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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."
[...] designed to shoot down enemy missiles half a world away, at the speed of light
That's a pretty impressive feat. Does it shoot the laser straight through the Earth's core? Or have they managed to get the jumbo to fly at the speed of light?
"it's not exactly your garden-variety laser pointer."
Wait, Laser pointers grow in gardens?? THAT, is a plant I would grow.
just like that other one....
Purple, because ice cream has no bones.
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.
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.
shooting a laser at the speed of light!?!?!?1 Wow, that's AMAZING! i never thought that lasers could go at the speed of light!!!one1
So... this isn't something I should use as a cat toy?
As with all "Class 200000" laser products, care should be taken to avoid looking directly into the laser. Do not point the Airborne Laser into other people's eyes or stare into the beam.
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.
We all know the real reason America is winning the war in Iraq.
3 00.swf
http://tinyurl.com/r2t8q
But on a more serious note, check out this video footage of new age technology
http://media2.foxnews.com/040606/040606_fr_tobin_
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".
Seriously, where's the giant bowl of popcorn?
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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
...and all they'd need is a Flux capacitor!
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
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.
Lazlo, call me for the coordinates of Professor Hathaway's new house.
Just what indeed IS a garden variety laser pointer?
I mean, if you just wanted to point out flowers, you'd normally use your finger.
> I think the bigger question is this: Can they mount those frickin' laserbeams on sharks?
Does slashdot have a policy on censorship?
Yeah - any time anyone says "frickin'", it automatically converts it to "frickin'"
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!"
What increases the protection of the missile most effectively? I realise this is probably all top secret, 'mums the word old chap' etc.
> Is quantum computing sci-fi?
At this moment in time, PRACTICAL quantum computing is, yes.
> Is the space elevator sci-fi?
Again, at this moment in time, yes. Tests of a few thousand feet are a hell of a long way from geosyncronous orbit.
> Is nuclear fusion sci-fi?
No, it's a big bright ball in the sky. Now, if you're talking about humans initiating and controlling that reaction to extract more energy than they put into the reaction, then yes, it is in fact science fiction right now in 2006.
> Is a laser cannon sci-fi ? No.
Depends on your definition of cannon. If you mean something that can be effectively used as an offensive weapon against a hostile force, then this may be the first non-scifi example of such. If you mean a laser pointer, or something to cut out grills for your computer's fan in the shape of a nekkid chick, then no.
Wait, Laser pointers grow in gardens?? THAT, is a plant I would grow.
Do not look directly at garden with remaining eye.
It's not gigawatts, it's jigawatts!
Jigga, watt?
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 /.)
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.
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.
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/
So what happens if a bird or sky-diver gets in the way? At worst, will it maybe delay the laser's ability to blow up the missle for only a second or so? Then I still feel safe ... as long as I'm not sky-diving.
Fuck no.
These weapons may have been useful and valuable in the cold war era to cancel an airborne nuclear threat from our of our communist rivals. In this day and age, when nuclear weapons and other explosives are less likely to be airborne and more likely to arrive in a shipping container on one of our ports, doesn't it seem like we're going even further down the path of excessive militarization?? The military-industrial complex accounts for 30% of government spending, and it's because we keep launching projects like these airborne missile defense lasers that the upward trend continues. I agree that it's important to have technology in defense , but pouring all these resources into military technology that doesn't make a whole lot of strategic sense when we could be putting money into, say, education and health care, and actual national security concerns - doesn't it make you stop for a second and think?
On the other hand, at least the airborne defense lasers fulfill the actual premise of a "defense budget" - it is meant to defend us, and not to invade or destroy other countries, though I could see its purpose being perverted there as well.
Jigga, please!
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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.
We are already bouncing ground based targeting lasers off of satelites.
Hitting a mirror on the moon with a fixed ground based laser was done in the 60s. Hitting it when you are on a plane with a velocity changing almost randomly in 3 dimensions isn't easy
Alls you'd need is a spinning mirror and a tracking system and you could vaporize a human target from space!!
Popcorn anyone?
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.