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Airborne Laser Successfully Tracks, Hits Missile
fructose writes "The Airborne Laser managed to acquire, track, and illuminate a test missile a few days ago. According to the press release, the Boeing plane 'used its infrared sensors to find a target missile launched from San Nicolas Island, Calif ... issued engagement and target location instructions to the beam control/fire control system ... fired its two solid-state illuminator lasers to track the target and ... fired a surrogate high-energy laser at the target, simulating a missile intercept.' The sensors on board the missile confirmed the 'hit.' Michael Rinn, ABL's program director, said, 'Pointing and focusing a laser beam on a target that is rocketing skyward at thousands of miles per hour is no easy task, but the Airborne Laser is uniquely able to do the job.' The next steps will be to test the high-power laser at full strength in flight and do a complete system test later this year. Its success or failure will determine whether the project gets canceled. Looks like the Real Genius fans out there are finally living the dream."
Which is generally isn't above the clouds in the stratosphere.
Billion dollar laser tag. They didn't destroy the missile. The missile's laser tag vest scored the hit.
They've proven that standard mirror materials will ablate and burn up very quickly with this laser power. Even rotating the missile does not help. The missile body still heats up significantly.
The laser optics in the airborne laser probably have to be made out of narrow band reflectors which in practice can be made more than 99.999% reflective to a laser. It would be easy to slightly change the laser wavelength and optics (a few nm's perhaps) and the missile would absorb again.
Doesn't matter, apparently. The total amount of energy in the laser overheats the reflective surface long before a significant amount of the light is reflected. One of the problems of aiming high powered lasers is that the mirrors that guide the beam melt.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/star-wars-fake-fooled-the-world-1461979.html
I see a press release from the people who claim to have pulled it off... which doesn't mean a thing.
Nothing, in theory. Just like there's nothing in theory that says the rocket can't have a zillion other systems designed to defeat this laser. In practice, however, the answer is weight. A rocket's weight is around 80-90% fuel with payload being from 2-5%. A small increase in payload weight leads to a great increase in the rocket's size and fuel load.
A rocket designer ends up having to make a series of compromises between the strength of the rocket itself, the payload and the range. If you want to protect your rocket you're going to have to give up payload, give up range or increase rocket size, all of which make them less useful as weapons.
you can always track a missile optically, or via infra red, or.. etc.
as for 'pointed in the right direction fast enough'... see Phalanx and Goalkeeper systems for some seriously-fast-aiming systems. As long as you can track the missile itself*, you can aim something at it. Lasers come with an advantage over the above systems... the laser tends to travel in a fairly straight line, bullets.. not so much. Even with atmospheric distortions, you should get much better aim with a laser than with bullets.
* As for tracking a missile - keep in mind that this system is intended to be used from some distance. Tracking a missile going 'thousands of miles per hour' just means having to rotate the system (fractions) of degrees. Think of regular ol' human camera operators tracking the space shuttle, which goes much faster than a typical missile, and having no problems doing so. It becomes easier the further away it is, in fact. (well, easiest is when it's still sitting on the launch pad, but you get the idea.)
this technology is totally useless in its current state. high power flying lasers will never find a use without a high power flying shark to combine it with.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Wouldn't Boeing have a lot of incentive to hype this to ensure that the contract got renewed for further research? It's possible that they set the bar for success so low and/or made the experiment so contrived that they couldn't help but achieve it.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
So how will this anti-ICBM technology be used against a terrorist carrying these suitcase a-bombs that are said to exist?
The problem is, ss soon as we get a 100% effective missile shield, enemies will find a way to deliver nuclear armaments. It wouldn't even be that hard. They can just park a ship off a Manhattan and light one off if they wanted to.
This whole idea of shooting down missiles is a waste of fucking time and money. If we gave the money we were spending on this bullshit to the countries to foster good will, we'd be a lot better off.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Changing the output frequency of a giant high energy chemical laser is extremely tricky. Frequency doubling demands a very pure coherence to get good efficiency, and even then "good" in this context means above 50% power converted to the new frequency. With a weapons laser, you're going to have a hell of a cooling problem in the converting medium. Then again, if reflective anti-laser coatings become common, it shouldn't be too difficult to add on a free electron laser system to burn off the mirror layer before the main beam strikes. A free electron laser can change operating frequencies trivially, just by adjusting its internal magnetic field.
It is merely a single contrarian idea. The laser tests would be visible from orbit - and frequency/energy could be sampled as simply by mere spectroscopy: the interaction between radiation and matter as a function of wavelength and easily measured. Displaced / superheated air will reveal the operating wavelength and energy density of the laser.
If we are talking dye lasers or tunable cavity lasers - you still have massive problems dealing with the excitation as frequencies change. It might well prove to be too complex to fit aboard an aircraft.
I built the Scientific American CO2 Laser project back in the 1960s - it was impressive and it could shatter glass at more than 100 ft. Still, the energy necessary to power an airborne device is going to have to be stored - probably in banks of capacitors.
Realistically, an aircraft mounted rail gun might serve just as well and be far less complex to deal with (absent the effects on the aircraft of the massive magnetic impulse).
Do you work hard to be this wrong?
The Germans have soldiers in in Afghanistan.
If you want an oil leaking POS british car feel free to buy one. If I wanted that kinda junk I would by a GM vehicle. I buy cars not from folks I like, but from people who build good cars. This is called capitalism, you should check it out it is a great system.
You are a fool if you think we have "friends", or if we should give those folks free money. The system you propose is no more than a hair's breadth from corporatism. Your appeals to nationalism are would make Mussolini proud.
I surely hope this is not the view center-right in this country.
All of the "obvious" solutions like you mention generally will not work. The power levels for the lasers are specifically designed to defeat the known technical counter-measures available to a missile designer. This is why laser weapons have a power rating orders of magnitude greater than is strictly required in most conventional circumstances; they are obviating counter-measures before anyone tries to develop them. Among other things, they are designed to ablate the target faster than you can reflect it or physically spin it.
This is also the reason a lot of US military research focuses on hyper-kinetic weapons these days; good ones can defeat all plausible molecular armor and even weak ones can defeat all current armor. The power levels of US weapon systems are getting to the point where any passive counter-measure would have to be very exotic.
This is based on a media-created myth. The US has never had GPS-guided weaponry, precisely because GPS can be jammed. Therefore, it would not have done much good to have a GPS jammer beyond attracting the attention of missiles designed to destroy RF emitters.
The primary guidance mechanism usually mislabeled as "GPS guided" is ultra-precise inertial guidance, which can't be jammed at all short of altering the physics of the universe. These inertial guidance systems can optionally accept micro-corrections from a GPS input, but only within the (classified) error bounds of the inertial system which are already known to be very small. If the GPS signal deviates from the inertial guidance, the GPS is assumed to be compromised and ignored.
The "GPS-guided weapon" thing is one of many myths about US weapon systems perpetuated by the media. The US never has and never will produce a GPS-guided weapon.