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."

Comments

I 3 Real genius

[Hellbuny]

Laslo: I figure you've increased the power output to six megawatts?
Chris: Yeah, about that.
Laslo: Well what would you use that for?
Ick: Making Swiss cheese?
Mitch: The applications are unlimited.
Laslo: No. With the fuel you've come up with the beam would last for what...15 seconds. Well what good is that?
Chris: Oh Laslo. That doesn't matter. I respect you but I graduated.
Mitch: Yeah, let the engineers figure out a use for it. That's not our concern.
Laslo: Maybe somebody already has a use for it. One for which it is specifically designed.
Jordan: You mean Dr. Hathaway had something in mind all along?
Laslo: Look at the facts! Very high powered, portable, limited firing power, unlimited range. (Chris stops smiling.) All's you'd need is a tracking system, and a large spinning mirror and you could vaporize a human target from space.
(Mitch glances at Chris.)
Chris: This is not good.

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to disappoint you but an Aegis cruiser doesn't use a 'sweeping' radar. It uses the far more advanced AN/SPY-1 system. Rather than looking like a mesh antenna, it looks hexagonal pads. There's no way even a complete idiot could confuse them so the story is entirely made up.

Questions

[mach1980]

1) How do they solve the problem with Bremsstrahlung?

2) Anyone got the rated power of that laser-beast? I guess they put 2-4kWh into that 5 second burst which leaves it at 1.4 - 2.8 MW. Which is a helluva lot more than the previous 20kW reported http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1221397

Passive Defence

[gringer]

I presume a splash of of highly reflective metal (or metallic heat-resistant plastic) will work wonders for defence against these things.

Delivery vehicles

[Kupfernigk]

In other news, the Chinese Government is working on ground based lasers that can shoot down C130s.

One of the most interesting things for future military historians will be how the US, and to a lesser extent the UK, have believed in the effecitveness of action at a distance warfare. "Bomber" Harris in WW2 tried to destroy Nazi Germany by air bombing of cities. Didn't work, half bankrupted the British economy, while the Army and Navy were screaming for convoy escorts and air support. Germany still had to be fought over to end the war. (Meanwhile Hitler spent a fortune on V-weapons whose total effect for the entire war was less than two large RAF night raids.) The lessons had been learnt so well that in Vietnam the US spent a fortune bombing the jungle - then in Cambodia. There was a brief success in the first Gulf War where the fleeing Iraqis obligingly went down the same road and got bombed and shelled to pieces in a local action, so in GW2 Iraq was bombed back to the stone age, which brought the Iraqi war to an abrupt halt (not).

So the US Government continues its development of bigger and better spears, still fantasising that one day they will develop the big one that will stop anyone, anywhere, from upsetting them. And forgetting that, no matter what firepower you put on a mobile weapons platform, it is still vulnerable to fixed weapons, and usually to small mobile weapons that cost relatively little to make and deploy.

It's worth remembering that one of the most asymmetric military actions of WW2 was a French resistance girl who visited a German tank base on her bicycle, wandered around putting grease loaded with carborundum into track bearings, and disabled a battalion, riding off home again for lunch.

Re:Delivery vehicles

[Ihlosi]

said of a raid on Hamburg that destroyed most of Germany's ball bearing factories

And here I thought Germany's ball bearing industry was concentrated in Schweinfurt (which was bombed quite heavily for precisely this reason).

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.

As far as I've read, the raids on the ball bearing factories were considered very successful by the Allies, because they've hit the factories and saw that the buildings had collapsed. However, making ball bearings requires heavy machinery which will survive the building collapse, so all the Germans had to do was remove the rubble and resume production.

Then again, maybe it's a question of what type of bomb to use. An incendiary might work better on a ball bearing plant than a HE.

And armoured vehicles need regular spare parts that need ball bearings.

Unless you switch to roller bearings, which are more easily made and only slightly degrade the performance of the vehicle. This is what the Germans did later on.

