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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."
If you emit X Joules of energy in over one second, you have X Watts. If you emit X Joules over one microsecond, you have X MegaWatts. The difficulty is not in getting the MegaWatts up, but keeping the laser trained on the same spot for long enough to penetrate the skin of a remote missile and cause it to malfunction catastrophically.
True, this is more like "they finally got that thing working"? The ABL dates back to the 1980s. These things are starting to look useful, though, now that everybody is throwing low-rent rockets around battlefields. This provides a way to thin them out, without using an expensive Patriot to take out a cheap rocket. The smaller model in the C-130 is likely to be more useful than the big one in the 747.
Seriously, where's the giant bowl of popcorn?
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
Someone I knew once worked at GE, building phased array radar for the navy. She told me a couple of very funny stories. A guy was inspecting a prototype for a new array model in a closed room, and accidentally fired it off. As you might expect, the radio waves bounced off the wall 5 feet away, came straight back, and blew out the system. Needless to say, there were some very pissed engineers.
Then, they would go out to the boonies in New Jersey to test it. The Navy testing grounds is this large, flat, empty area in central Jersey. The thing was, birds (pelicans or gulls, I think) would swoop down right above the radar while it was being tested at full power. Needless to say, they made a rather disturbing sizzling sound as they dropped.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I don't want to put the blame on anyone but when few years ago US was 'freeing' Jugoslavia flying off from bases based over here (Bulgaria), it was happening that from time to time they accidentally were dropping their radioactive bombs over houses in our capital city (I'm not kidding).
I just hope this new weapon doesn't make it too easy to destroy wrong targets when your aim is kinda off, given the power and distancees we're talking about.
Not that I blame anyone. But I don't want a hole through my house (or me).
Well, I'm all for megawatt class lasers - as this means the technology is about 1/1000th of the way towards using lasers for something useful: Beamed Laser Launching of hardware into space.
Liek Myrabo of http://www.lightcrafttechnologies.com/ has been developing beamed power launch technology for some years now. In my correspondence with him, he has estimated that a 1-ton payload can be launched into low earth orbit using a 1-Gigawatt class pulsed laser cannon.
This ground-based launcher is the ultimate tool, and if you build a ring of them around your country, you can be pretty well assured of having utter domination of not just the sky above you, but the skies above everywhere. The first to deploy the network wins the game!
There is almost no end of uses for this array of gigawatt laser cannons:
1) Beamed Laser launcher, with total cost to orbit of just cents per kilo.
2) Inbound missile melter, extraordinaire.
3) Extreme Bug-eyed alien tamer. Unfriendly invaders might think twice before tangling with a species capable of focusing better than 100 Gigawatts of energy at inbound bogies.
4) Surgical Strike weapon par excellence. Reflected back to earth via large space-based mirrors allows you to wave the thing in a decreasing spiral which will turn your neighbours house to molten slag, but barely singe your fence.
5) Galaxies' brightest Search and Rescue spotlight: defocused in orbit, and reflected to earth to illuminate areas currently under search and rescue operations.
6) Illuminate work sites on the moon during the long luna night. Defocused to make a nice night light back on earth.
7) Interplanetary messaging system: embed knowledge into the beam, and send it to likely looking planets. Long term payoff - unknown.
8) Asteroid deflection device: light pressure alone is enough to deflect an inbound near earth object. Just 2cm/s velocity change is enough to deflect most inbounds.
9) Interstallar probe launcher: lightsail driven robot craft accelerated to a decent %age of light speed in fairly short order.
I'm sure there are other uses too - but these would seem to be the obvious ones.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Actually, one could argue that technology could have, atleast temporarily, forstalled the inevitable loss of the war for Hitler. Two great examples, the Tiger Tank & the Messerschmitt Me 262 Jet. Both were better than anything else the Allies had at the time in their respective weapon classes, but both were then micromanaged by Hitler such that they lost their purpose. The tiger went from being one of the fastest tanks in the war to being the most heavily armored tank in the war with a giant gun, so much so that its ability to manuever in the Russian geography was terrible. They essentially turned into semi-mobile artillary placements. The Messerschmitt suffered the same fate; it was faster and more manueverable than anything else the Allies had but then Hitler said make it a bomber, eliminating its manueverability & range in favor of dropping more powerful munitions. In both cases, Hitler decided to micromanage these projects, ignored his own scientists and subsequently created weapons that were ineffective at what they were originally designed to do in the first place.
As far as your comment on comparing politicians to Hitler, personally, I think this really debases just about any debate since a) most people really don't fully grasp what Hitler did when he was in power, so any metaphor they make is incomplete and quite likely bears no resemblence to what happened under Hitler, and b) theres tons of more moderate and applicable examples than Hitler to be used as reference that do not carry a fuckload of emotional baggage like Hitler & the Nazis do. Its merely used since even the slowest kid in the class knows that Nazis = Bad, and as such, panders to the lowest common denominator. If you think your audience is stupid, sure use the Nazi's, since everyone knows they're bad, but otherwise, show your audience some respect and get a bit of nuanced thinking in there.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Yeah, well the implications are much more impressive. The acquisition, tracking and targeting system will be most impressive if it works well enough to fully utilize the lasers potential. But what may be most intriguing is how this could be used on stationary targets... say... Saddam's bunkers, (pastense) or perhaps... North Korean and Iranian nuclear potentials. And don't be so naive to think that the chicoms don't want to be on level ground with us strategically...they've been doing some major muscle flexing in the pacific rim as of late... the end of the USSR does not mean the end of potential threats to our way of life (translation, loss of ability for geeks to hang out at /.)
Yep. I noticed this in the last month on a government website that maps NOTAMs.
It is quite common for there at the national scale map, to see a purple dot. This purple dot indicates that there is scheduled laser activity in the area. Frequently a laser light show. The NOTAMs advise altitude and range for which precaution is advised.
Then suddenly broad sections (that can only be assumed to be flightlines) stretching from Texas, down the Gulf of Mexico (just off the Mexican coast) to the Yucatan penensula and over to Florida. These NOTAMS frequently advised precaution of several thousand feet "below the aircraft" and "above the aircraft" and for a range that makes the "light show" type NOTAM seem laughable.
But when a terrorist blows up some people, the finger is always pointed back at the evil western powers who obviously drove them to it.
"Treat people with respect and they will treat you with respect as well". Ask Neville "I have in my hand a piece of paper" Chamberlain about this. Sometimes, people are not reasonable, and you have to kick them in the ass.
Personally, I thought that the Iraq war would be a mistake, and sadly, I feel proven right. That said, what do you think the people blowing up US troops want? In your worldview, once the troops leave, there will be peace and the people doing this will stand down and get involved in a democratic, political proces. Because after all, they are victims of US aggression, and not aiming for a power-grab.