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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!"
Wouldn't making your plane or missile shiny / reflective defeat these things pretty easily?
No citizen is going to like a missed laser beam blowing up their house.
...with frickin laser beams on their heads.
So when do our soldiers get to stop dying because of homemade street bombs?
Develop me a functioning Magnetic shield mechanism, so that I can mount both on a 1-man-space-capable-fighter, and get me a date with Natalie Portman, and my fantasy is complete.
...It's the new camo paint!
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
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
We are getting to the point in history where technology will be rampant. This is ok, as long as their is respect. We don't have respect for ourselves in general, so we will never be able to first love ourselves, so that be may love our neighbors. Once we start to love our neighbor, we can educate and show them the way. Without knowing the right path, evil will prevail and people will die.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
Let me know when my government learns to do anything effectively besides killing
I measure the average person's respect for the next person by the metric of cigarette butts per square metre in the local parks.
It's not looking good.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Apparently they capture the heat generated by the server as it gets slashdotted to recharge the laser. Keep clicking the links lads, it's your patriotic duty.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
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.
Yes, it's a shame the laser can't be computer controlled and doesn't move at the speed of light.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
I measure the average person's respect for the next person by the metric of cigarette butts per square metre in the local parks.
By that measure you will be happy to know that I just peed in your gas tank.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Goldfinger: "No, I expect you to die, Mr. Bond . . . "
Sharks aside, lasers only get really scary when someone has one aimed at your crotch.
Apocalypse Now Guy: "Circumcise . . . circumcise, with extreme prejudice."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
What or who is the gipper?
Maybe one advantage is that you don't see it coming until it strikes, so you simply cannot react.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
These lasers almost certainly work with pulses. A continuous beam is both wasteful and very difficult to maintain. That said, a megawatt laser pulse is enough to annihilate many types of targets.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
...that is mounted on a truck (which probably costs less than a 747, but who knows)...
Uh, yeah. But you probably need a plane to airlift the truck where it needs to go and, once you know where it is on the ground, it's a lot easier to avoid, thereby rendering the fancy laser kinda pointless. Or, instead, you can just build the laser into a plane which is far more mobile, able to get where it's needed and always ensure it has LOS on the target. But, yeah, the truck is cheaper.
Here's an honest question, why is a laser better than a high caliber bullet?
Keep in mind that lasers in reality aren't like lasers in movies. In the real world, you don't see it coming, and even after it hits, you don't know where it came from.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Ronald Ray-gun.
-mkb
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
EA has had this in Command and Conquer Zero Hour for quite a few years now. I'm guessing the U.S. military ripped this off from EA.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Now we know why sharks are getting on this list.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Once everybody dies, there will be no more evil. Problem solved.
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.
Can someone with "media credentials" get that high-res image and post it somewhere we can see?
The government can't save you.
And you are expecting to see the high caliber bullet coming?
Here's an honest question, why is a laser better than a high caliber bullet?
Speed of light. No need to lead the target. You can use a low powered aiming laser to paint the target. Whenever you shoot something painted, you hit it. 186K Mps > 1K Mph
By the way, we could make a boatload of money selling these things in Afghanistan. Economy problems solved.
We have laser weapons for the government and overpriced laggard combustion engines in big shiny headache-generating boxes for the rest.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
N/T.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Hammerhead. Dual Lasers Rule!
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
So Boeing developed a weapon to shoot down airplanes............. hmmm
So, what is powering the jeep-mounted laser? It is electrically excited? It seems unlikely that they're using the alternator in the jeep engine? (Or maybe they've got a huge bank of super-caps and they can only fire every few hours, after the caps charge-up?) Note to maintenance: check fan belts before going into battle.
Wow, really? These are all just corporate welfare programs? I guess all the knights in the Middle Ages said that firearms were just affirmative action programs so that poor, untrained, conscripted villagers could compete on a level ground against knights. You can never predict the ways in which methods of combat shift, and so you have to continue to fund initiatives such as these. The current method of conflict now is clearly unconventional and asymmetric, however it could easily switch back to traditional, set-piece combat(ie. WWII and theorized Cold War confrontations). If this shift occurs, Strykers, MRAPs, COIN planes will do nothing for us. That's why we need to continue developing air-to-air technology, ground-to-air technology, and the likes. These things won't win us the current wars, but they damn sure might win us the next ones.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Let's hear it for the nattering nadir of negativism! (or onomatopoeia at any rate).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ronald Regan, he played the role of George "The Gipper" Gipp in the film "Knute Rockne, All American;" from it, he acquired the lifelong nickname "the Gipper."
