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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.
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?
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
Sorry for the self-reply, but my brain's still spinning. White Sands missile range had some success shooting down artillery shells, but it had a hell of a time with it. Basically they just spin to damned fast to heat up any single point enough to cause the device to fail.
I am not an aeronautic engineer, but would spinning a bomb be efficient/effective? What about missiles?
Probably more difficult than a reflective spray, but spinning could be predicted and could still have a competent guidance system with existing targeting methods.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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
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
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.
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.
Fit them with semiconductor lasers and they'd be LED Zeppelins.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
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.
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