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67-Kilowatt Laser Unveiled
s31523 writes "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has announced they have working in the lab a Solid State Heat Capacity Laser that averages 67 kW. It is being developed for the military. The chief scientist Dr. Yamamoto is quoted: 'I know of no other solid state laser that has achieved 67 kW of average output power.' Although many lasers have peaked at higher capacities, getting the average sustained power to remain high is the tricky part. The article says that hitting the 100-kW level, at which point it would become interesting as a battlefield weapon, could be less than a year away."
Cue the frickin' lasers jokes in 3...2...1...
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
But my laser goes all the way up to 11 ...
tag it ohgodsomeonewilltagthissharks instead and show some originality
Yawn...somebody wake me when they can make it 500 pounds, 2 spaces, $8000, and it can cut through an engine block in 1/10th of a second.
-Uncle Albert
...will be the "Yamamoto Cannon".
(damn, why couldn't he have been Dr. Yamato)
Let me guess -- the Pentagon now has everything it needs to proceed with the Death Star?
I want five megawatts by mid-May.
Picture in TFA shows a trailer which you would presumably tow through the streets of Baghdad zapping potential IED's but the opposition in that country have shown that they have the ability to adapt to changed conditions. So the bombs they plant will be in places you can't tow a huge trailer, or outside a place where blowing up the IED will only make you get the blame for killing civilians.
Too much overhead, not enough payload.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Okay, I'll bite...
Near the end of the article: 'mobile laser concept'.
That thing needs a whaleshark to mount it on!
--
Still prefer the double-barreled shotgun, or the Bio-Force Gun (BFG) myself...
The article does not mention that any reflection off whatever the laser is aiming at is many kW as well. A small polished piece of steel would reflect 80% in some random direction, and the beam will go until it reaches something. Only a few milli Watts would be sufficient to damage the eyes of civilian spectators, so a reflection could easily permanently blind everyone in a football stadium of 50000 people.
"Fix it"
You know, I think you should try it. I hear you can get a scientific award for experiments like that, though I hear it's named after someone who is controversial in US schools.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
67 kW? Thats nice. Another 933 kW and we can mount it on my Cobra Mark III.
Do I make a Real Genius joke, or a StarCraft joke?
geek. lawyer.
... the Iraqi insurgents come up with the 100kW mirror!
What kind of non-military applications exist for a 100kW laser... a Houseful-of-Popcorn-O-Matic?
Can't say I'm surprised really. The funny thing is that no other nation sees the need to spend anything like the US military budget. I suppose the argument goes that there are people around the world who hate freedom, and since the US is the 'most free' nation on Earth, well, they're prime targets. Problem is that the US isn't the 'most free' nation on Earth - not by a long shot. Scratch that theory. The alternate argument goes that there are a lot of people around the world who hate US foreign police. This argument seems far more sensible. So for US citizens, the correct path would be to change foreign policy, right? Problem is, US citizens don't live in a democracy, so can't affect the foreign policy of their ruling class. Think I'm wrong? Think again. They just voted out the Republicans in an absolute landslide which is largely recognised as being a rejection of Republican foreign policy, but you watch just how much that policy changes, both now AND when they get rid of Emperor Dubya.
For those who see these laser protecting them from the terrorists' attacks on their homes, I think this is being a bit naive. This laser is to protect military equipment on the battlefield, and the ruling class at home. Just look at how the military didn't lift a finger to stop 9/11, even though they had precise warnings from multiple credible sources. The only thing the US government did was to protect Bin Laden's family after 9/11, flying them back home to safety.
Soon, America will wield the power to project an annoying red dot into any room in North Korea or Iran, disturbing and agitating ANY and ALL cats, and, if the resident is so foolish as to investigate... his very eyes may be irritated, and possibly damaged, after prolonged exposure!
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
Do not stare into laser with remaining co-worker.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Fool. You forgot to shoop da woop first.
The RIAA is terrified that it will be used to burn DVDs at a range of 500 meters. Drive-by piracy is here: hide your children, lock your doors, hire your lawyers!
You need to put the reflective surface on the intercept side of the substrate, glass or otherwise. That way, it is the first thing the laser hits. And of course, you'd better make sure that the efficiency is high enough that the laser doesn't manage to ablate the coating. Maybe coatings aren't that good an idea in the first place. Maybe thick, mirror-polished armor that can direct heat away from the surface really quickly is more what you want. Of course, a little dirt on there, you have a localized heat event, and all of a sudden things aren't as reflective as they should be, and zonk, you have a hole right through the armor.
