Slashdot Mirror
Sci-Fi Weapons to Join US Arsenal?
marct22 writes to tell us CNet is reporting that the next weapons coming out of the US arsenal could be stepping right off the pages of science fiction to be there. From the article: "By the end of this year, the Air Force plans to conduct a first, fully loaded test flight of its Airborne Laser, a jumbo jet packed with gear designed to shoot down enemy missiles half a world away, at the speed of light. The ABL also packs a megawatt-class punch--it's not exactly your garden-variety laser pointer."
Is quantum computing sci-fi ? Is the space elevator sci-fi ? Is nuclear fusion sci-fi ? Is a laser cannon sci-fi ? No.
Nothing to see here move along.
Assuming your world is not larger than 600 kilometers across, that is. Or do they mean that the plane's going to be in the Middle East? In that case, an M-16 is able to kill enemy soldiers half a world away, too.
I've read the article and nowhere does it mention how they implemented the necessary "Freakin Shark" component. Either they are holding it back for the sake of national security or they are preparing themselves for a million dollar blunder.
This is nothing new, this kind of thing has been underdevelopment since late in the Cold War. Unlike perceptions in the pentagon, times have changed. These missile systems will not prevent projectiles like rpg fire; we need defense platforms for the present, not the past. There's no point in building an anti-missile laser when Iran or whoever developes a nuke can completly skip the missile. Whose going to build their nuclear weapon onto a missle delivery system if they know we can shoot it down? Not being able to shoot them down was the reason we put nukes on missiles in the first place.
Cut the funding, dump the project and reassign the personel to more useful projects like laser based fusion power, or robotics, or composite smart armor development.
Demented But Determined.
Hitler lost the war by micromanaging his army into the ground. But he had blind faith that technology would save him, and he always talked about the "fantastic new weapons" (jet engines, etc.) he was expecting from his scientists to save the war. Blind faith in technology is no substitute for a well run army.
But we must not compare any contemporary politician to Hitler- that wouldn't be "responsible".
And how does something like that help us fight an enemy that puts up a roadside bomb?
Troops need body armor and armored trucks. Not, useless debt building toys that are made to fight a cold war enemy, long gone.
Want more info http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/25 30001.html
Am I the only one here who looks at Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq and thinks our money would be better spent on a few crates of AK-47's, body armor, and more benefits for the troops?
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
how long is "instantly"?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
God, I have mod points but I can't seem to find the -1 Stupid option.
Now if the missle rotates (nothing too hard about making it rotate) then your super laser-pointer has to be really powerfull to penetrate through it and make permanent damage. Another simple idea is to make a sliding shield protecting from laser beam.
When I think about it more it gets closer to 'paper, rock, scissors' rather then 100% accurate missle defense system.
Hitler may have lost the war, but he sure had a great plan!! Yeah, you know - what he planned on doing to "the people".
Yeah, providing them an inexpensive car. I mean - those Volkswagen Beetles were great!!
Doesn't this weapon smell of the 80's flick, Real Genius?
On proposition 1, using a laser to beam something into orbit: The value of the kinetic energy of something in low orbit (roughly 8.8KW-h/kg) is indeed cents, depending on where you live. However, it promptly becomes dollars when you consider the efficiency of the driving laser (Typically 1-3%, 25% for CO2) and the efficiency of converting laser joules to kinetic energy joules (?). If you get the power for $.10/KW-h, and assume the laser and propulsion to be 10 and 50% efficient, the cost to orbit becomes 8.8KW-h * 10 * 2 * $.10/KW-h = $17.6/Kg.
Vastly superior to $x00/KG, and good enough to put the cost of reaching orbit within reach of the affluent (75Kg adult + 500Kg of vehicle -> $10000), but until power is too cheap to meter, the cost will never be pennies/KG.
Hate to break it to you, but sci-fi weapons have been in our arsenal for years.
Namely, the geostationary communications satellites that are the backbone of our military communications system (and not to mention the later GPS system). If you told a commander in the field in the early 1970s (in, say, Vietnam) that he'd be able to have maps with his location pinpointed by meters, or that he'd be able to guide a cruise missile air strike just by pointing a pencil-sized cylinder at a target, or that he could have a live, secure telephone call with anybody in the world from anywhere with open sky, he'd cream his pants.
They're such a part of our everyday world now that many people forget (or never learn) that the notion of communications satellites were invented by Science Fiction author Arthur C Clarke.
