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Air Force Looks To Laser-Proof Its Weapons
slugo writes "This wired.com article has probably the coolest laser destruction video you have ever seen. The video shows the Israeli and US Air Force working on laser defense systems. The US Air Force is starting to look for ways to laser-proof its bombs and missiles — with spray-on coatings, no less. They think everyone is going to figure this laser thing out sometime and need a defense against what they are already very good at — shooting things out of the sky with a laser."
Cover everything in mirrors.
OK, If somebody Rs TFA and my issue is addressed, feel free to enlighten/pwn me. But one of the best laser defenses I know of is simply misguiding missiles. Many are laser/infrared guided so, by providing false input, you can misdirect them and guide them off-target. It seems that any spray that can filter out a false signal will also filter out the true signal.
Discuss.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Doesn't necessarily work as well as it does in scifi. Mirrors aren't perfect, and tend to gather things like dust, which reduce their efficiency even more. Not to mention different mirrors vary in their effectiveness with different spectrum lasers.
Shouldn't matter much, but at the high powers weaponized lasers operate at, they quickly destroy mirrors.
As for working on anti-laser stuff, well, it's best to keep three steps ahead militarily wise - tends to keep your casualties down.
I don't read AC A human right
That's why you need sharks to go with your lasers. You think you can defend yourself with mirrors, do you? Don't you know that sharks like to eat shiny things?
weaponized bling. Jay-Z will be one of our biggest defense contractors.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
1. Buy all the Krylon 'Chrome' spray paint.
2. Relabel it and sell it to the government as 'Anti-Laser Shielding'.
3. Profit!
Ha ha h- wait... there's a step #2. There's never a step #2. wtf
my sharks-with-freaking-laser-beams missile defense is useless now
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
MASER weapons!! mwahahaha
so if we chrome plate the space shuttles heat shield tiles this whole LASER system is thwarted.
Also it clearly needs to be mounted on the moon, we can call it project Death Star.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Because, last I checked, they could only shoot things out of the sky with a laser when the trajectory, speed, etc was known. Otherwise, it was impossible to get the laser aligned to hit the very fast moving object quick enough.
The problems with lasers is that the need to punch through the armour in the time they can stay on target.
#1. Spin them. If the laser cannot hit the same spot for X fragments of a second then it cannot burn through (unless you get a bigger laser).
#2. For when the enemy gets a bigger laser, you coat the missile in a nice insulator. Something like carbon.
So now the laser has to punch through the carbon armour before the missile rotates new armour into sight.
We need to do this to our torpedos or we'll still be vulnerable to Dr. Evil's sharks.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
We'll have to destroy them ship to ship. Get the crews to their fighters.
Judging from the video it seems to be able to shoot blow up 9-10 mortars per minute. But a quick google search showed that the M224 60mm Light Mortar can fire at 8-20 mortars per minute indefinitely or 18-30 mortars per minute for 1-4 minutes. Seems like you'd need a lot of these lasers to make an area 100% protected from mortars.
mirv already exists and so does flack. You can't hit what you don't know is a target. There are always limits to energy per unit time per unit area and since we are already 10 trillion dollars in debt destroying things, perhaps that money would be better spent on a plan to grow some crops to eat.
Hopefully the guy making the decisions weighed espionage. You can really shoot yourself in the foot if you find a counter to your own missle defense and then someone publishes the counter. Do you really need an anti missle defense technology so bad that it is worth endangering your own missle defense?
God spoke to me.
Why not put lasers on our weapons that are designed to take out their laser installations?
America doing weapon's testing in the desert? Yee-gads! It's not like that's where the majority of their theaters have been for the last two decades. Most american bombs are droped in, you guessed it, the desert. And isreal, the only country currently using lasers to defend against active atacks is located in... wait for it... the desert.
If you repel the sharks, the lasers will go too.
