Laser Cannons Coming to an F-16 Near You

dxprog writes "Reuters is reporting that the US Pentagon is designing a laser cannon that's small enough to fit onto a fighter jet yet powerful enough to knock out a missile. "The High Energy Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS), being designed by the Pentagon's central research and development agency, will weigh just 750 kg (1,650 lb) and measures the size of a large fridge." Now all we need to do is make fighter jets space worthy for that true Star Wars feel."

Comments

Re:Forbidden?

[PoitNarf]

I just did some quick searching and found only this on laser weaponry in the Geneva Convention:

"Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons prohibits the use of laser weapons specifically designed to cause permanent blindness to the naked eye (or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices). Countries that are party to the Convention and Protocols will not transfer such weapons to any country or other entity."

So I guess to conform to the Geneva Convention, the lasers will just require the same stickers that they put on childrens water guns: "Point Away From Face"

Re:Great...

[Tribbin]

Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have?

Number Two: Sea Bass.

Dr. Evil: [pause] Right.

Number Two: They're mutated sea bass.

Dr. Evil: Are they ill tempered?

Number Two: Absolutely.

Dr. Evil: Oh well, that's a start.

Re:Forbidden?

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

I don't think the Geneva convention includes energy weapons, it dates back to pre-world war 2 I believe.

You may be thinking about weapons in space, if I remember correctly the USA and Russia agreed not to militarise space, which essentially meant no orbitting satellites with either lasers on them or nuclear missiles. (it may have taken kinetic weapons into account too, i'm not sure on that)

Re:Forbidden?

[DoubleD]

No.

Article 1 of the Geneva Convention's Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons has laudable aims. It states, "It is prohibited to employ laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision."

But Article 3 opens the door to lasers that blind so long as that was not their aim. It states: "Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol".

source http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2585

Link to DARPA

[Stanistani]

HELLAD DARPA PAGE

Re:Link to DARPA

[Stanistani]

Google is your friend...

From a DARPA PDF:
"To help arm tactical platforms, the High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS)
program is developing a new high energy laser (HEL) tactical weapon system whose unique
cooling system might allow the system to be 10 times lighter, significantly smaller, and
approximately half the cost of current developmental HEL systems.
The HELLADS design goal of less than 5 kilograms per kilowatt would enable, for the first time,
high energy lasers that could be integrated into several air and ground tactical platforms,
including unmanned combat armed rotorcraft (UCAR), UCAV, Predator B, the F/A-18, and
future ground combat systems. HELLADS could protect fixed installations or population centers
from attack, patrol a border, or patrol a demilitarized zone with the capability to react to hostile
actions and engage tactical missiles, rockets, or artillery at the speed of light."

This is from 2003, so this has been steeping for a while... is it soup yet?

Re:Missile defense

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, defending against a laser isn't that simple.

You ever felt how hot a mirror gets in sunlight? Well, a lot of the light that hits it is converted to heat. Even a highly mirrored surface would get incredibly hot under a 150Kw laser beam. A missle is essentially a flying tube under a lot of stress, so a small non-uniform structural weakness would have the capability to tear it apart if it was travelling at high speed....

Re:HELLADS?

[Zocalo]

So what's the other L for?

"Liquid". HELLADS actually stands for "High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System", despite what Yahoo! would have you believe. Maybe Yahoo! are employing ex-Slashdot editors now; they do seem to copy everything else Google does... ;)

Re:Anti-satellite?

[imsabbel]

Very doubtful.
The f 16 will be above of >90% of the athmosphere at the ceiling hight, so absorbtion in the atmosphere isnt that big of a problem. But divergence is.
No matter what movies will make you believe, lasers arent perfectly parallel beams of light.
Not to go too much into the details, a laser needs to have a large diameter to have a low divergence (hence the used large telecopes for the moon reflection experiments: a 5m laser diameter here will be a few km on the moon, wile a few mm here will be 100s of km there ...)

I cant see how a jet-fighter mounted version would fullfill the requirements. The lens crossection has to be small enough not to fuck up the aerodynamics of the supersonic plane, and you cant just put a streamlines glasshood in front of hit because of the high pulse energies...

So you could get some light onto a satellite, but not enough to knock it out...
Otoh, I think it could be strong enough to permanently blind the CCDs of enemy spy-sats...

