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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."
I question your mastery of the English language. The article is not about how to defend against missiles with lasers, but how to defend missiles against lasers -- specifically lasers which are aimed at a missile to poke a hole in it and/or destroy sensitive electronics.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
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.
It's been able to track on its own since around 2001 or 2002. This is mentioned on one of the wikipedia pages.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Last time I saw a specification for the laser mounted in a modified 747, it had 30 seconds of firing capacity, and was capable of being turned on and off at will.
That 30 seconds was considered sufficient to engage something like 5-15 targets.
I don't read AC A human right
It is all about how much energy you want to get on target, the nature of that energy and the affect you wish to achieve.
So, minimal amount of energy solution, target CPUs and get all the 0s to be 1s and those smart weapons go stupid and don't target targeting anything ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Chrome might help with lasers, but it'll decrease other factors such as stealth, both visual and radar. Older fighters (think P-51 Mustang or B-29 Superfortress) often went out with polished aluminum skins. Later generations opted to increase the weight by adding paint, so that they could get additional visual camouflage both when on the ground and in the sky (depending on where they were being deployed they would go with different color schemes, though lately the services prefer the general-all-around-good patchy-gray). I'm no specialist, but I also imagine a chrome/polished surface isn't the best radar absorbent material available.
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.
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make install -not war
No clouds, low humidity, line of sight. Guess what laser weapons don't do well in?
Yeah, our DOD ppl just can not think for themselves. Thank God we have you to point out the screw ups that we make. Or, you can think that perhaps not all is a fake:
Very quickly, deuterium was dropped in favor of hydrogen, since it is far less costly and more readily available. However, later it was realized that HF produces infrared radiation in the 2.6 to 3.1 m waveband, a region of the spectrum absorbed by water vapor in the atmosphere. Interest was renewed in DF, which produces radiation in the 3.7 to 4.2 m band, which passes easily through the atmosphere.
THough to be fair, we still need a line of sight. Of course, that could be bounced off a sat.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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.
Will chrome even work against that? It looks like a DF laser outputs light at 3.7-4.2 micrometers, which puts it in the mid-infrared. That'll go right through clouds. Is chrome reflective at that wavelength?
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.
"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
-- Albert Einstein
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Photons don't carry a charge. You'll have better luck trying to focus them with gravitation. All you need is a black hole of the appropriate mass.
You know nothing. And that's the way we like it.
-- Ironically Anonymous
So it all depends on the type of particle you a firing at the target, whether it passes right through the armour to target the components you a particularly after...
X-ray or gamma-ray lasers could do this, but there are some (severe) practical problems involved. An atom emitting an x-ray photon tends to recoil a bit, so the photon has only part of the energy from the transition - not enough to cause emission of another photon from the next atom, as happens in a laser. And even if you did produce an X-ray laser beam - how would you focus it? Mirrors and lenses don't work that well with x-rays.
I'd think the obvious choice would be to go with a longer wavelength, as opposed to a shorter one. If your laser has a wavelength longer than the reflective surface's thickness (say 1 cm, microwaves), it will pass right through it like it was never there.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
DU rounds (most often as Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Depleted Uranium Discarding Sabot) are indeed nasty. In some cases, radiation measured at the outside of the shipping container exceeds 0.5 mR/Hr.
On the other hand, it has better penetration, at longer ranges, than titanium core ammo.
I imagine the concerns for the folks using this ammo run something like...
1) Do I need the advantages of this ammo enough to load/use it?
2) If so, what is it going to do to my (future progeny)?
I wouldn't even imagine that "what about the locals" even enters into it, particularly if it looks like those same "locals" are shooting at you at the time.
As for the locals resenting the US military on the basis of uranium rounds? Love it if you'd point me to a specifically reported case of it. After all, they have so many other reasons to resent the US military ("Infidels!", for instance) that it's hard to settle on something so particular.
If you're thinking "Iraq", you might consider that's the same place that locals stole radioactive material and used it for decorations, or dumped it in the sewer when they found it was bad for them.
Yes, but anything of the appropriate mass that isn't a black hole is going to be _way_ too large to focus a laser beam. It's just going to block it instead.
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