Yet another defense industry scam, and all of us are dragged along for the ride.
of chrome would probably rule out using it as a coating/shield. Its tough enough getting EPA approval to use chromium coatings on stuff that isn't going to go BOOM (such as bearings/anti-corrosive coatings, etc), let alone a proposal that says "We'd like to put chrome on artillery rounds so there are lots of opportunities to leach into water supplies, cause cancer, etc."
Impetuous! Homeric!
Your first post is in as much danger from lasers as anything else. Which is none at all. It's been 25 years and untold billions of dollars secretly(gotta love the Cold War) pumped into viable military applications for lasers. What do we have to show for it?!? An entirely-useless-chemical-laser-carrying 747 that:
1) Has gotten so far in that last 12 years of focused development that it has finished "target illumination" testing.
2) Has 40 shot maximum payload (according to the entirely optimistic marketers of this project). They admit that it is only really specced for 20 shots now, though.
3) Does NOT have any variety shark attached to it.
I think Northrop Grumman, Boeing and all the other defense contractors had the following plan when they met with Reagan:
1)Convince The Gipper that Green lasers is just what's needed to kill the Red Communists. ("It'd be just like that recent film by that young George Lucas, and we know how much you love movies, Mr. President."
2) (optional) ???
3) Profit!!!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
I'm no rocket scientist but...
Spinning something as large as a ballistic missile, in the boost phase which is when these lasers are useful as well as when the rocket is full of fuel and rather heavy, might conceivably produce gyroscopic effects which could increase trajectory calculation complexity quite a bit?
Just throwing that out as a possibility.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
If EEstor is real, no doubt the feds are going to buy a lot of this. We have railguns and lasers coming on line. Our new DDX will have both. The ABL is designed not to just shoot rockets, but also to take out sats (it is flying at 40-50K feet; a great deal less atmosphere). And of course, our f22 were designed to handle lasers and we will shortly have them on their. My understanding is that future guns for the F22 will also be rail guns. Funny thing is, that most countries are gearing up with crewed planes. We are moving towards automated because we have figured it out that a human is not going to be able to manuever fast enough to avoid these things. But an automated system combined with a remote pilot, just might. Even the M1 is to be modified for these. And EEStor may make it all possible. All these toys will be held back for the next real war (and not just a bungled invasion). I think that any pres that tries to bring these forward for something as small as Iraq/Afghanistan would be lynched by the DOD.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And that was just the soviet union in 1984.
Pentagon confirms Beijing's anti-satellite laser
This was in china in 2005 (confirmed in 2006).
Now, we have an "entirely-useless-chemical-laser-carrying 747"????
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No, the Pentagon still sucks at shooting things out of the sky with a laser. They are excellent at spending $BILLIONS on trying, over and again, for decades.
Maybe they're laser-proofing everything because they're so bad at lasering stuff that they're afraid they'll laser our own stuff. At the very least, it's innovation in spending $BILLIONS on lasers.
--
make install -not war
The resulting dispersal of the laser energy would prevent the missile from being seriously damaged.
The opinions expressed here are those of this individual, and may not reflect the policy or practice of the collective
couldn't help myself :D
Give it a week near the Gaza Strip, for a daily workout.
But they'll still be vulnerable to attacks with proton torpedoes.
"Just because you're eloquent doesn't mean you aren't a fucking crackpot." -Wavebreak
In battle, they would don a full-length ball gown covered in sequins. The idea was to blind your opponent with luxury.
A more modern tack might simply be to let Frank Ghery design the bomb casing. The high-strength reflective materials would avert damage, while the deconstructionist curved form would, with luck, send the beam back to the attackers, using their own laser against them like in a cliched Star Trek episode.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
-- Sig down
Damn, and this right after I invested all my money in shark lasers.
Mount lasers on something large and slow like an airship heavy transport. Maybe you could cover the airship with photoelectric material to gather solar energy, to power the laser.
