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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."
Someone find the house full of Popped Corn!!!
--- no sig to see here... move along.
Stop playing with yourself!!
So how is it working against mirrors?
They missed and cooked their server instead.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Shhhh, it's only a model.
Table-ized A.I.
30 Million is pretty small money for the DOD and for Boeing. There must be more money in this project somewhere.
Even if it's just an artist's conception, there's always a picture. No exceptions.
(If there isn't, make one)
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%.
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
Wow, according to the article, the laser is supersonic. Good to know.
... to a size I can strap onto my sharks, since I haven't yet figured out how to grow them to the size of C-130s.
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.
From WP:
The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) program is a US military program to mount a high energy laser damage weapon on an aircraft, initially the AC-130 gunship, for use against ground targets in urban or other areas where minimizing collateral damage is important. The laser will be a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL). It is expected to have a tactical range of approximately twenty kilometers and weigh about 5,000â"7,000 kg. This program is distinct from the Airborne Laser, which is a much larger system designed to destroy enemy missiles in the boost phase.
and yes, we do obey international convention. The treaties say that no weapon can be designed for the purpose of taking out somebodies vision. These lasers are NOT designed for that purpose. Just like many bombs are not designed to kill, there is collateral damage. The ATL was designed to DESTROY a target similar to how a bomb would work. Likewise, the ABL is designed to collapse a sidewall of a missile. If somebody 'hardens' it causes the collateral damage, how is that America's fault?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
From TFA:
Both systems employ a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) that is made by combining a bunch of nasty chemicals - potassium, peroxide, chlorine, iodine and other stuff and then fired at supersonic speeds.
I'm pretty sure the laser fires at the speed of light which I guess is technically supersonic. Correct but a retarded way to explain technology the author clearly doesn't understand.
Then TFA follows up the next sentence with the following gem:
According to as post on Wikipedia...
So Wikipedia is a source of journalistic research now? Oh dear... This guy isn't even smart enough to hide the fact he used Wikipedia as a primary source AND he has a typo in the same sentence. Is he trying to get on the Slashdot editing staff?
Known as the SWEEPER, which is wicked short for short-range wide-field-of-view extremely-agile electronically-steered photonic emitters
"Wicked short"? Is this some teenager from Boston writing this? Not according to the picture but the author certainly writes like a high school freshman.
Why land size and not population? Emissions are fundamentally related to electricity consumption (when produced by coal and oil plants) and gasoline use. Each of these are proportional to population. All else being equal, if the population doubles the electricity consumption doubles. Population density plays a role, but only by making mass transit somewhat less effective.
Land size doesn't seem relevant. Doubling land size doesn't affect electricity consumption, and it (rightly) doesn't affect a per capita estimate. If the U.S. had the same emissions as today but a population of exactly 1 person, your metric would imply that the situation hadn't changed at all. But it would, of course. That 1 person would be using up fossil fuels at a rate 300,000,000 times faster than the average American. Doesn't that seem like something that you'd want your metric to be able to measure?
.... with the laser pointers: We're shooting back.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
This was the power of the aiming laser, not the main laser.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Because if it hits you anywhere near your eyes, the hole burned through your head will kill you. Since you'll only have a fraction of a second that you've been blinded due to your eyes melting, I really don't think you'll get a chance to file any sort of charge.