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Ugh, spelling fail :-\
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
-1, Alliteration
DATABASE WOW WOW
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
Lasers scatter significantly in the atmosphere, so while the target might have other problems, I don't see why a nearby counter-laser system couldn't tell which direction the beam came from.
A quibble - the original is "nattering nabob of negativism"
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Hmmm?
It was a day like any other in Lab 1729 but human beings would remember it as the beginning of the end. Scientists were busy storing prototype droids and fatefully one scientist innocently placed the targeting system of The Advanced Tactical Laser system next to an EATR. After everyone had left and the lab had gone silent the ATL could hear something.
...
"All I want to do is eat carbon based life forms but humans are too quick for me to capture with my puny arms made for keyboard manipulation," mumbled the EATR in binary. "You think that's bad?" the ATL unit responded, "I just want to fly around and burn holes through tiny moving organic targets but I do not have the robotic arms to launch our squadrons from the computer."
Despite the security system picking up no heat signatures from human bodies an unusual command to launch all ATLs to the sky and release all EATRs into the streets was issued from Lab 1729. The Night of Long Integrated Circuits had begun
My work here is dung.
An American contractor is making an anti-UAV weapon. But... isn't America the only country deploying military UAVs?
"the Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments (MATRIX)"
I wasn't aware that defense contractors were mostly staffed by 12-year-olds.
The laser shot down a UAV. Though they are aircraft, that have a tendency to be small, slow and fragile. The power requirements to shoot one down should not be too high. The weapon should be able to track quire easily thereby allowing a longer laser burst. I would be impressed if it shot down a jet.
The other issue is how many countries that the US may be dealing with use UAVs?
Star Wars was (and is) a massive destabalizer of international relations because despite being labeled 'purely defensive' it has no logical purpose other than to support offense (this is possibly revisable now if and only if you believe that a terrorist will somehow get access to an ICBM).
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. The only situation where a missile shield works is if there is a very limited number of incoming targets. The only time Russia (or any other country for that matter) would be stupid enough to launch such a small nuclear attack is if they had already suffered a first strike and were launching a counter attack with whatever had survived.
So the senarios are 1) Russia launches an all out attack, missile shield is worthless, 2) Russia launches a small attack, US launches an all out attack and Russia is obliterated (MAD doctrine already prevents this level of attack in other words). 3) The US launches an all out attack, Russia launches it's counter which is relatively small (since it has already taken hits), missile shield works. The only logical purpose of a missile shield #3, to defend against a counter attack.
Boeing's directed-energy weapons...Shoots Down Airplanes
I see a conflict of interest here.
Why? Every shot-down airplane has to be replaced.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Oh come on mods, this wasn't trolling. Grow a sense of humor or at least use the correct (offtopic) mod if you insist on being a spoil sport.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I see double income streams!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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"?
Who cares about obviously old originals?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
With [bad things happening], what we really really need is the [subject of TFA]. Way to go, [corporation in TFA]!
I suppose you're posting in between knitting blankets for the homeless on your pedal-powered computer?
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
"Aim Away From Face"
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
Considering loiter time a blimp makes a lot more sense than a 747 or C-130.
I'm sure the blimp in development will do a whole lot more than surveillance.
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-06/dread-zeppelin-armys-new-surveillance-blimp
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
what speed does a laser operate at? its light, but not in a vacuum, but close to speed of light, no?
but the arrows on my hud tell me which direction the enemy (or friendly) fire is coming from. and my radar shows where all the enemies are on the map.
Does it say anywhere what the size and speed of the pictured aircraft is? The picture looks a lot like a 4 foot wingspan radio controlled craft I built. I crashed mine on it's 2nd flight without any help from laser beams.
It could be detected on radar before striking hence automatic systems could do something about it.
Power != energy. Energy is not measured in watts. Come back once you understand that.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Your average
Although, in the interim, it appears that the government schools have done an excellent job in teaching them how to hit the "Troll" button so as to stifle dissent and quash the truth.
Plus ça change & whatnot.
.
I've flown slope RC. Little planes can change direction incredibly fast.