Re:Missile defense

[rgmoore]

& yes, defending against laser is that simple.

Do you actually have some evidence to back that claim up? I thought not. The people who come up with ideas like military lasers are actually smart enough to have thought of things like mirrored surfaces on enemy missiles. They wouldn't have put all that time, effort, and money into the project if it could be stopped by such a simple countermeasure.

Common mirrors are not 100% efficient; they absorb some fraction of the light rather than reflecting it. The actual reflecting layer is also quite thin. The small amount of absorbance is enough that a high energy laser will destroy an ordinary mirror very quickly, at which point the remaining energy is absorbed efficiently. The kind of extremely efficient mirrors needed for ultra-high power lasers are fantastically expensive and fragile enough that it's hopelessly impractical to try putting one on military gear.

Re:Missile defense

[j. andrew rogers]

No, you cannot defend a high-power laser by making a shiny missile. The whole point of using lasers of sufficient power is that even if you had a missile that was 90% reflective in infrared (which is at the upper end of what one could reasonably do for a missile), the power level is high enough that the last 10% of absorption is enough to ablate that lovely mirror finish and eat the missile. Note also, that most missiles guidance systems operate in the same part of the spectrum as the laser, which would make the pointy end have a very low reflectance by definition.

The reason for using very high-power lasers is the same they prefer to use hyper-kinetic missiles: at some energy density, no plausible molecular material has sufficient bond strength to withstand it, effectively obsoleting armor.

Re:Forbidden?

[aaronl]

The modern M16 fires a 5.56x45mm NATO round, while the previous generation (original AR15 platform) used a .223 caliber Remington round. The NATO round is a very standard round used in quite a few weapons. The newest weapon in wide use is actually the M4, which is also based on the AR15 platform.

The M2 is a retired weapon, and pretty much has been since the 60s. The AR15/M16 was adopted to replace it then. It wasn't really accepted until the 80s, however.

The 5.56mm NATO round is also used by the Steyr AUG, FN FNC, British L85, FAMAS F1, HK23/53, the Israeli SAW and TAR21, several Berettas, and the standard police rifle (Remington 7615). There are quite a few more than those, though, these are just popular.

The older 7.62mm NATO round was used in a lot of weapons, including the M14, M60, Kar-98k, and the Winchester model 70. It was very popular, as well.

The M16 isn't designed to maim, but they are easy to do this with. They are rather accurate, have a good range, and don't do full auto. One of the major design goals of the platform was penetration of combat helmets at range. It was designed to kill, like most other modern firearms. The general exception to that rule is for things like PDWs, where the goal is defense of wielder. They will still kill very effectively, but you're aiming a lot less.

Re:HELLADS?

[deglr6328]

FYI this is NOT a liquid laser. The term "liquid laser" is barely ever used in laser research and when it is, its used to referr to DYE lasers which are absolutely not what is being discussed here. It could concievably be used to describe a chemical laser where the chemicals are liquid before being reacted to lase but this would be incorrect because lasers are typically classified based on the phase of the medium which undergoes lasing. In the case of the chemical laser the lasing medium is a plasma formed in a reaction chamber by the mixed, previously liquid, chemicals. It's a gas laser. From what I can tell here though, neither of these things is what is being proposed for the HELLADS system. It looks like what they're trying to do is match the index of refraction of a cooling liquid to the index of refraction of the slabs of lasing material in a SOLID STATE laser such as Nd:glass. Thereby allowing the efficient removal of heat from the laser material while it is firing and while also preserving the quality of the beam. I would be willing to bet they are looking at using ytterbium-doped strontium fluoroapatite (Yb:S-FAP) slabs immersed in a very dense transparent flowing liquid (perhaps even a molten salt like NaNO3) which is optically pumped by specifically tuned solid state diode lasers.

Re:Forbidden?

[StikyPad]

It's not the Geneva convention, it's the Hague convention, and the relevant part is "In addition to the prohibitions provided by special Conventions, it is especially forbidden - ... To employ arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering;" http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/hague04 .htm#art23. Maybe you're thinking of the Geneva Protocol to the Hague Convention which outlaws biological and chemical warfare? The Geneva convention mostly outlines basic minimum treatment of enemy POWs.