Your use of a conspiratorial tone in combination with a series of rhetorical questions and vague, but scary, implications in the text you quoted have swayed some of the moderators. Well played, indeed! To that I can only respond, from your own sources:
From the Terra-3 page of your "Encyclopedia Astronautica":
The first applications would have to be limited to anti-satellite, and then primarily to blind optical sensors --Hmmmm...a high-powered flashlight...
Remember: from your own quote it was not "discomfort and temporary blinding" but instead there was a "/" in there. Meaning that the discomfort was the temporary blinding.
Alas, your Register article doesn't fare much better in supporting your beautifully possible theories if you read past the first line. Heres's the second line for your benefit:
The high-powered light was able to blind onboard cameras, acknowledged National Reconnaissance Office director Donald Kerr...
So, if this is the best you have to show, I'm afraid, despite how incredibly impressive really bright lights are, I'll stand by my previous statements about the uselessness of the current military laser technology. Except for what the Men In Black have, of course.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
...everyone has laser-proof missiles?
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
I say, good luck!.
Even a modest artillery battery, on a bad day, with the hot, dusty wind in their face and half their crew asleep, can manage to put 18 rounds downrange, per minute. With a 30 second flight time (hey, it varies with range), you've got less than two seconds per projectile if you're going to destroy them all. And the laser takes several seconds per round to destroy it. And that's without the coating.
So here's what you do: you fire a 'smurf' round - that is, a hollow steel round as your first projectile. Because it doesn't have any explosive, the laser will track it and burn it until it hits the ground, paving the way for the remaining rounds to come through without any problem.
Granted, I think lasers are cool and all, but we already have anti-rocket systems like the Navy's phalanx which seem to be much more effective. The problem is that something like a 3000 rpm chain gun can put more energy on the target than most tactical lasers. Even more embarassing, a .50 cal round can pierce 2 inches of solid steel at ranges greater than 3 kilometers. A single .50 cal round impacting nose of an artillery shell would detonate it instantly. Why not use those precision servos to direct a weapon with real takedown power? Ballistic flight trajectories aren't that hard to calculate.
And unlike the laser, artillery can hit things beyond visual range, in places obstructed from direct line of sight. Put yourself in a valley, and your laser defense system might not even track the round until its already too late. I think it's a step in the right direction, but they clearly need much more powerful lasers to be practical.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I bet I can figure it out. I'll just need one of those lasers they're talking about, for testing purposes ;)
its going to be won in the economic arena, and the US is losing. in 30 years, we will have only fry cooks and customer service reps, everything else will have een outsourced or made automatic. a bunker will hold about 5000 computer/robot engineers, and massive hospitals will form the basis of the economy, as there will be no other jobs.
meanwhile, china will have a base on the moon, and still have only invaded tibet, and no other countries. but at least they cant shoot us with a laser.
I'm pretty sure Mitch Taylor and Christopher Knight can solve this problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius
Every time this comes up someone trots out "it's a distribution problem, not a production problem" line.
Here's a clue for you, while better distribution might be one part of the solution, so is more production, ie production where food is needed.
Any solution based on distribution is inevitably reliant on political goodwill. Production can empower people so that they aren't so dependant on ongoing political goodwill.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
God bless AmerIsrael and to hell with everyone else!
Debian FTW
Yes of course, there's no evidence that we have more lasers so the obvious conclusion is that we have a lot more useful lasers that the government is hiding from us because they're classified.
You know, we also have no evidence that the military has gundam warriors... they must obviously have a huge fleet of them... they're just classified, that's why you haven't seen them.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
With amazing insights like those I'm sure you'll have a lucrative defence job offer very shortly.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I wasn't aware that there was any other unfriendly nation with any type of offensive or defensive laser. Seems like more military spending on something that we'll never use because some jackass in the government got freaked about about "terrorists with lasers".
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I finally have a reason to justify my owning a pair of those polarized, reflective shades from the 1980's!