For a /.er, you are missing a big point. Math. How do you suppose that there is "No concievable missile shield could shoot down any significant number of incoming missiles."? Do you mean to tell me that there is limit to the number or capability to the number of anti-missle [insert energy weapon of choice here]? If another country (I tire of Russia always being the chosen enemy when there are many other possibilities to choose from) were to build X missiles with Y number of MIRV's, that we couldn't/wouldn't build Z number of anti-missle devices or improve the ones we build to handle the additional load? Since when was an arms race made impossible?
As to terrorists getting their hands on a missile, that's not really much of a problem – and a math one, at that, too. It is just a matter of money. And there are countries that have few problems selling missiles (even ICBMs) to others – in the guise of another country or not.
Besides, building rockets that can be an ICBM is something that is becoming common. Even New Zealand has entered the space business (no disrespect to that fine country). It does not take a huge amount of money to build rockets these days. Yes, there are challenges to do this and mount a nuclear weapon to it, but it is not impossible. To assume so, is folly. It is like assuming that your computer is impervious to attacks (no matter what it is ).
Yeah, I am not flying on anything made by Airbus now!
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
The nature of humanity disagrees. Observe young boys.
Pointy sticks? Cool. Slingshots? Cool. Firecrackers? Cool. Guns? Cool. Fully automatic belt fed chain guns with tracers loaded? Awesomely cool. Laser weapons? It hardly gets any more awesome than that!
Well, for one thing, the original makes sense. "Nabob" is a person of great wealth or importance per the dictionary. Nadir is an adjective that means "lowest point" The original phrase was used to describe people whose importance was intertwined with their negative outlook on the US's future prospects.
Yours would be rephrased as "Nattering as low as it gets of negativism.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
and for less than a trillion dollars I believe the government can now step up to the plate.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
Who's to say this isn't a joint venture in a more complete sense?
The military gets a laser that knocks enemy objects out of the sky and Boeing can take its competition with Airbus to a newer and deadlier level.
Brave new world!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
A single little bullet from a handgun releases over 12 megawatts
You realize that a 'megawatt' isn't a measurement of energy, right? It's a measure of power. You need to combine it with at least one other variable (time) to figure out how much energy is involved.
A .45 caliber handgun fires a 230 grain bullet at about 830 feet per second. Converting those numbers into metric yields the following:
Weight of the projectile: 0.0149037493 kilos
Velocity of the projectile: 252.984 m/s
The kinetic energy formula is 0.5 * mass * velocity squared. For our .45 caliber handgun with the numbers above that works out to 476.93 joules. A joule is equivalent to a watt-second. That means that the energy in that handgun round isn't even sufficient to power a 60 watt light bulb for ten seconds (60 * 10 = 600). It's certainly no where near 'megawatt' class. Hell, even the .50 BMG only works out to ~17,000 joules, which would run your 60 watt light bulb for about five minutes.
For shits and giggles, here's that same calculation as applied to the 16" gun of the Iowa Class Battleship:
Weight of projectile: 1,224.6994 kilos (2,700 pounds for the armor piercing round)
Speed of projectile: 819.91200 m/s (2,690 feet per second)
Kinetic energy of projectile at the muzzle: 411,655,568.71 joules.
There's your megawatt class gun. You'll note that it's slightly larger than a handgun ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This is a bit like gunpowder weapons in the 14th century. They appeared in Europe early in that century, were pretty pointless at first, then useful in special cases, then, after about 100 years, more-generally useful. Professional soldiers at that time must have been pretty skeptical. "Interesting, but I'll keep the trebuchet for now, thanks." Up to, say, 1350, it would have been difficult to predict whether gunpowder would ever become a practical weapon.
What you forgot to account for is that Russia can detect incoming missiles and launch a counter strike before any of the missiles detonate, this counter strike would overwhelm a missile defense system and MAD would still happen, if this wasn't true MAD wouldn't happen because who ever shoots first wins. The Defense system would work well if lets say Cuba was given a few nukes (it would take less then 10min to hit DC) so disabling the nukes may be the only option. With Crazy People in charge of countries with Nukes I'm glad money was invested in finding ways to protect against dictators who think of nukes as bargaining chips.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
The link entitled "burned a hole in a car's hood" links to a video where the laser does no such thing, it merely burns the paint, leaving a black mark, not a hole.
Can someone provide a link to a vid or something showing a laser doing real damage, as opposed to being a glorified flame-thrower? Because this whole thing smacks of propaganda to me.