These Aren't Laser Cannons

[jonathanbearak]

I went to U.S. Airforce Space Readiness Briefing while I was a Congressional intern this summer.

Lasers were covered and I had a brief chat with the Air Force representative after the briefing.

The USAF is sticking lasers in 747's and the army is testing ground-based systems.

The aircraft-based lasers cannot inflict any physical damage. They are powerful enough to scramble electronics. The goal is to target a missile shortly after it is launched so that its guidance systems fail and the missile lands in the enemy's territory, never reaching its target (us). Their goal is to use this as a powerful deterrent by making it very risky to launch missiles.

The ground-based systems can inflict physical damage, but are nowhere close to being airborne (they're much too massive). They are, as I was told in July, still "in the lab." (I later saw a full-page ad in "The Hill," a capitol hill newspaper, promoting Lockheed Martin's ground-based laser systems as though they were about ready. I'll trust the USAF officer's discussion more than the corporate advertisement.)

A key misunderstanding of lasers is in the kind of damage they inflict. Lasers will poke holes through objects but do not cause a target's destruction or explosion -- however, shooting through or over-heating a target's fuel tank will cause an explosion. And of course, to re-emphasize my major point, we don't have airborne laser cannons --- their goal is basically to inflict a kind of EMP-like damage to missiles. I asked about getting these things into UAV's and was told they'd love to do it, but don't expect anything for another 50 years.

Re:I hope not. Here is why.

[jericho4.0]

It was badly worded. I meant soldiers are needed to kill, not that they have a need to kill.

Re:Forbidden?

[tsotha]

Good post. One other thing you might consider too:

When "Star Wars" was heavily funded in the '80s, the Russians did a little bit of investigation into what it would take to thwart both kinetic vehicles and energy weapons. The actually deployed the Topol-M, which has a lower arc and "jinks" in-flight, makeing it almost impossible to hit with another missile. It takes so long for your interceptor to get to the intercept point that a really tiny course deflection on the part of the target means you'll miss by a hundred miles.

On the energy side they came up with ablatives (which could be refitted to existing missiles) with, literally, a twist.

Since you have to hold the laser on a specific spot for some length of time (governed by the power of the laser, atmospherics, etc), you could significantly enhance the survivability of the missile by having it slowly rotate during the launch phase. We're talkin' about a reasonably simple software change that makes it 10x harder to shoot down with a laser.

Not the F-22, or the F-16

[TamMan2000]

Actually the F-22 Raptor already has a laser system that's been designed for it and [I think it] fits in place of bombbay doors.

It is the F-35 or the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) that has a laser on the drawing boards.

The thing about a laser system like this is that it need a lot of electricity to run, and the vast majority of fighter aircraft do not produce the kind of juice needed to run one of these. The thing that makes the JSF capable of handling a system like this, is the way the VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) version of the aircraft was designed. Unlike previous VTOL fighters (AV-8 - Harrier and the Boeing consept for JSF) which use a series of nozels to redirect thrust the engine was already making to get vertical thrust, the Lockheed JSF (the one that was selected) has a secondary fan, driven by a shaft from the main engine and door that open above and below the fan.

Using the lift fan in the VTOL plane means that the engine in the CTOL (Conventional Take Off and Landing) and CV (Carrier Varient) has the capacity built in to drive a shaft, and the aircraft themselves have a lot of room right in front of the engine/behind the cockpit. This shaft can then drive a large generator to fire the laser.

I used to be an analyst at the company that builds the engines for the F-22 and the JSF. I worked on both programs.

The laser is ultraviolet, thus it would allow an F22 to loiter in an area and attack ground targetes (Geneva conventions state that we can't attack people with lasers) However, we can cut the truck they're driving in half and thus detonating the fuel tank...

Conventional fuels (gas/diesel) do not detonate unless they are vaporized, or atomised. They will burn pretty fast though.

Re:I hope not. Here is why.

[operagost]

A famous example is the Battle of Gettysburg, where thousands of soldiers on both sides loaded their weapons over and over to avoid having to fire them.

This argument is fallacious because it assumes the only possible cause for recovered rifles having multiple loads is intent by the bearer. The battlefield was noisy and frightening, so a perfectly valid premise held by many historians is that the soldiers failed to realize that their weapons did not fire. This happened on other battlefields- not just Gettysburg.