Slashdot Mirror
Truck-Mounted Laser Guns
bl8n8r writes "Boeing has announced a contract with the US Army to develop laser cannons that are to be mounted atop 20-ton trucks for the purpose of shooting down incoming artillery, rockets, mortars, or bombs. The High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator project actually shoots stuff instead of just painting a mark on a target for other armament to hit."
to be an American
Next put them in C-130s, or Jeeps, like Rat Patrol.
Yesterday: 747-mounted laser.
Today: Truck-mounted laser.
Tomorrow: Shark-mounted laser.
sudo eat my shorts
How soon will we see these being mounted on the heads of ill-tempered seabass?
This government is so incompetent!! Bush screwed up. Again...
Sharks, I wanted sharks. Is that so difficult?
Guns of destruction are bad.
But the kid in me says...
SA-WEEET!!!!!!
surrounding Seattle, but I think you're right. I would not want to fire one of these in the dust and smoke of a typical battlefield. That energy will just get dissipated locally which can't be a GoodThing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The range to shoot down a RAM (rocket-artillery-mortar) threat is on the range of a few kilometers. Laser attenuation ovr that short a distance is pretty minimal. My master's thesis was on this concept, but swapping out the laser for a gun-launched projectile... you actually don't need that much focused energy to destroy a RAM threat mid-flight.
...but can it drive a 6 inch spike through a board with its penis?
I wonder how much power it takes to run and if it can target multiple incoming threats at once. It would be awesome if it could take on say 5 or 8 incoming mortars at the same time. Even better would be knocking out a barrage of RPG's. I guess the final implementation would be zapping bullets out of thin air which at that point you'd have a "shield" like in sci-fi. Military tech amazes me.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
rail gun projects? Nooooo...I think rail guns are way cooler, especially when they malfunction.
After the war, torture, Gitmo, NSA's unwarranted wiretapping and all the other crap that has made me ashamed to be an American, I'm glad that we can even for one brief moment have something cool like this.
Yeah, sure, we'll probably sad when they end up used to blind baby seals or to violate the Geneva convention (again), but quit ruining the moment, dammit. You made me misread "cherry truck" as "Cheney truck" and I was afraid I'd get zapped in the face by it.
Why don't they just work with the already tested MTHEL system?
The adult in me says ... Guns of destruction are bad.
No, that's the adolescent in you that says that. It wants to stop killing, hurting, and threatening, and goes after a tool that is capable of such things.
But once you've had enough time and thought to understand the unintended consequences of the simple "solution" - disarming the law-abiding - you'll reach the adult understanding that self-defense requires force, and that a credible threat of retaliatory force produces a net reduction in killing, hurting, and threatening.
"Mutual Assured Destruction" works at both the wholesale level (having prevented an all-out nuclear war for over half a century now) and the retail level (convincing crooks they want to leave you alone and either go after an easier victim or find a new line of work.)
Second-order effects often swamp first-order effects, producing (initially) counter-intuitive results. Part of growing up is learning which situations are like that, and what the useful counter-intuitive solutions are. (To people with less experience this is often mistaken for wisdom, cynicism, or evil.)
Unfortunately there is a significant fraction of the population that either never DOES grow up or never learns some important lessons about rare, but deadly, situations.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Have any trials been done on using the laser to fill a snide professor's house with popcorn? There could be a big market for this among the college crowd.
You make an excellent point. All the enemy needs to do is first fire a barrage of Jiffy Pop popcorn. when the laser hits it, the corn pops and rains down on the target. This should be sufficient in preventing the laser from knocking out the REAL rounds, which are fired second.
Hey, it works when fired from a satellite!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The Laser in the article is a development of the MTHEL project. The purpose of MTHEL is to defend positions against incoming rockets and mortars. One of the test videos actually shows the MTHEL hitting 3 different mortar rounds launched from 3 different positions all traveling through the air at the same time.
All the enemy needs to do is first fire a barrage of Jiffy Pop popcorn. when the laser hits it, the corn pops and rains down on the target. This should be sufficient in preventing the laser from knocking out the REAL rounds, which are fired second.
So would this be called Jiffy Chaff?
The enemies of Democracy are
So the Navy has railguns and the Army now has lasers - the Air force better get quad-damage or else they're going to get pwned.
The High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator project actually shoots stuff
Who wrote that summary, George Bush?
Boeing are a member of neither RIAA nor MPAA. What's the problem?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
False dichotomy. You can rejoice at some aspect of a war (such as fewer deaths), while still looking for "a better way".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
NEWSFLASH:
Boeing has developed a new squirrel mounted laser. Lasers have been mounted to squirrels and released on the Iranian border. Unfortunatly the squirrels were all captured by iranian police, but not after they fried their eyes out.
Cost? $50 million nuts.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
> If your ashamed to be an American, then America is ashamed to have shed blood for your freedom...nuff said.
Well, I personally don't think Americans fought and died so that we could torture people, or that you speak for the whole country. But that's just me.
And don't give me any flag waving to say that these kinds of gross national failures happen elsewhere or are somehow acceptable. I flew what was probably the biggest damn flag in the state for a good long time.
I don't feel like flying it any more because of all the "patriots" who think that saying "This is the best damn country in the world!" is something you use to excuse problems instead of a reason to acknowledge, fix and rise above them! Dammit, you don't fix things by stuffing your head up your ass! The only way you can NOT feel shame is if you have no damn pride in your country to begin with!
Let's do the math, just coz I'm bored.
The specific heat capacity of stainless steel is 500j/Kg and from this site I'm going to assume the specific heat capacity of the explosive is the same as "sandy clay" (poor assumption, but this is /. and I can't be bothered doing more research) which is 1381j/Kg.
Lets assume a 5Kg mortar is 40% propellant, 30% explosive and 30% shell, and that you don't have to heat the propellant. The specific heat capacity of a 2.5Kg object with a 50/50 mix of steel and clay by weight is given by:
Lets also say we want to heat the thing from ambient (35 degrees Celcius, coz remember we're in the desers of Iraq) to 100 degrees (I have no idea about explosives, despite the fact that I am a Muslim) in order to detonate it.
100 - 35 = 65 degree deltaAssuming that all energy is absorbed evenly, the formula for energy required is:
Given that watts are a measure of joules per second, assuming you have a quarter of a second "paint time" of the laser on the round, your lazer will need to emit:
(Please note: My assumptions are completely bullshit and this figure is probably way off, but it was fun doing them anyway.)
To put this into perspective, a 20g chocolate biscuit yeilds about 2,200 Kj. So really, forget the billion dollar laser program, just start lobbing chocolate biscuits at your enemy.
If this post wasn't bizarre enough, if you lob that chocolate biscuit fast enough at your enemny for e = mc^2 to come into play, then that same chocolate biscuit will yield:
Just sayin'.
I hate printers.