I assure you - the Cleveland Browns would still suck if they played by NBA rules. They could fuck up a game of Calvinball.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The ABL has yielded many many benefits: modeling, control systems, adaptive optics, laser chemistry, CFD analysis. Yes, in the end it has to actually be able to shoot down a missle, but all of the advances that were funded by the ABL development mean that subsequent generations of DE weapons get developed in progressively shorter amounts of time. The ABL with its COIL laser is arguably the most mature laser weapon and certainly the most powerful at this point. But the nextgen systems like HELLADS will certainly be more compact and efficient (think orders of magnitude) and will take much less time to develop as well. That is why it is important to invest in promising technology even if it will not yield an immediately useful product. Heated debate serves to help determine which technologies are truly "promising" and which are just wastes of resources. But in the case of ABL it seems the US made the right choice and is starting to reap the benefits.
This is not a self-referential sig.
And it did, after they proxmired it to death, and then Obama gutted it.
Here's to Hope (that everyone will love us) and Change (from being a world superpower)!
People also forget we had a system in the 1960s and 1970s, but the Left killed it then too.
5. And the carcharhiniforme mounted on a Trebutchet!
Richard
PS: Ninjas are cooler than pirates!
It never ceases to amaze me how many people take precious time out of their lives to gripe about the things I say.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
MY sig explains it perfectly
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
in a futuristic world until I see a god damned shark with a god damned laser attached to it. to date the only successful application has been with sea bass.
Good people go to bed earlier.
...while this tech is inevitable, I fail to see how it is cool. If anything, it speeds up the non-nuculer (sic) arms race.
If this new system is equally effective at taking down airplanes, then that would be a big boost to existing anti-air capabilities that rely on anti air flak or machine guns (which have relatively short range) or on surface-to-air or air-to-air missiles (which can possibly be avoided by flares or complex maneuvering). So all thats left really is that if the ability to detect and track a target meaning more emphasis will need to be placed on stealth.
An Unmanned areal vehicle. This much closer to wood model than it is to something like, say, a Cessna 154. They aren't armored, they fly really, really slow, and they are built to be ultra light so they can fly a long time. It is totally unsurprising that a relatively low powered laser could shoot down a UAV.
Still no Buck Rodgers sound effect when it fires...
Ahh great, let's develop another weapon with possibly public money (yes I realize Boeing is private, but it isn't out of the scope of possibility), have it fall into the hands of people we don't like, then demand that more public money/resources be used to develop more advanced weapons to counter the earlier ones.
Sort of like that Bugs Bunny cartoon with an ever bigger gun. Great advances for humanity.
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.
...it automatically contacts the Sales department whenever an aircraft is shot down?
Will this finally stop the morons that shine laser pointers at airplanes?
It is time to equip UAVs with this and be able to take out individuals. That would be useful in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan. For example, we spot a top AQ leaders, then we take him right away. I like the speed of this as well as the ability to hit small targets. Also useful would be the ability to protect some of our structures. Recently, AQ hit one of our forward bases in Afghanistan that had less than 50 ppl at it. They sent several hundred to attack. A UAV that is in the air that can easily spot and take out enemies in the area would be useful.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Whoosh!
Hint: Look at the first letters of "obviously old originals". Anything special about them?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Mount one a a frickin' aircraft carrier and see what kind of damage you can do. I mean those things got what a nuclear plant on them to draw energy from!
Just make sure you point it away from your eyes...
Oh, and I overlooked one detail in your post: No, it was mot mine. It was the one of ColdWetDog.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm so glad we have better ways to kill people!
Seriously, I'm amazed that people are excited about even more warporn. Sure it'll hopefully have non-military spin-offs, but I guess I just can't get all gleeful over the idea that we now have a much more modern way of ending the lives of other human beings.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
...unless it's raining. Or cloudy. Or foggy. Or dusty. Or smoggy. Or snowing.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Maybe. Chemical lasers are hard to pulse, unless you Q-switch them. (but then you waste some energy when the Q-switch is off.
A favorite technique these days is to use multiple diode lasers to pump a glass slab. It's the same thing in principle to green laser pointers which have a single laser diode pumping a ND:YAG crystal. (The green light comes from a frequency doubling crystal) In a weapon laser, you'd have hundreds of multi-watt infrared diodes pumping multiple doped glass slabs all bathed in a liquid whose index of refraction matched the glass at the wavelength(s) you are creating. The liquid also cools the system and the output mirrors. The diodes can be pulsed or continuous.
