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Airborne Boeing Laser Blasts Ground Target

Posted by samzenpus on from the lazlo-approved dept.

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."

3 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. Still a chemical laser by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's still a chemical laser. It's quite possible to make chemical lasers powerful enough to be used as weapons, but so far the equipment has been too big to be very useful. The Mobile Tactical High-Energy Laser is able to shoot down artillery shells and small rockets, but the equipment takes up three trailers and costs too much.

    The solid state laser people are catching up. The current output record is around 100 KW. This is enough to be marginally useful for anti-aircraft use. Around a megawatt, things start to get militarily interesting.

    Cooling is a huge problem for the solid state devices, though. With the chemical lasers, most of the heat is dumped with the spent chemicals. For the solid state devices, the gear has to be cooled, and efficiency is only around 20%.

  2. Re:no collateral damage by religious+freak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."
    ~William Tecumseh Sherman

    More quotes...

    --
    If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
  3. Actually the first SUCCESSFUL attempt... by SunSpot505 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My company's developer had a side job as "computer support engineer" for this group a couple month ago (translate: 45/hr to configure software and as a human "fail-safe"). They actually did the first test fire a month or two back.

    It was only half successful.

    It did destroy the target which he described as a "basketball sized item" while traveling at ~450mph or whatever a C-130 cruises at (not supersonic). Unfortunately one of the chemicals has a ph of 17 and is stored at 2500 psi. When the tank developed a leak everyone had to don gas masks, move the cockpit and then make an emergency landing before it ate the plane. A full hazmat crew run by the company had to be flown in from Albuquerque to run decontamination.

    It makes me think that perhaps if they just shot those chemicals rather than the laser it might be just as effective and quite a bit cheaper.