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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."
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!!!!!!
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?
Rail guns are what the navy is going to use to replace cruise missiles (which replaced heavy ship artillery). Lots of advantages there -- about the same range and precision and destructive power as a cruise missile, but at a fraction of the cost. Plus has a huge advantage over both cruise missiles and conventional artillery shells in that the ammunition won't explode if the ship gets hit -- though I imagine the gigantic capacitors needed to fire the gun may blow up if charged up and hit, though that'd only be one shot's worth of energy rather than the ships whole payload. Rail guns have a bright future, as long as they can figure out how to keep the gun from destroying itself every shot.
:)
Lasers so far are mostly being considered for defensive roles to shoot missiles and artillery down. This is a good role for lasers, since first hitting the target at the speed of light is good when you're trying to hit a small fast moving target, and second because the energy needed to destroy a warhead isn't that large.
Two awesome future technologies, two roles. It's a good time to be a geek.
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.
> 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!