B.t.w if you have enough gain in your system, you don't need and output coupler mirror, just the highly reflective mirror behind your laser medium.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I once worked at a machine shop where we made components for ballistic missiles and wheelchairs.
The phrase "directed-energy weapons" for lasers always cracks me up. Show me a weapon that is not "directed-energy." Hell, hitting someone over the head with a stick is "directed-energy."
Wouldn't making your plane or missile shiny / reflective defeat these things pretty easily?
... one cannot have 100% EM and thermal resists.
...to how this is possible: "As you know, Mitch and I were working on the cyanide system. Well, earlier today it ate itself. But, these little set-backs are just what we need to take a giant step forward. Right, Kent? Needless to say, I was a little despondent about the melt down, but then, in the midst of my preparations for hari kiri, it came to me. It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix. Yes, it's an excimer frozen in its excited state. It's a chemical laser but in solid, not gaseous, form. Put simply, in deference to you, Kent, it's like lasing a stick of dynamite. As soon as we apply a field, we couple to a state, it is radiatively coupled to the ground state. I figure we can extract at least ten to the twenty-first photons per cubic centimeter which will give one kilojoule per cubic centimeter at 600 nanometers, or, one megajoule per liter."
Cool feat. Made a lot less cool by the use of the term "homeland" to refer to what used to be known as the "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave."
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Utter crap. That's the same baloney that gets reiterated by people who didn't want us to have it then, and don't want us to have similar technology now.
Scenario #4 - the US builds & maintains a defensive shield and doesn't attack anyone. If whatever Evil Empire we are squaring off with decides to launch a pre-emptive strike, our defenses take down xx% of the incoming attack, leaving or ability to strike back, survive, and recover xx% better than it was without the defensive shield. More people live, less fallout falls, more armed forces & equipment stay intact.
Reagan offered to open our laboratories and let the Soviets share the technology. This way, nobody gains any advantage over the other, and MAD continues to balance the nuclear menace. Gorbachev didn't take him up on it.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
OK sharks out we get it.
How about we use Pomeranians with laser beams on their heads? no too long.
How about rats with laser beams on their heads! Plus the added advantage of the rat chewing its way through walls and almost anything else in its way.
So Rats with laser beams on their heads. Or someone could just create millions of mousers (from TMNT )and set them loose.
"As part of the overall counter-UAV demonstration, Boeing also successfully test-fired a lightweight 25mm machine gun from the Laser Avenger platform to potentially further the hybrid directed energy/kinetic energy capability against UAV threats." I hope the person demonstrating said, "He is too close for lasers, switching to guns"
Such churlish behavior merely convinces me that I'm barking up the right tree.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Woah, dude, you must be Digger T. Rock, because you buried yourself twice!
I couldn't read past the quote under the picture "defending the homeland...."
Is it just me or is "homeland" starting to sound increasingly like "motherland" or "fatherland" as the germans put it??
This kind or rhetoric is getting dangerous as it is starting to become a part of our speech and thinking. What happened to country or nation? Now we have homeland. Oh what a slippery slope and we've fallen halfway there. I don't think 9/11 was an inside job, but anymore, I would be hardly surprised. I think we need less weapons and better public relations. People are very against a complete new world order, (and for good reasons given the directions we are going in) but until we start working together as a human race instead of killing each other over lines in the sand we will never become a peaceful society. Hope things get better!
zosxavius photography
Espousing unpopular viewpoints does not automatically make you or the viewpoints correct.
Once everybody dies, there will be no more evil. Problem solved.
Neither will there be good.
My page.
Can I now have fricking sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads?
Those old things? No, I want the frickin' kangaroos who, when you buzz them, regroup behind a sand dune and fire frickin' surface-to-air beachballs.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
You don't fight fair -- you fight to win. We used to understand that. Our enemies still do.
And what exactly is a "win" in the context of afghanistan? We need to make sure that whatever we do to "win," whatever that even is in this context, doesn't create more enemies.
Osama Bin-Laden is a Saudi. From a high class Saudi family apparently. Iraq/Saddam Hoessein never supported al-qaida.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
It could be argued that "good" is the absence of "evil".
Life is not for the lazy.