100 KW for a battlefield laser, eh? Personally, I'm thinking being in front of one of these is a very, very bad idea.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If such weapons make their way onto the battlefield, you're going to end up with a lot of blinded soldiers. Any beam powerful enough to be useful will be capable of blinding everyone near the target with the reflected light. In fact, if you put some kind of corner cube reflective coating on the target, there might be enough light sent back to the source to blind the people firing the beam.
Industrial uses of high-powered lasers include laser cutting and welding. I don't have any experience with either one, but I imagine they could benefit from power increases (cut thicker parts faster) and solid state (hopefully means cheaper and lower maintenance).
Laser-thermal rockets are also not that far away from reality; what they lack is a fair bit of development effort, currently hindered by the cost of high power continuous output lasers. The basic way they work is a high power laser on the ground aimed at a heat exchanger on the rocket that heats hydrogen (the best working gas) to very high temperatures (relatively... 2-3000 kelvin is enough to be interesting with hydrogen) and exhaust it, developing several times the specific impulse of conventional chemical rockets. The advantages are lowered cost if you have a high flight rate -- you can use the expensive bits for many many launches per day, realistically limited only by how fast you can get new boosters into position. And yes, the math suggests you can do single stage to orbit (depends on the details of your heat exchanger performance, obviously). And, they're absurdly power-hungry -- one newton of thrust requires ~ 5kW of laser power; even a demonstration rocket would likely need hundreds of kilowatts or more of power.
If your mirror is 99% reflective (which would be very, very good -- and it won't stay that way in a dusty dirty battlefield), you'd still be absorbing 1kW of power. Which might be very easy or very hard to dissipate, depending on the beam diameter and how well the targeting system can keep it on the same piece of armor. And, as soon as your armor starts to heat up more than a little, the reflectivity will drop and it will fail.
Everyone always thinks mirrors are an easy answer to laser weapons, but it's not really that simple; sure they're worth considering, but they're not obviously a winning strategy.
A better armor might actually be an ablative -- eg a phenolic or graphite plate that absorbs all the heat at the very surface, and vaporizes into a cloud of gas that then takes the majority of the heating while the armor continues ablating from conducted heat and laser heating that gets through -- meanwhile the targeting system frantically tries to keep the laser on the same spot long enough to punch all the way through, and the tank driver tries to conduct evasive action. Modern ablative technology for rocket engines can take 1kW/cm^2 of heating and last for minutes of service; ablatives derived from such technologies might make very effective armors.
Insightful how? Making mirrors that can withstand 100+kW of energy you can't exactly go down to your hardware store. Insurgents have nowhere near the facilities or technology to create anything close to withstanding 100kW.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
It's very subjective. It's easier to so which nation isn't the most free than it is to say which is...
... and this is supported by the state, under Chavez. They're also setting up co-managed factories, where workers elect managers, and can also recall them. This is also a very good step in the right direction, democracy-wise. Read up on the Bolivarian revolution for more info on what direction they're heading in.
... as Guantanimo Bay is itself an example of where the US is heading.
Venezuela is looking very promising. They're creating soviet-style workers' councils and other community-based groups
As a general rule, the level of development of capitalism inside a country mirrors the level of attacks on personal freedoms. So the big economic powers require more and more power to control their population. This was shown very well in the recent anti-Dick Cheney demos in Sydney. We broke numerous records for police numbers, roads closed, and probably personal injuries resulting from police violence. So I don't think Australia is exactly leading the way here either. Our government's abandonment of David Hicks in Guantanimo Bay for 5 years is another example
Look at the dot! Chase the dot! Chase the ...
Uh-oh.
The fact the SSHCL is able to get 67kW out of a solid state system is very impressive. Most solid state lasers of this sort have been stuck below 10kW and are only about 1% efficient, a 1kW laser needs 1MW of input power 99% of which needs to be shed by a cooling system. Solid state lasers have a definite advantage over chemical ones like the THEL and ABL because their "ammunition" supply is essentially only limited by the amount of electricity they've got available. Chemical lasers consumer reactants in the lasing process and have a finite number of shots before those reactants are exhausted. Those reactants take up a lot of space as well, Isreal's THEL system requires four semi trailers worth of equipment to shoot down small katyusha rockets and mortar rounds.