Re:Delivery vehicles

[tyroneking]

Excellent post my friend.

A few weeks ago I remember hearing/reading a comment from a US policeman who bemoaned the militarisation of the US police force, a few days later I was enjoying a night out in London and saw two unarmed policemen literally brow-beating two thugs into submission - letting a potentially violent incident descend into a petty argument. In the US I guess the two thugs would have been tasered, there would have been a small riot, couple of deaths, etc.

Good example of what's wrong with the enforcement powers our governments wield - too many weapons, too few conversations. I've never been one for total demilitarisation, but maybe it's about time we asked our governments to start keeping their dicks in their pants a bit more often.

I'm thinking not

[patio11]

Leave a white shirt out in the sun all day, and you know what you get? A hot white shirt. It's the same story on arrow versus armor that it has been for more than a thousand years: given equal technology, the arrow wins. (And the US Air Force is categorically not planning to "fight fair" when it comes to comparing technology bases. Hello, Mr. Third World Tinpot Dictator. Do your Revolutionary Guards have access to MIT's materials engineering department? No? Oh, what a pity... because their physics department works for us.)

When in doubt, the arrow scales more-or-less linearly (bump up the juice on the laser, problem solved), the armor ceases to scale very rapidly (try adding another 9 to the string of 99.999% reflectivity index).

I'd be much more worried, for the first few iterations of the system, of it being compromised by less-than-ideal environmental conditions (smoke, dust, smog, haze, clouds, intervening terrain in an urban situation, etc) than by enemy preparations. Besides, if the enemy has decided to put on his Armor of Laser Resistance +1, you can always just go back to Plan A and drop a really big bomb on his head.

The Pig Farmer

[MichaelCrawford]

This reminds me of a story I heard when I was a student at Caltech. A Tech Physics grad got a job with a defense firm where he was assigned to design a kill verification system. The way it was supposed to work was by using a spectrometer to detect the carbon emission lines from vaporized human flesh.

When he realized what he was doing, he quit his job to become a pig farmer.

Re:Hmm.

[KDR_11k]

Think of it as a recoilless cannon. At 12000 lbs you could probably mount a lot of firepower on the plane instead.

Re:Cool but...

[Ginger Unicorn]

you're conflating is and ought. He is just being pragmatic. You are just burying your head in the sand and hoping for a magical land of pixies where the US can dismantle it's weapons and send the world flowers and everyone will suddenly get along just fine. Who wouldn't want that? I know i would. Trouble is, it ain't gonna happen like that. So in the mean time the least bloody solution is for the americans to keep (albeit hamfistedly) casting a shadow over all the upstart dictatorships. That's the difference between is and ought.

Re:Sorry,I can't find it again

[gnalre]

Right method, wrong story.

The sabotage was in fact organised by the SOE(Special Operation Executive) and an an agent called Anthony Brookes(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Brooks). He organized the replacement of a carborundum mixture in the axles of railways flat cars which were to be used to transport a panzer division to Normandy, so bringing the entire railway network to a halt.

Not as romantic as a french girl on a bike, but just as effective

Re:You'd think...

[PinkyDead]

One of the arguments as to why Civil (biased) is better than Mechanical: The mech gets paid for once for designing the weapon, but the civil gets paid twice, firstly to design the structure, then to tell you how to blow it up.

I remember Sky News did an interview with a guy who worked for the Iraqi's to build their bunkers, and then during Gulf War I worked with the US as a consultant.

Study Civil Engineering
???
Profit
???
Profit

Re:Hmm.

[Total_Wimp]

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.

More like, it becomes possible to destroy a missile launcher even when the Hamassholes have hidden them among their own civilians.

Isn't that great. Assuming widespread deployment of course, our military won't really have any excuse for killing large numbers of civilians in a war zone. Our military never should have gotten a free pass on this to begin with, but with this technology they should get even more scrutiny. As a society that feels we need the occasional war, we need to take a hard line on "collateral damage." We need to have target metrics for acceptable levels of collateral damage and we need to hold our military leaders accountable for exceeding them.