Slap a pair of those rad-fashion babies on a missile and will not only be laser proof, but it'll look *cool* at the same time!
To quote The Great M.C. Hammer: "Can't touch this!"
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The USAF has had no purpose for the last, oh let's say, fifty years beyond spending money to develop defenses against threats that don't exist.
the military has been using gimble mounted lasers to fry the circuts of missile starting back in the early 90's
any simple sheilding from such divice is quite easy
now let's just focus on lasers as offencive weponse
OMFG LAZERZ!!!11!1!
Looks like it's time to develop Glitter Boys.
will they go for EM resistant coating or thermal?
That's not a crop growing problem. The problem isn't that crops can't be grown in Africa, for example. The problem is that the governments there are unwilling to do so. A good example is Zimbabwe. It used to be the bread basket of Africa. It was like the farm states in the US. However, Mugabe has put a stop to that. Now they are a net food importer and their production is next to nothing.
Food shortage these days really isn't a problem of production. We have the technology and the land to handle it. It is a problem of distribution. The places with large starving populations have governments that are not interested in allowing the problem to be solved, or sometimes have no real government at all and are anarchys more or less.
This isn't an easy "just throw money at it" kind of problem.
... and Isn'treal are working so closely together on this. I'm not aware of any force in the world capable of doing any significant damage to either country besides China, Russia, India, Pakistan and recently N Korea - though NK is a joke really.
The most harm possible to US and Israel is this kind of brinksmanship they continually engage in.
Break ties with Israel now. They are a rogue nation to rival any. Before it is too late.
This is common sense. You know it is.
get me my shark repellent bat spray...
get me my laser repellent satellite spray.
FairTax baby!
My brother, a University professor, who had a big laser laboratory, covered all the walls with plywood. What happens is that when a strong laser beam hits the wood, the glue vaporizes and spreads out the beam so its rendered much less concentrated. The cheapest laser defense in the world.
Don't know about you but I can't see infra red and unless thermal imaging cameras (not near infra red gun sights, we're talking far infra red) become standard issue I don't see this happening.
Otherwise some FM radio listeners could be in for a surprise during the testing!
But for the whole implausibility factor. I mean, I can only suspend my disbelief so far:
"the Lebanese army guys measured the angle of the holes at the bottom of the impact craters made by the fuse assemblies being blown into the ground"
Yeah. Granted if your calculations are thrown off my five degrees by something irregular -- say, I don't know, an explosion -- you get garbage data which broadens your "X marks the spot" to a few square miles, which is about what you could have guessed given that the shells appear to be coming from thataway and you presumably have a rough idea of how far they could travel. But don't worry, Horatio Caine is on the case, and can infer from the fact that the pollen grain of a deusexis machinus was on one of the spent shell casings that the adversary must have been shooting from next to the greenhouse, on a Thursday, when the gardener was taking his lunch outside.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
It's not as if the Israelis need anti-laser defences. Their continuing campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians just needs more guns and fighter jets. But hats off to the the US military for their forward thinking in case the Palestinians somehow get hold of lasers.
Israeli and palestinians on the borders to the West bank and Gaza are firing home made rockets at each other all the time, and this laser is incapable of shooting them down. I guess the palestinians have discovered a simple way to outsmart it. Israel -> Palestine: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-07/21/content_8741605.htm Palestine -> Israel: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,370701,00.html
The troops just follow the orders of the generals.
Why? You can fling a dozen cheap dummy rounds at the target and let the laser overheat itself before you send in a couple of real ones.
No sig today...
You know nothing. And that's the way we like it.
-- Ironically Anonymous
I kept waiting for a real genius reference the Austin Powers one is tired, but RG is perfect for this.
Anyways...Self-realization. I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
I think a number of people are mistaking the point of this article. The article is mainly based on the idea that the Chinese and Russians (strange how they're suddenly enemies again, isn't it?) will have lasers, too, and will be able to use them on American aircraft and weapons.
