop 4-5 missles and you know the target (like a ship). They don't work on large area targets. If you want to defend a building or ship, they work fine. If you want to protect a city (say Los Angeles) you would need to place one Phalanx every 3-4 miles along the coast. Further, the system can track a maximum of 64 targets for each turret, so numbers would win again.
The cheap, plentiful cruise missle is the most effective non-developed vehicle out there, it is only a matter or time till some smart government figures that out.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
No, it's not, it defends against short range rockets.
Even if a terrorist group gets ahold of a nuclear bomb, it would be easier and cheaper to sneak it into the US than to develope and build ICBMs.
In fact terrorist groups have these rockets, that's why previous tests were against katyusha rockets, used by the Hizbulla.
And even then, this system can only shoot down missiles as they are launched by flying over the enemy's territory. This means that the government has spent billions on a gimmicky star wars program that only works if we invade another country's airspace, a.k.a. an act of war.
IIRC, it's primarily a ground based system, to be used from the privacy of your own country. There is an airbourne version, which can be used after hostilities have begun. Or in peace-keeping missions, when an invasion isn't relevant.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
Yes, but if the bicycle strips are 90% reflective (which is the typical reflectivity of commercial retro-reflective material), only 10% of the energy is being absorbed, while a great deal more is being returned to the source.
While the returned beam will be slightly diffused because of non-zero feature sizes on the edges of the micromirrors, it will still be sufficiently coherent and focussed to dump significant energy back into the source.
The dwell time to make the missile go up in smoke will increase by a factor of 10, while the hardening at the source to minimize damage to the source optics from the reflected beam also has to be increased by a factor of 10.
It is a very simple assymetric countermeasure. For a few 10s of dollars of surface modifications on the missiles/decoys, you create a viable threat to $100 million few-of-a-kind laser systems.
Given Israels technological prowess, why does America subsidize Israel to the tune of several billion a year?