Do you think [insert number of civilians your favorite study thinks got killed by us in Iraq] is acceptable? Why? How about ten times that amount? Certainly there is some number that would make you feel nauseous and fearful that this was all being done in your name? Every business has target numbers for sales and losses and our military has goals for advancement and acceptable troop losses on the battlefield, so why would we let them not have targets for this? We must hold our military accountable, and if this laser makes it so much easier for us to only hit the enemy, then the number of civilians killed in future wars sure as hell better be a lot lower than we're seeing now.

Re:Hmm.

[pryoplasm]

Isn't that great. Assuming widespread deployment of course, our military won't really have any excuse for killing large numbers of civilians in a war zone.
This is not a large number of civillians. For instance, there are still Iraqi civillians, meaning we fell short of genocide
Our military never should have gotten a free pass on this to begin with, but with this technology they should get even more scrutiny.
No military has a free pass on civillian casualties. The laws of war, or the law of armed conflict http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_war/
As a society that feels we need the occasional war, we need to take a hard line on "collateral damage." We need to have target metrics for acceptable levels of collateral damage and we need to hold our military leaders accountable for exceeding them.
Americans and the Brittish have done worse in the past, along with several other countries throughout history. Might I remind you of the firebombing of Dresden in World War II
Do you think [insert number of civilians your favorite study thinks got killed by us in Iraq] is acceptable? Why? How about ten times that amount? Certainly there is some number that would make you feel nauseous and fearful that this was all being done in your name?
No. No amount of civillian deaths is acceptable. It is the responsibility of the people and the leaders to protect their people. Were there actions the Iraqis in charge could have taken in order to prevent this? Yes, there were ultimatums and sanctions in place before the country was invaded. There was more process to it than just, well, its Tuesday so lets invade....*throws a dart on a map* ....Uzbekistan
We must hold our military accountable, and if this laser makes it so much easier for us to only hit the enemy, then the number of civilians killed in future wars sure as hell better be a lot lower than we're seeing now.
Military members are held responsible. If you personally know of a Law of War violation, I highly suggest you report it.

Re:Hmm.

[encoderer]

Well, I think you'd have more of a point if so many of this civies weren't killed by their countrymen.

And yes, I know that we "started it." But that's a little irrelevent.

I mean, MANY innocent civies have been killed by Saddam and his regime and there's no reason to think that was going to stop. And, no matter what, they day was approaching when Saddam relinquished power. Whether he died, was overthrown in a coup, was just too frail, whatever, eventually (and probably measured in years and not decades) he would've been out of the picture and a quick look at the political climate there should convince anyone that it wouldn't exactly be a peaceful transfer of power.

There's also something to be said about being complicit and complacent. Just because many of these civilians weren't taking up arms against us, it doesn't mean that they wouldn't at a future time. And even more important, how many of them kept their mouths shut about neighbors and family members who WERE actively fighting us? How many of them were aiding and abetting the insurgents? And for those that weren't actively aiding insurgents, why weren't they actively opposing them?

So, really, it's very hard to say how many "innocent civies" were killed. It's hard to get a reliable number of deaths to begin with. But even once you do, you must subtract those that would've died anyway, and then subtract those that were killed by insurgents and not by the Coalition, and then subtract those that were complicit and complacent in the insurgency.

Re:Hmm.

[encoderer]

I do want to just go "on the record" and say that I'm 100% against the Iraq war and I was from day one. I'm probably the most enthuiastic democrat you've ever met. Four years ago I quit my comfy job sitting in my aeron writing software to drive to New Hampshire and work for the Dean for America web team. It was hellish hours and a pittance of a salary but also, hands-down, the very best thing I've ever done.

I'm not defending Bush or the military. I'm just defending truth. The anti-war movement shouldn't try to use propaganda about how many innocents were killed. We sneer at Bush for HIS propaganda. We should be above that.