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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.
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
> 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'"
Hitler lost the war because he was out produced, not because of his faith in technology. The Russians and the Americans could just produce one hell of allot more "stuff" than the Germans. Granted this stuff was often inferior to the German's stuff (the Sherman's cannon couldn't even penetrate the front or side armor of a German Tiger) which resulted in far higher loss rates but even then the Germans didn't have the resources or the production capacity to keep replenishing their forces.
:)
So basically you're wrong
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
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!"
> 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?
We've already spent the money on an immensely effective ABM system; it's called MAD. It's the solid belief that if you nuke anything that we value, we're going to make the rubble bounce from one end of your "now a historical question on Jeopardy!" ex-country to the other. It's why we fought only proxy wars after 1945, and didn't, despite the urges to the contrary, use tactical nukes in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, or any other number of flash-points. This is actually the best incentive certain nominally middle-eastern states have to keep a lid on their stockpiles. It's probable that even if they don't nuke one of our cities, if it happens they're going to get blamed and made an example of. Basically, we need the old Kissinger/Nixon team at the helm. One of them negotiates with the other power, and says that the President is crazy, and is going to bomb them, then the president acts crazy (and in the case of Nixon and the North Vietnamese), does bomb them, but just enough to get them back to the negotiating table. Same deal here; rail against the imperialist foreign hedonistic infidel running dogs all you want, but don't get too antsy, or bad things happen. None of the ABM systems we've tested so far has been nearly as successful as good old psychology and enlightened self-interest. We'd be better off spending the money on a couple of underground tests capable of rattling seismometers on the other side of the world and more money for scanning cargo containers as they enter port than on jumbo-jet mounted lasers, missile batteries that have to be told where the missile is coming from, or the rest of the Reagan-era Sci-Fi retreads we are now.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
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
All of this research was done a long time ago. The laser delivers its power in such a burst that no amount of mirroring or spinning will make a difference. As to the atmospheric attenuation, that's what the laser's adaptive optics are for. It's kind of like a telescope in reverse. In any case, this sort of thing was tried for short-range defense in the 70's, and even a small laser was capable of shooting down Sidewinders (mounted on a KC-135.) We're talking about serious firepower here...this thing was tested at a low-altitude range of 50km, and worked fine...up in the high atmosphere where they hope to catch boost-phase weapons, it should be much easier. It's not like the things can evade or maneuver, after all, they're called ballistic missiles for a reason.
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http://www.nae.edu/nae/bridgecom.nsf/weblinks/MKE
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.
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.
--
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Hitler lost because the West outproduced him. He also lost because he didn't adapt new technology - in 1944 he was still fighting largely with 1938 era equipment, while the West was fielding 1944 era equipment. (For various political and economic reasons the Nazi hierarchy a) wouldn't disturb existing production for new production and b) couldn't agree on what to produce in the first place.)
Hitler's much vaunted belief in 'wonderweapons' is an artifact of the last phases of the war, when the situation was starting to crumble.
Fuck no.
Jigga, please!
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
The article does not explain how reinforcing the casing or rotating the missile so it takes longer to heat effect the performance of the laser.
I recall a General being asked this question in a news conference a while back. He said something to the effect that spinning the missile would make the missile immune to the laser to roughly the same degree that a spinning ballerina is immune to a machine gun.
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.