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Laser Weapon Shoots Down Airplanes In Test
airshowfan writes "Boeing's directed-energy weapons (a.k.a. frickin' laser beams) have been getting some attention lately. The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) is a C-130 that famously burned a hole through a car's hood, and the YAL-1 AirBorne Laser is a 747 that shoots a laser from its nose that is powerful enough to bring down an ICBM. But even cooler is the Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments (MATRIX), a laser that is mounted on a truck (which probably costs less than a 747, but who knows) and that can shoot down small aircraft, as shown in the picture on this article. (The Laser Avenger supposedly also has this capability). We live in the future!"
So when do our soldiers get to stop dying because of homemade street bombs?
Yeah, but if you make your plane shiny and reflective, you make it a lot easier to target with other weapons, like missiles.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
So when do our soldiers get to stop dying because of homemade street bombs?
When we stop invading other countries?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Let me know when my government learns to do anything effectively besides killing
Yes, IIRC they said it would take billions of dollars and 30 years to make and wouldn't be effective against ICBMs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Wouldn't making your plane or missile shiny / reflective defeat these things pretty easily?
The answer is no, because no shiny surface has 100% reflectivity (your bathroom mirror probably tops out at around 85%): some of the light will always penetrate to the base layer, and if the surface is being hit by a megawatt weaponized laser, it'll just burn straight through.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
A laser that powerful would convey enough impulse to make a hole without needing to heat the target.
What mechanism would cause that type of effect?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Could this Laser help with refining metals on the Moon? Could I use this machine to smooth a road, or carve a tunnel? Outside of making the Bad Guys day miserable, what OTHER uses could this tool have?
It's quite easy. Make sure that you have a defense contractor in every congressional district. Then you get to play the "jobs" card when someone tries to stop an idiotic waste of resources such as this.
Dwight Eisenhower must be turning in his grave now that the Military Industrial Complex that he warned of has come to pass.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
The goal for the 747-mounted laser is to shoot down missiles on the way up (when they are over bad guys) versus on the way down (like the Patriot missile). That's why it's on a plane, not a truck.
Well, the fact that they are over the people who just launched the missle is a side benefit, and doesn't really factor into why they are shooting it at that stage.
In the primary phase, the missile is pretty limited in what it can do. It has to gain altitude and speed, and really isn't/can't be built to perform evasion at that point. Combined with the fact that the earlier you hit it, the more combustible it actually is.
On the way down, what you are faced with is a VERY fast moving object (assuming you don't target the countermeasures) that has already demonstrated that it can resist the high temperatures of re-entry and consists of very little in the way of combustible materials. It can also employ a variety of measures to alter its trajectory (more than on the way up).
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Czarangelus...
I always wondered where you would pop up after you were banned on Fark. (A pretty impressive feat in its own right). Needless to say, you certainly haven't stopped with the flamebait.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Once everybody dies, there will be no more evil. Problem solved.
The heat which boils away the paint surely also destroys the reflective properties of the material beyond.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
instead of a police action where every activity is on film or subject to investigation.
I doubt we could have won WW2 under the rules we use now, people no longer have the stomach to do what needs to be done.
I know that your point is true, but we also lose soldiers to bombs elsewhere. We also manage to lose many times more to drunk driving yet we turn a blind eye to that.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Will will stop invading when they promise to stop trying things like hijacking planes and flying them into really tall buildings to kill a few thousand civilians.
What country were those hijackers from, again?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
$1M missile vs firing a laser. I do not know how much it costs to fire a chemical laser but I bet it is a lot cheaper than firing a missile.
"You can actually accomplish that with plated layers of reflective material and dialectric material. However, all I then have to do is count on the explosion of the topmost dialectric layer to destroy the reflective layers beneath it.
Fixed.
Moderators: Parent may not understand the answer to his/her question, but that doesn't make parent a troll. WTF?
Parent: The mirror won't reflect 90% for very long. Not long enough for it to matter where the reflected energy goes, I expect. Perhaps collateral damage to other mirrors in the area; or, more seriously, I suppose it could damage the vision of anyone who was looking at the target from the wrong angle.
Which future is it?