Aircraft would be very vulnerable to high powered lasers as their sensors and skin structure (and the pilot!) would all be single points of failure in a laser attack.
Obviously, if lasers ever do become small enough to be practical on a tactical level (Chinese tanks already have lasers on their turrets to blind enemy operators and optics), defence against them becomes very important.
On a realistic level, the only craft capable of carrying a battlefield laser at the moment would be a C-130, which might be very useful in counter-insurgency operations due to the low collateral damage.
But, in reality, in the wars that the USA and NATO are currently fighting, insurgencies like in Iraq and Afghanistan, heavy weapons will not win the day. Policing and politics will.
The only real technical achievement that would bring great relief to thousands of victims of suicide bombers would be a device that can detect explosives at a distance, something like a terrahertz xray machine, so that suicie bombers could be detected and stopped at a distance.
Don't Mase me bro!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Or better yet, launch during an actual sandstorm? The problem here is that they're using unguided rockets, and a sandstorm involves high winds and solid particulates in the atmosphere. That's not nice to a multi-mach rocket, either.
In short, I figure that launching during a sand storm to degrade the effectiveness of the lasers would also degrade the accuracy and reliability of the rockets, reducing effectiveness to an unacceptable level.
I don't read AC A human right
Or, had we the system on 9/11, we shoot down the airliners with the laser before they can hit the towers. You balance the higher mass/damage resistance of a plane against the slower speed/easier targeting of the laser.
But yeah, we're facing a lot of covert agent/unconventional warfare today. But that's because we'd slaughter pretty much anybody else. The only non-allies that might be able to stand up to us would be China and Russia. China mostly because of their manpower advantage(at this point), Russia because of their still existant nuke supplies.
Militarily wise, it's important to keep the advantages in conventional warfare, because even at it's worst, unconventional warfare tends to be capable of only limited damage. Look at Israel - they're still around despite decades of unconventional warfare against it.
I'm not saying we shouldn't improve in the areas of covert/unconventional warfare - it's just that even now it shouldn't be our sole objective.
I don't read AC A human right
The role-playing game Rifts found the solution to laser based warfare two decades ago:
The Glitterboy
It was a power armor that was coated in reflective\refractive material the resembled a metallic glitter. It simply scattered high intensity energy weapons forcing more convention munitions to be used.
Once the glitterboy armor technology spread they and the war dragged on, resources became scarce. To provide effective ammunition against other glitterboy based war suits they developed a high velocity cannon that shot, well, junked scrap metal called, affectionatly I assume, a BOOM cannon.
Once again Sci-Fi beats the brains to the punch.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
this story reminds me of a quote from star control 2: A little superconductive spray-paint and Presto! Your lander can sustain a direct hit by a lightning bolt without crisping the passengers inside... usually. Since the job is so easy that a nymph could do it I expect all your landers will be treated in less than an hour.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Good point. Did you know that there is also a crack team of lightsaber-wielding jedi marines in the US army?
What do you mean, you haven't seen or heard of them? You think the gub'mint goes around shouting about that sort of thing?
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
done at White Sands.
I recognized the mountains in one of the test videos as being at white sands.
Guess what? White Sands missile range is not only HUGE it is located in the desert.
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
Until the predicted lack of phosphorous in easy-to-extract mines, which will happen in 50-100 years from now.
And you thought you only had to worry about petrol running out? ;-)
When do we start seeing anti-anti-anti-missile technology?
Radar detectors detected by radar detector detectors.
we are already 10 trillion dollars in debt destroying things, perhaps that money would be better spent on a plan to grow some crops to eat.
That is a weird sentence fragment.
The first part, before the comma, complains about the debt. The debt is three-quarters unconstitutional socialist programs. The first part of the fragment correctly says that such spending destroys things - lives, businesses, subcultures, and even farms. Economists know this as The Invisible Foot.