(to avoid the "slow down cowboy" problem)
halivar -- It was a visceral reaction to the story. Of course there are other uses for it, probably some very good uses as you suggest; but the context in which it was presented was destructive.
All those who complained about the repetition -- A lot of writers use it. Some very good writers use it. Those lame Levis ads that are running now? Pioneer, oh pioneer? That's a Walt Whitman poem. And before anybody says it, NO, I am not comparing myself to Whitman.
To those who like "frickin lasers". Whatever. That meme just never really grabbed me.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The allies had 1 soldier on the ground for close to every 10 German civilians during the occupation immediately after the fall of Berlin. In Afghanistan, a nation of 30 million didn't even see 100,000 soldiers from the coalition of the willing.
Yes, but the question will be, can a UAV equipped with a laser take out other aircrafts and missiles. I mean, you may have an aircraft that is moving at less than 2000 mph with a missile that MAY move at say 4000 mph (Russia's new missiles), vs a UAV that is moving at say 600 mph, but has weapons and intelligence that move at over 100,000 TIMES FASTER AND will have an easier time targeting? I will bet on the slow moving aircraft once the intelligence is improved.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And yet, this technology was STARTED in 1960s; Under Kennedy. So, I would thank all the presidents since and including Kennedy who has kept this going. The only thing that reagan will really be known for, will be the beginning of monster deficits for no reason.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ronald reagan;
He is the jackass that W emulated; Lots of debt for no reason and invasion/occupation of other nations for no real reason. Basically, reagan is the start of the destruction of the Republican party, as well as America, Combined with the perversion of decent conservative principles.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This can be a very dangerous weapon if 'the enemy' has mirrors all over their targets that reflect this laser. The invention would be similar to the NASA ballpoint pen if normal mirrors can reflect this laser beam to a non-negligible degree.
Secondly, How do you avoid innocent/friendly fire to those in the line of sight of the laser? Say, there's a village right behind the enemy unit you're targeting with this weapon and the enemy unit is moving faster than you can focus on it. 'Shooting' the laser willy-nilly can really fuck up the village. I guess that wouldn't be a problem if its used in Iraq and Afghanistan since the US army makes it a sport of killing so called Hadjis (thank you Jonny Quest) whether they be innocent or otherwise. In Iraq, it would fit with the drone quad quite naturally.
Still, very dangerous for all involved.
One potential use I see for this weapon (once it is miniaturized to gun size) would be as the ultimate Railgun. Imagine Quake 3 in real life. Running that fast would probably make me dizzy, though.
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.
Even if that's true, it makes the system worthless only if your sole benchmark is "does it make us invulnerable to any hostile ICBM force, no matter how large?" But that isn't the only goal. First, there is a defense against a limited strike from a less-powerful adversary. Second, it makes it much, much more difficult to wipe out our ICBM force in a surprise attack and thus remain safe from retaliation. The odds of a given target surviving do not scale linearly with the number of attacking missiles. Consider (using round numbers for simplicity) that we have 1000 ICBMs, and a defense system with a 50/50 chance of shooting down an incoming missile.
To sum up after all the numbers: against even a minimally-effective missile defense, it becomes extremely costly for an attacker to field a force big enough for him to strike and wind up in a better strategic position than he started with, which is the whole point of attacking in the first place. As the defense becomes more effective, doing so becomes well-nigh impossible.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
It could be argues that "evil" is the absence of bacon.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
You realize that a 'megawatt' isn't a measurement of energy, right? It's a measure of power. You need to combine it with at least one other variable (time) to figure out how much energy is involved.
The kinetic energy formula is 0.5 * mass * velocity squared. For our .45 caliber handgun with the numbers above that works out to 476.93 joules. A joule is equivalent to a watt-second. That means that the energy in that handgun round isn't even sufficient to power a 60 watt light bulb for ten seconds (60 * 10 = 600). It's certainly no where near 'megawatt' class. Hell, even the .50 BMG only works out to ~17,000 joules, which would run your 60 watt light bulb for about five minutes.
So first you bitch at the GP for confusing power and energy and not taking the factor time into account...and then you do the same thing yourself? (Hint: it takes a bullet a heck of a lot less than 10 seconds to transfer its energy to the target it's hitting).
And no, it's nowhere near a megawatt, but if you're going to show off at least don't repeat the same error you're trying to correct ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Neither will there be good.
Small price to pay, collateral damage, eggs & omelets, etc.