I suggest you read George Orwell's 1984, to find the answer to that question.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Destruction is easy. I'm not impressed. We pissed away our wealth in two wars. Destruction is easy. A bunch of brainwashed flunkies brought down 220 stories of creation. Creation is hard. Destruction is easy. Every day there are people wasting the precious gift of life, drinking, shooting up, shooting. Easy. Destruction. I'm not impressed.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The laser *ITSELF* has two mirrors.
Why doesn't it burn?
So you want to make a radar resitant stealth supersonic high heat coating that burns away cleanly.
Yes I said that right. Supersonic speeds produce friction which make heat. So by design you have a stealth coating that ablates when ever you travel fast.
Something tells me you haven't seen all the angles yet.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I think the moderators wanted to see a MS cluster.
With the world economy in the toilet, all-time record in unemployment, massive desertification, energy shortage, more than 1 billion starving, epidemics of malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis, global warming, what we really really need is the ultimate super cool weapon.
Not that I believe your premise, but what better time to have a superweapon than when other countries start getting desperate enough to attack?
You can shoot down UAVs with this thing? WOOOOOW. Current UAVs are the short fat pimply kids of military aviation: they're slow and stupid, and you can shoot them down with conventional missiles, antiaircraft artillery, or a well-aimed fart.
This is why we only use them in asymmetric warfare situations, where the bad guys are armed with nothing but Ak-47s. They wouldn't last 30 seconds in the airspace of any competent superpower.
Designing a zillion dollar laser system to shoot them down is a pointless waste of money.
On the way down, what you are faced with is a VERY fast moving object (assuming you don't target the countermeasures) that has already demonstrated that it can resist the high temperatures of re-entry and consists of very little in the way of combustible materials. It can also employ a variety of measures to alter its trajectory (more than on the way up).
A few minor points:
1. It can resist predictable high temperatures, for a limited amount of time, if I heat up part of the RV that isn't designed to get quite as hot, I can cause the whole thing to tumble and fail.
2. It doesn't have to explode, I just have to make it slightly less aerodynamic, and let friction do the rest.
3. So called "Maneuvering RVs" don't change trajectory all that much. Mostly they make very fine adjustments so they hit their target, not to avoid things coming at them.
It goes like this: No concievable missile shield could shoot down any significant number of incoming missiles. The Russians would always be able to overwhelm the defenses with shear numbers, making the system worthless.
Totally true, if you only have a few lasers. And that's all we have now at the moment. It's worth mentioning though that originally back in the 50's we only had a few transistors and they were the size of dixie cups.
Now I'm not saying that laser equipment will scale like that, but I am saying that it will scale to some degree. Maybe there is a Mitch Taylor-esque lab coat out there somewhere who is going to figure out something better. In fact I'm sure there is.
We're just now getting to the point where lasers are becoming battlefield possibilities. These are essentially laser flint lock rifles. But - enough R&D and eventually we'll move up to six shooters, gatling guns, full auto machine guns, Phalanx anti missile gun points... All it takes is successive small improvements, and you can't get those without the original flint lock gun. As they say, the rest is details.
Put a few hundred planes in the air that have increased effectiveness laser systems with millisecond reload and a few hundred shot capability and suddenly you might have that workable shield.
As it is today, maybe the scenario plays out the way you suggest. But that's only if the tech stands still and never improves. And it's a sure bet that it won't.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
...unless it's raining. Or cloudy. Or foggy. Or dusty. Or smoggy. Or snowing.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
...if you dump enough energy into the air near an infinitely-shiny object to explosively transform the nearby air into a plasma, the shiny object still probably gets a big dent in it. Probably even more so if the shiny object is supersonic.
I remember reading a SciFi book once about war in 2020 where the new apache like helicopter had smoke chaff of dust born particles to scatter the laser light of attacking craft trying to melt them.
I think that would be the only reasonable defense.
Of course you really wouldn't be able to see anything yourself and if it was really windy or you were moving really fast it wouldn't work.
Nor would it really be feasible with the whole turbulence from the chopper itself... Well it was an ok book.
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You can disprove his assertions, or you can just be a dick.