Then, in the second part, the fragment contradicts itself by saying that unconstitutional socialist spending should be used destroying farms, families, and markets.
If we ditch the unconstitutional autogratuity programs there would be no debt whatsoever. And we would have plenty of money to spend on constitutional requirements of common defense and general welfare.
The 'oops' you refer to isn't a military issue - it's a CIA issue. The CIA is NOT part of the military. It was CIA intel, CIA planes, CIA operators, CIA guidance.
When I consider military - I consider organizations under the DoD, the CIA isn't.
From that oops I can see a number of problems that would of had the US Military going 'hold up'.
A: Pakistani village - we're not at war with Pakistan(that I've heard), and lacking presidential authorization, we're not going to be shooting there.
B: Proportionality - Is Ayman WORTH attacking while he's in a village in a neutral country, occupied by it's citizens?
C: FOUR hellfires? A hellfire isn't the largest missile by any means, but it's still got a good warhead on it.
Now, don't get me wrong. The military WILL make attacks that WILL kill civilians. Especially when the opponent is a ass that mingles military and civilians - like parking AA guns on schools and hospitals. Though I do know of one such case where we pulled a trainer bomb that had concrete instead of explosive, put a guidance package on it and dropped it on the tank that had been parked next to an occupied school. The idea that 2k pounds of concrete dropped from 30k feet, with a terminal velocity over the speed of sound would bust the seams a bit and render the tank unusable.
I don't read AC A human right
Of the 1985 movie Real Genius Starring Val Kilmer, a classic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector
Imagine covering your spinning target with these, and then try to imagine what might happen if someone fired a laser at it.
Eric Baird
So the famous Chinese air pollution problem may actually be an exceedingly clever anti-laser defence?
Eric Baird
Or use "non-explosive" ceramic shells that "detonate" as a shaped fragmentation effect, converting the impact energy into a nasty cloud of computer-designed shrapnel. Aim a laser at one of those, and all that happens is that when it impacts, the shrapnel is now hot shrapnel.
Eric Baird
What you could do is launch a few cheap decoy missiles that are basically just big corner reflectors with no payload.
Great big radar signature ... laser targeting systems lock on and fire ... laser beam gets reflected straight back at the laser platform.
Then I guess it's be a question of what gets destroyed first, the multi-billion-dollar laser platform or the cheap-and-dumb reflector.
Eric Baird
"SIR, the tinfoil hats for your rockets are ready, SIR!"
And you've run into the problem. The US Military has the ability to kill anything in the world. We have the ability to guide weapons down smokestacks.
Accuracy wise, we're very good.
Target discrimination is where we're lagging a bit - thus the 'friendly' fire incidents, other mistaken hits. The convoy was hit as directed, in a fashion to minimize collateral damage. The fact that it wasn't a convoy of what we thought it was is the problem, exasperated because we're fighting an enemy that deliberately attempts to hide itself as/with civilians.
I don't read AC A human right
Lets look at the U.S. arsenal and consider anything that involves a Laser. First off, laser type guns, illegal by international treaty. And if the Oval office isn't to clear on the verbiage, the rest of the world would have no trouble rubbing the Oval office's collective noses in the words. Because, lasers can be fired by bad guys too. Now, laser guided bombs, from the bad guys view point, setup a dummy laser signature spot and the bomb heads in that direction. The defense against "Spotting", (women please pardon the pun), is to either change the frequency of the Laser on the ground and in the air, or its signal feedback frequency. All this stuff considers the teeth of the Tiger, but how about its tail? How about developing lasers that cause mischief, and when dealing with cleaning up the mess, just to generally just piss people off. How about laser based Graffiti? Try painting over that mess. How about firing a laser into a traffic photo taking device, or grocery store check out device. How about coating a bar code sticker such that the wrong valid number is read in. Wars are lost because of Logistic's foul-ups. Now I'm starting to feel uncomfortable...