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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."
But, can you use it to make popcorn?
Little or no collateral damage? Depends on the accuracy really.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
If they relly want to destroy thing on hte ground why dont they enclose some high explosives in a steel container with a fuse set to go off when it hits an object. They could then drop this from the plane.
just an idea.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
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.
meep!
We are one step closer to having an X wing
....what does it sound like...movies always told us that laser will make cool sounds when fired. I vote it makes that 'Ptsui!' sound.
A C-130H might not have the sleek looks but it's a step in the right direction.
My next question is
"You'd think... they'd go after Wal*Marts first. Or Target Frys."
I think you have that backwards... they'd fry targets first.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
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.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
That's why you should never go out without your tin-foil hat.
As they say, mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets...
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.
I don't remember Mandatory saying that.
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?
Well, that's just dandy if you're an American. But if you lived in Taiwan, South Korea or Israel, or Japan then America having the ability to shoot down ICBMs might come in handy.
Because at the moment all those countries are menaced by a neighbour who is kept in check largely by the US. And all those neighbours either have or are very close to having ICBMs. And some of them are maybe crazy enough to threaten the US with those ICBMS or their neighbours. Now if the US can shoot them down there's much less incentive for them to do that. So missile defense is actually a geopolitical stabiliser.
Come to think of it, even if you're in America it's far better that America is far ahead of any conceivable rival, because that deters them from a sprint to parity and then a Pearl Harbour style attack on the US or even engaging in brinksmanship and messing it up so that they end up swapping ICBMs with the US. Which would be far more expensive than current US defense policy, even ignoring the fact that millions of innocent people would die, many of them Americans.
Most of these regimes seem to engage in brinksmanship with the US all the time. It seems likely that they view ICBMs as a tool to strengthen their hand, rather than just a defense to hunker down behind. And most of them have little or no understanding of US politics, so it's quite likely that they would miscalculate and get into a war with the US even if it were to make concessions to them. Arguably starting to make concessions to appease them would simply embolden then and make them start to demand things which the US cannot concede.
So if I were you I'd vote to keep spending on defense. Come to think of it, the good old US military industrial complex will probably managed to get the dollars somehow regardless of how you vote.
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;
When he realized what he was doing, he quit his job to become a pig farmer.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
How many people are liable to be staring at, say, a SAM site, in the middle of the night? For that matter, how many times will this have to be used before everyone knows not too? Not to mention that it would be fairly simple and cheap to airdrop safety glasses designed to filter on the laser's wavelength.
At least laser-rebound is nice enough to be benign when you are out of sight. Shrapnel will take a parabolic arc which hops over any intermediary buildings to pop you on the head.
Not to mention that rules for angle of incidence/reflection mean that a laser shot straight down on a tall structure is unlikely to cause problems for anyone else.
Anyway, say this takes fifteen years to become standard technology; by then, repairing retinas may be easy as pie, but money says that being blast-incinerary radius of a bomb will still be fairly lethal.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
No. It wouldn't. All of those countries live right next door to their enemies. An ICBM would hardly be necessary to inflict devastating damage upon any of them.
North Korea has enough conventional artillery pointed at South Korea to level Seoul in a manner of minutes (and vice versa). China has a big enough army to march over Taiwan and Japan simultaneously, and would very likely win by sheer numbers alone without much of a fight.
And attacking Israel is simply a bad idea. The response provoked by a nuclear attack upon Israel would be a hundred times more severe than the initial attack.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
We spend approximately 21% of our budget on National Defense. Nearly half the budget is lost to entitlements.
Now where would *I* get all the money to spend on good projects? Earmarks buried in the various bills that pass Congress. There were over 2000 (two thousand) earmarks in the Defense budget alone. This is money being spent by Congress, not the DOD, but charged as part of the defense budget. How many monunments (read research centers, bridges, etc) do we need named for LIVING members of Congress?
We spend an amazing amount on education but efforts to improve it are thwarted by Teacher Union's, Special Interest Groups, and Politicians. If you want to improve education don't look to Washington, get involved at the local level. You will see the wall first hand.
Improved Infrastucture? Look, we already budget more than enough to fix and maintain what we have. The problem is that Congress takes the money allocated and redirects it to new projects. You then have government incompetence at the state level as well. Ever wonder why a certain bridge disaster disappeared from the news so quickly? Because it was exposing the system that is failing. You cannot just throw more money at a failing system and expect good results. If that were the case we would have best schools and roads in the world!
Lets hit your next category. Medical research. The private sector is doing amazing things in this area - why? Because by not taking Federal money for all lines of research they are left with options they would lose otherwise. Getting the Feds involved handcuffs researchers in more ways than you can count. Medical research is big money, the risks are great but the rewards are great. Keeping people living longer means more money for the companies that can provide it. The government has no interest in you living longer as you cost them more money when you do. (remember that entitlement section of the budget? Nearly half directly spent there)
New power alternatives. We already have seen where Congress is going. Ethanol. Why? The FARM industry. Earmarks out the wahzoo for a fix that may cause more problems than it solves. Less food for the world and more pollutants of a different sort. Wind farms you say? Sure, just don't put them in some Congressman's backyard! Nuclear? No member of Congress has the willpower to stand behind this industry. Simply put it does not get them votes. The money is high and tied too much to a small area. Whereas ethanol allows for tax money to be spread around garnishing lots of votes!
Yes the military spends a lot of money. Yes a lot is wasted. However that same military is the reason why we can bitch about the state of our country and the world with near impunity. We don't have to worry about tanks rolling over our demonstrations, we don't have to worry about family members being disappeared overnight because a relative spoke out in university, and we don't go to the market worried about some whacko with a bomb on his chest.
My sole criteria for the next election is, who will cut the BUDGET the most. The taking from Americans is extreme. Bush was anything but a conservative, having grown the government to sizes beyond reason. There is no reason to have so many people dependant on the government to survive. By creating such a situation we doom the future generations. Where will be the innovations and great strides in society when its people don't have to do so as someone else will foot the bill and tuck them in?
Getting the government off our backs is the first step to having a great country. Our government should be here to serve us, not indenture us.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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
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Profit
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Profit
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Iraq only became a shithole after the UN sanctions, and then a hellhole after our invasion. The USA has historically had no problem with nations that were politically repressive, even brutal (Indonesia, anyone? Saudi Arabia? UAE?) as long as they did business with US companies, allowing us to profit from their brutality. I agree that Saddam was a dictator, but saying they have us to "thank" for "democracy" is a bit cheeky. Can they thank us for arming him, or for cutting off medical supplies? How about selling him components for chemical weapons in the 80s?
As for Iraq being a democracy, stop acting as if they have self-determination. Over 150K troops and mercenaries on your soil, enjoying complete immunity from Iraqi law, with the ability to shoot you at will, isn't what I'd call a democracy. Would you favor letting the Iraqis vote next week on whether US military members and mercenaries should be subject to Iraqi law? Would you consider the referendum binding? If not, they aren't much of a soverign nation, are they?
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.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?