The Air Force has a real hard on for laser systems. Though it doesn't say specifically in the article it appears this lab was awarded the AFRL's contract to produce a solid state equivalent to the ATL system being developed largely by Boeing. The ATL is a smaller cousin of the ABL weighing in at about 70kW. It's an order of magnitude lower power than the roughly 1MW ABL but is also quite a bit smaller. The ABL requires a 747, the ATL is being developed to be mounted on a C-130 or V-22 Osprey. A solid state ATL would be far more useful for the Air Force than a chemical one. A solid state laser system on an aircraft could be powered by generators hooked to the engines and fired an indefinite number of times in flight.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
First thing that popped into my head was the sound of a Prism Tank blast followed by AAAHHHHH!
1) You could deliver your PowerPoint presentation in Paris from your office in San Francisco via videophone and STILL point out the interesting bits to the audience.
2) Later that night you could pick out a cinema in Paris and really piss off the audience by squiggling on the screen.
AT&ROFLMAO
Time to update your laser pointers! The old ones only melt plastic, light matches and pop balloons.
(Have to be ready for when the sharks attack--and they will!)One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The spirit of Human Compassion is alive and well.
Talking about dirty - I'd cover the 99% mirror with an ultra thin ablative designed to blow away cleanly on first impact of the laser - which takes the dirt and dust with it and then underneath is the perfect 99% mirror. And my projectile is going to be spinning and moving at mach 2 - the airflow will cool your hairdryer effect nicely. There's also got to be a reason they want 100KW and not 10 KW (10 times your puny 1KW).
This conversation reminds me of the ABM missile discussions, it costs 10 billion dollars to make an ABM system but only 50,000 for a couple engineers to think hard to make ultra hard to beat countermeasures.
there is little to no physical force behind it; the destructive energy is heat. Things won't explode like they do in Star Wars and other sci fi/fantasy movies and shows.
The satellite-based lasers for Star Wars (Reagan's wet dream, not the Movie) primarily worked by kinetic activity.
A cutting laser doesn't take anywhere near 67kW, but they work fairly slowly (slow enough for an armored target to take countermeasures). Instead, you want to basically vaporize a few nm of the surface, resulting in exactly the sort of explosion you say doesn't happen.
Search Google for "arc flash"... Though a much more mundane effect, it gives the general idea... Basically, if you vaporize copper bus bar by shorting it out, it produces a pretty impressive "explosion" due to the copper suddenly occupying 67,000 (no connection to the laser from the FP, just a coincidence) times its original volume.
Another AC! Does no-one have courage or valid points of view these days?
Sure, I've entertained the idea. The problem at the moment is that Venezuela is unstable. It's on the tipping-point of a revolution, but hasn't quite gotten there yet. I also am heavily rooted in my own country - mortgage, job, family, etc. I'm certainly not the kind of person to move countries just because they have some advantages in some areas. They have more freedom of speech, for example. But in Australia, we also have some degree of freedom of speech. If things change, then of course I'll be looking more closely at other countries.
But I'm also not the kind of person to run away from a country just because I've identified problems. Instead I think it's a valid approach to stick it out here and fight to implement the best elements of Venezuela's society into ours. What's wrong with that approach.
Lastly, I assume you think the US is the most free country on Earth, though your response was a little on the light side, so it's hard to say. Perhaps you should move to the pinnacle of their freedom, Guantanimo Bay. I think you'll have a great time there, and it will help you to get some perspective. Go on. When are you moving there?
Yes it all varies with the color of the light.
Alright, the good guys gets the red ones and the bad guys can use the green ones. That way we know when we got killed by friendly or unfriendly fire.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
This gadget will be used as a sniper gun from hell. Mount it on a plane, on a hybrid tank with a kilowatt generator, in a satellite.
Do we really trust the new SuperPresidents(tm) that Bush has created with a silent assassin from orbit? How long until a terrorist(tm) is smoked? The family around him? An environmentalist - already labeled terrorists. Hell. PETA members are now semi-official terrorists. REPORTERS are being labeled fellow travelers. The Army already smoked one building full of reporters with a tank. They'd love them some lasers. We've killed one foreign head of state by hanging, another still is in prison on charges that no one understands. You think the New American Century Cheney/Rice types will hesitate one second in smoking a head of state?
