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Airborne Boeing Laser Blasts Ground Target
coondoggie writes "The airborne military laser which promises to destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage has for the first time actually blown something up. Boeing and the US Air Force today said that on Aug. 30, a C-130H aircraft armed with Boeing's Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) blasted a target test vehicle on the ground for the first time. Boeing has been developing the ATL since 2008 under an Air Force contract worth up to $30 million."
Thank god this circumvents the stipulation in the Geneva Convention against weapons that cause blindness. As the lasers purpose is stated as an anti-vehicular weapon, the side affect of inducing blindness is A-OK.
30 Million is pretty small money for the DOD and for Boeing. There must be more money in this project somewhere.
I suppose that would fall under the category of collateral damage, and they're probably expecting everyone within sight of the target to be, well, "The Enemy(tm)."
The purpose of this tool is war. So, yes.
According to as post on Wikipedia, each COIL burst produces enough energy in a five-second burst to power a typical American household for more than one hour
The purpose of this tool is war. So, yes.
We already have plenty weapons with lots of collateral damage and they're being used, that was never in dispute. The question was how can this be a weapon "with little to no collateral damage" if in fact the reflections do collateral damage. If we didn't care about colleteral we could just throw a nuke at it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I was looking for a good place to crack a "Real Genius" joke. There's already a thread about popcorn... something about a "Real Genius" thought of that...
A mirror surface will harden the target, but even the best mirrors do not reflect all light and a combat laser can still burn a hole in it very fast.
Surprisingly, a mirror wouldn't work nearly as well as cheap glossy white paint.
Mirrors reflect (typically) 60-70% of the light that hits them, turning the rest into heat. Cheap, glossy, exterior-grade white paint often reflects in excess of 90% of the light back.
In other words, mirrors would turn about 4x as much of the light into heat as the white paint will. The difference is that mirrors reflect light without losing its coherency. White paint, on the other hand, just reflects the light in random directions.
Worried about teh lazers? Paint your tin foil hat white!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Did you read your own links? From the second:
Causing blindness is not a combat function of this weaponry; it's a side-effect of the other side trying to subvert the weapon. They were also not specifically designed to have such an effect. Their goal is to blow shit up from the air, with a particular emphasis on fired projectiles but probably used for vehicles as well (as per this example). In most cases there won't even be anybody around to get blinded.
A bullet through the eye can cause blindness too, that doesn't make it banned. Intent matters.
Firing at civilians is illegal too... but dropping a bomb on an enemy that is surrounded by a thousand civilians is perfectly fine.
Creating a blinding weapon is illegal. Creating a destructive weapon that may blind as an accidental side-effect is perfectly fine.
By 'perfectly fine', I mean within the terms of international agreements on the conduct of war.
Depends if the reflection deflects perfectly or if it bounces off a rounded angle and deforms. If it's rounded it will lose nearly all of it's power at distances exceeding "half the fucking planet".
How do you kill that which has no life?
Close you missed the some key aspects of the article 5.
"Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.
In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be."
A protected person detained as a spy or saboteur. Non uniformed terrorists do not fall under the "protected person" definition. So they are not protected by the GC.
Boo, Fuckity, Hoo. War is SUPPOSED to be inhumane, SUPPOSED to be degrading, SUPPOSED to be horrible.
It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee, Statement at the Battle of Fredericksburg (13th December 1862)
US-Confederate general (1807 - 1870)
All the people crying OMG WE HAVE INTERNATIONAL LAWS AGAINST DOING THIS AND THIS AND THIS are the kind of people who don't understand this fact. The more horrible war is, the less likely it will happen. The population of the west today just doesn't get that war is ugly, they've pacified themselves culturally to believe that war is NOT the ugly horrible thing it always was, and always will be, and seem to think that OMG A CIVILIAN DIED THIS IS AN OUTRAGEEEEEEEEEEEE is how you should respond to finding out 20 enemy fighters died...but 1 civilian did as well cause the enemy was hiding in a family's house. I don't really care that I'll get modded as flamebait/troll because this is the fact of life in western society. They've been pussified since WW2 and can't handle a real war. God forbid the chinese or russians ever decide to have a real war with another country, the citizenry of the west will collectively shit their pants and break down into tears at the 'atrocities' they'll hear about that happen in what a real war should/does look like.
The laser itself needs several small laser-quality mirrors. The target would need a much larger quantity of the same mirrors, and in the same spectrum as the weapon. A plain bathroom mirror is not smooth enough to reflect that much without those imperfections absorbing a good bit of energy. If the laser really does use 'as much power as a household over an hour' then we are talking about 10kwh. 3.6E7 joules, over how ever large the surface area of the 'impact' point is, and you end up with a lot of heat in that 5 second burst.
Nope, that is definitely is going to take high quality mirrors to protect. For a moving target, say a rocket that is going to undergo high G acceleration, those mirrors will probably not survive launch. Other mobile targets, maybe. Buildings, well, putting meter tall neon letters on the roof saying 'this building is important' would be just as conspicuous. Mirrors, meet Predator. I think it has 500lbs of some iron that it would like you to meet.
Compared to a missile, this does little to no collateral damage, because most targets don't walk around wearing mirror-covered suits. Do you understand now?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The article says that the the ABL uses a COIL laser which has an output wavelength of 1.315 Âm, the wavelength of transition of atomic iodine. What reflects light well at that infrared wavelength? Gold. Yup, just plate your missile with gold and it might be able to survive hits from a laser like this. They probably use gold on the mirror(s) used to aim this laser. The reflectivity of gold at 1.315 microns is about 98%.
So if this really is a 1MW laser, then only 20kWatts of energy gets through. Plus, the beam diverges, so at a long distance the beam diameter might be something like 1meter. The USAF probably can't even run this laser for very long or else it will self destruct. So, 20kWatts of energy that is pulsed for a few seconds over a 1meter area? You can design a missile to withstand that. Just plate it with gold, and put on some aerodynamic heat sinks and/or shield and/or insulation.
"Uh, no, only Americans have convinced themselves that due to not having a war on their own soil in 150 years. Europeans (both West and East) are damn fucking well aware of how nasty and horrible war is."
The United States had war on its soil until 1890 (119 years ago), mass terrorism in 1993, 1995 and all out war in 2001. Or don't you remember the 3000 people dying back then?