Yesterday's science fiction is taken for granted by tomorrow.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
And half a world away is about 400 miles. Horizons, boost phase topping out at say 100,000 feet before rockets contain insufficient fuel to blow them up, and incidentals like atmospheric pollution, sort of limit this 'half a world away' drivel.
Americans have such a poor sense of Geography.
One of these ABL's will have to fly within spitting distance of NK to have a hope of shooting down something coming from that country. With the other 3 ABL's we will have lots of opportunities to burst party balloons all over Nevada and California.
The laser pulse is so short and intense that the missile rotation does not matter. Same for mirroring. For all practical purposes, the rising edge of the pulse will destroy the surface layer of any mirror very quickly, and then the rest of the photons will be nicely absorbed.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I'm not too sure about that. Any spacecraft can defend against a laser weapon by making the hull a very good reflector- the maximum power that could hit the craft without damage would just be limited by how perfect the reflectivity could be. In fact, if your spacecraft had a smart deformable concave mirror on the front of it, you could actually reflect the beam back to the attacker. That's assuming, of course, that the beam is either turned on long enough for the mirror to adjust to the right concavity or that the target spacecraft had some advance warning about the placement of the laser's output coupler.
But more fundamentally, laser weapons can't penetrate very deeply into its target. The reason is that the beam vaporises the surface of the target, creating a reflective plasma that effectively shields the target from further damage.
The laser deliver it's energy in a few milliseconds - it's simply impossible to spin the missile body fast enough to make a difference.
Reinforcing the casing means increasing the weight (and the cost) of the missile. This means the bad guys can build fewer of them, thus the number of weapons they have to toss is reduced - which is precisely the purpose of the ABL. (Not to mention that coatings that can stand up to megawatts of power and the (relatively) rough handling of a field missile are essentially non-existent.)
Should Americans have a power source device with equivalent energy density for such weapon, they wouldn't be fighting desperately for remnants of oil today. Considering latest Russian rockets have unpredictable trajectory, targeting would be quite an interesting math problem. Unpredictable as in chaotic, not as in "we don't know where they shoot". Certainly a 747 is a much better target for identical weapon of an opponent than speedy rocket is... Optical properties of atmosphere are horrible, ask some pilot; so called "beam preconditioning" sounds pseudoscience bullshit to me. Possible iodine laser wavelengths will not be dificult to find, what if the misile surface will be polished mirror for that waves? Or maybe the opposite: vaporized metallic carbide of outer coat can serve as thermal isolation or even coolant..
Anyway, high energy weapons projects for upcoming age of energy scarcity is a really challenging strategy. Water pistols in desert, anyone?
There you are, staring at me again.
You don't even need to 'destroy' a missile, in the conventional sense.
All it takes is cooking away enough material to fsck a missile's aerodynamics beyond it's ability to compensate.
Admittedly, large pieces of the nearest country would still be screwed if these missiles had nuclear warheads, but maybe they wouldn't end up in/over the major population center that was being aimed at.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Obviously we have no idea what aliens might put on the outsides of their UFO's. (I've heard about confederate flags being seen painted on them, but that's not relevant.)
With that said, the problem with trying to make a reflective surface that'll stop a laser of this power is that we simply don't know of anything that is 100% reflective at UV wavelengths and at those wavelengths absorbed photons have sufficient energy to instantly break molecular bonds. This isn't melting, where you have to heat atoms up enough that their kinetic energy enables them to break their bonds -- this is ablation, where the photons actually affect the bonding electrons and the bonds just go away. If you pulse the laser at a high repetition rate the debris from each ablation blast clear out pretty well, increasing your material removal efficiency at the cost of time.
It is possible that incoming UFO's or whatever might have external armor screens and return fire if those screens get hit, while they soak up (briefly) the laser power, analogous reactive armor on modern tanks. But just polishing them up so they're good and shiny, probably isn't going to work.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
That would be fine, we'll just smuggle our suitcase nukes into your country.
You are an asshole, but you make a good point. But how many of those do you have? Pissant people like you have maybe a couple of those, which could damage a city or two. The good new is that our response to that will not be to start worldwide nuclear war, which is the only response now to a sizeable nuclear missile attack. So maybe crazy fanatics cannot destroy the world any more if this technology pans out.
Currently hooked on AMP