What really worries me is, say, an individual with advanced power storage tech (coming soon) or a hybrid car generating enough juice to have a lovely laser handgun. Perfect as a targeting system, perfect as a killer. No noise, good for miles, untraceable by conventional means in real time. Also good for "riot" (AKA protest) control for unruly peons. Goes with the microwave cannon, the electrical stunner, the sound cannon.
In all of this, how exactly are we becoming safer? What the hell do we need this thing for? and once we show it can be done, the Chinese and the Indian research teams will whack their own models out in a couple of years, selling it to the highest bidder. STREET GANGS will have lasers in fifteen years.
I checked, you apparently did not. China is second on the list, at about 1/8 of the USA.
Just note, the US official military budget is over 18% of china's GDP. There is no way that china outspends the US.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Good to see you're starting out from a defensible position
BULLSHIT! You mean like in Vietnam? Or Iraq? Or Afghanistan ( while they were setting up the Taliban, and now )? Or when they assassinated the democratically elected leader of Chille in 9/11, 1973? Don't give me this 'America support democracy' crap please. I didn't come down in the last shower.
It's true that the economy of a bourgeois democracy under a capitalist system will grow the fastest out of all the organisations structures that we know. That isn't necessarily a good thing, but this is a topic for another discussion. The cold hard truth about the US economy is that it's not exactly riding the wave of exports at the moment. The US economy owes a lot more to its imports than it does to its exports . For example, the US is unbelievably dependent on China for a source of cheap labour. You don't see them pushing China towards a democracy, do you? The only places where the US mentions the word 'democracy' is where they have a natural research worth stealing, and then you can bet it's not democracy that will eventuate, but exactly the opposite. You see, democracy isn't something that is handed down from on high. It's something that people have to struggle for. It's a process. You can't bomb a country into democracy. And I'll say it again: the day when the US pushes for democratic reform in China ( and not via bombing, mind you ), is the day that I reconsider my statement that the US hates democracy.
Well, the thing is that there are plenty of US-bashers around at the moment. It goes without saying that the Arab world thinks as I do. Europe is no different
my opinion that Slashdot wasn't always this mundane.
Well... yes it has always been... Just quit coming home drunk!
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
I remember Leik N. Myrabo saying in a tv-show that with a 100 kW laser his lightcraft could be sent into space. With such a laser built maybe this can be proved a reality quite soon?
"...democracies don't make war (not even USA)."
I used to believe that too. It was actually quite the cherished notion. One of the worst things about our invasion of Iraq--and reading the many ugly truths that have come out regarding the run-up to the war--is that if I still want to believe in that notion, I'm now required to *not* believe in the US being a democracy.
The two statements:
"democracies don't make war"
and
"US is a democracy"
have been proven, in my eyes, to be mutually exclusive.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
>> Problem is that the US isn't the 'most free' nation on Earth - not by a long shot.
e =wilson)f e/2004-03-29-child-self-porn_x.htm)
> Name one,
Germany.
> and explain how it's more free (not "a better place to live" or "more friendly to the environment").
If I'm a 17yo guy I can make pictures of my 15yo girlfriend and send them to my email-account
without both of us getting sued for posession and production of child pornography and being
trialed as adults and jailed for my own good.
Of course, I can't yell "Heil Hitler" on the street in Germany without getting into legal trouble but frankly,
I prefer to live in a country with people taking dirty pictures of themselves than in a country where
people feel the urge to yell "Heil Hitler" on the street.
Or being 17yo and getting a blowjob by a 15yo and 10years in jail?
(http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?pag
Or being 15yo and being charged with sexually abusing YOURSELF?
(http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetli
Or just google about your sodomy-laws?
You are only free if it comes to destroying and consuming.
(and yes, there are a lot of things wrong in Germany, too.)
"Oh, please," yourself. Revisionism needs to be done better than this bungle to have any hope of success.
3 /01-0912/features.html
I've been hearing this addage, fairly frequently, for 30+ years. But in it's *actual* classic form, which is pretty much as you originally posted it, not with the 'with each others' qualifier you've just added. In which form I have *never* heard it, until now. So if you actually thought "everyone had heard about it by now" in it's qualified form, you are very much mistaken.
For instance, you might read Bernard Lewis at:
http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_new/PAW02-0
It's somewhat apropos of my post, informative material by a guy widely judged to be rather thoughtful, and contains the addage in question.
I strongly suspect that anyone who can use a search engine will find many more references to this adage without your revisionist qualifier than with it.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.