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US Congress Funds Laser Weapons
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post reports that the US Congress is funding laser weapons for use in the near future. Low-power lasers called 'dazzlers' are already being used in Iraq to temporarily reduce a person's vision. High-power laser weapons would allow precision attacks that minimize civilian casualties. From the Post: 'The science board said tactical laser systems could be developed for broader use because they "enable precision ground attack to minimize collateral damage in urban conflicts." The report suggested, for example, that "future gunships could provide extended precision lethality and sensing." The board also proposed using lasers to protect against rockets, artillery, mortars and unmanned airborne vehicles by blasting them out of the sky. Last month, the Army awarded Boeing $36 million to continue development of a high-energy laser mounted on a truck that could hit overhead targets. But deployment is not expected until 2016, even if all goes well.'"
Do mirrors work against high-energy lasers? Say, the kind powerful enough to fry a person?
Actually the Geneva Convention has nothing about weapon types. Geneva Convention covers the treatment of POW's and civilians. It's the Hague Convention of 1907 that covered weapon types.
It's not legal to shoot a human target with a 50 caliber sniper rifle. However, it is legal to shoot the helmet he's wearing.
No, mirrors will not work. The weapon will use internally a wide beam that is just barely under the intensity level that will damage the weapon's internal mirrors. At the barrel, the focusing mirror will focus the wide beam down to a searing pin-point on the hapless target. The focused beam will be more than intense enough to defeat any mirror the target might be wearing. I have some notes here: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3l.html#laserpistol
"All I wanted to say is that most of the money tends to go for military research."
Do you have a reference for that by chance? I read this claim all over but whenever I go looking for numbers I can't find them. My impression is military research gets more _direct_ funding, but by funding the US university system, the amount of non-military research indirectly funded is higher. But again, I can't find the numbers either way.
Also, I know you hear it a lot, but a lot of the technology that makes the modern world what it is has its roots in direct military funding. And that means it's not a priori a bad thing. You have to look at every case.
The only things they can hit are robot troopers. A good guy may occasionally get hit, but only in the arm.
Only bad guys have robot troopers; therefore the bad guys always lose.
All guns - from M16s to pistols to artillery - fire lasers.
Good guys get blue lasers, bad guys get red lasers.
See previous post for approved battle locations.
As a kid, I always wondered - light moves so fast that it's (for all intents and purposes) not really affected by gravity at all. It would seem like this means that things 50-100 miles away from a battlefield could be hit by all of the missed laser shots before the earth curved away enough that they passed into space. And as they left orbit, what sorts of guarantees do we have that they wouldn't hit planes or low-orbit satellites? Since light moves very quickly, nobody would be able to see or dodge the laser before it hit them.
I can see the application of air-to-ground laser strikes, but it seems like the potential for collateral damage with any other form of laser weapons is huge.
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
Next time someone bitches that "Fusion power is perpetually 10 year away from now", remember that instead of developing lasers for that kind of application, money has steered research in the fields of lasers toward building DeathStar lookalikes.
I don't know how much funding has gone into DeathStar lasers, but I know of at least one facility where we've spent more than $4 billion on fusion-friendly lasers. I suspect the fact that it's 5 years behind (on a project that was supposed to run less than a decade) and almost 4x over budget has soured potential funding for similar efforts.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I remember hearing somewhere that (as of Vietnam-era?) the target of at least small-arms fire is to wound, not kill; the reason being that a wounded soldier will take both himself plus one or two buddies out of combat (to get him back to a medic), whereas *killing* someone will only take that person out of combat.
I don't know how accurate this is, as I am not in the military, but the reduction in ammunition size (from .30 in WWII era to .22 recently, IIRC) seems to support this. (Yes, you can also carry more ammunition when it is smaller and lighter, so there may be other benefits as well...)
Any other comments supporting / refuting this?
Cheers
Does this also apply to the non-visible light based lasers?
The lasers from previous research didn't burn, so much as pulse, causing small vaporizations on the surface hit at many hertz (times per second, not wavelength). These small explosions had a cumulative effect, fragmenting the structure, or in the case of watery (biological) material, causing a large rupture. Effects are similar to a bullet, except that there is higher accuracy, and less chance of ricochet or other misfire. The drawback has always been : Geneva conventions, Reliablility (glass tube lasers of the 80s-90s were junk), and the huge power requirements. Nowadays, capacitors are getting a lot better, as are batteries, and laser diodes are quite reliable (comparatively). I think there's a future here, and it might be a good improvement. Whatever it takes to get the US Army to stop throwing around depeleted uranium.
Or if they've set up near a culturally significant mosque. For political reasons, you don't want to drop a JDAM on their equipment.
Yeah, the US military is known to respect culturally significant buildings. Right.