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Warships May Get Lasers For Close-In Defense
King Louie writes "Raytheon and the US Navy have successfully tested a ship-borne laser capable of shooting down aircraft. Video at the link shows the 32-kilowatt solid-state laser shooting down an unmanned aerial vehicle. The technology is apparently mature enough to be deployed as part of ships' short-range missile defenses, a role currently filled by the Basic Point Defense Missile System (based on the Sea Sparrow missile) and the Close-In Weapons System (based on a 20mm Gatling gun)."
Is it shark-mountable?
32 kW, not MW, thats kilowatt, not megawatt.
There are numerous advantages to using lasers instead of traditional weapons:
*) Longer range
*) Better accuracy
*) Unlimited ammunition
*) No pollution from spent weapons
...shows the 32-megawatt solid-state laser...
From TFA:
...which is made up of six solid-state lasers with an output of 32 kilowatts that simultaneously focus on a target.
As my stat mech professor once said, "but hey, what's a few orders of magnitude between friends?"
Nice. So, we don't have money for the unemployed, for the ill, or even for veterans benefits, but we can afford laser systems to shoot down planes for imaginary invasions.
Seventy percent of the defense industry is a private set of corporations whose economic incentive is to discover (or invent) threats, and then sell the government the contract to fight this imaginary enemy. Sounds like a nice recipe for solutions that exacerbate the underlying problems, and not by accident.
Presumably, the reason for replacing 20mm Gatling guns with lasers is, ultimately, about missiles. 20mm DU rounds, in quantity, move pretty fast compared to aircraft; but substantially less fast than one would like compared to decent missiles. Photons, while they lack the punch, are much zippier...
Now, since the only reason to adopt this(no doubt more expensive and power hungry) system is that offers hope against missiles, why testing against UAVs? Well, if I were an optimist, I would say that this is just one of the tests in the development process. If I were a pessimist, I would say that the fine folks at Raytheon are following in the time-honored tradition of anti-missile systems, and responding to the fact that the problem is hard by moving the goalposts until their system is up to the "task"...
Hopefully, well before deployment, it will see proper "red team"/"green team" type testing, where the opposing force, made up of the most devious and talented people at their disposal, is free to try every sneaky, optically confusing, silver plated, ablative armor protected, etc. hypothetical near future threat that they can come up with against the system. A very valuable learning exercise....
the shark will still bite you though but nice try
Can it make popcorn?
I see a great need for a UAV-mounted Jiffy Pop module.
It is a moral imperative.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Red lasers on one side, blue lasers on the other. I keep forgetting which is which...
It's red lasers on the port side, green lasers on the starboard side showing from dead ahead to 2 points abaft of the beam. I thought everyone knew that.
This ain't rocket surgery.
This offers far less hope against missile swarms and fast cruise missiles then lead-spewing kinetic weapons. With this you need to affect a single point on the missile from the front for quite some time to get results. If it's a fast cruise missile with mach3-mach5 terminal approach, laser is useless - it simply won't have enough time to do damage. So is kinetic CIWS. Missile based CIWS has a chance as it can engage at decent range and score a one shot kill.
Against swarms, this is even worse. You have to burn every individual missile, retarget and burn next one. Even if by some stroke of luck you succeed in this titanic task and can get missile terminated in say 3 seconds of burning it (completely impossible with laser as weak in tests), all that opponent needs to do to counter it is to program missile to go into a spin in terminal stage, making it impossible to focus at a single point of the missile. Or install a high-albedo tip. Or just attack in a stormy weather where laser energy will dissipate into water droplets long before it hits the missile.
Kinetic CIWS like phalanx/kashtan on the other hand actually have a decent chance of shooting slow and small missiles of this kind down, as they can usually kill a missile in one-two hits and are largely unaffected by weather conditions. Missile CIWS are better, but tend to get overloaded with sheer numbers.
All in all, this is just a PR stunt to show US taxpayers that their money is spent on yet another hollywood-style toy with little room for real life applications. This is a weapon for space age and space warfare where weather does not exist and laser can be effective at far greater ranges.
Laser beams AND rail guns. The USN is on the verge of becoming a very "SciFi" weapons platform. If everything takes twice as long as planned then by 2020 you're going to see USN ships equipped with both weapons systems. Rail Guns firing projectiles at OTH targets at 5600MPH and handling close in threats with Phalanx CIWS upgraded with LASERS.
This IS the future.
A 32 MW laser would be a fine alternative to a gatling gun - 32 MW is a lot of power, you don't need to paint a single spot on an incoming missile. The laser in the video was just a few kW, and so took several seconds to kill a drone. The gatling guns also kill one threat at a time, and it takes time to get a few rouns into an incoming missile (the first few rounds usually miss, the gun tracks both rounds an missile on RADAR and corrects fire until it gets it right), and once you do the remains are still a serious threat that will cause real damage and casualties. A laser has a lot more potential to cause a catastrophic kill of the missile, where the remains aren't nearly as threatening (and all the fuel is gone) when the ship is hit.
But gatling guns deal with threats that make it past the missiles, and the advantage of the Sea-Sparrow-based defenses is you can launch all your counter-missiles rapidly against many incoming threats at once, at medium range. A laser cannon might grow into that role, but it would be much harder (and have enormous power demands, but then we do need to protect ships with nuclear power, so maybe that's OK).
The other nice advantage of a solid-state laser is that it's not used up after one engangement. The gatling guns require significant service after minimal use. Can the Sea Sparrow-based CIWS can be "re-stocked" at sea?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This laser is 32kW, and it's already pushing the limits of solid state laser tech. 32MW laser is nowhere in sight for several decades, unless we make major breakthroughs in materials needed, not to even talk about power draw, which for current laser at 20% efficiency would be around 160MW for your suggested 32MW laser. And with increased power, the efficiency of laser installation is likely to decrease significantly.
You're gonna have some pretty hardcore power cabling, cooling system and a nuclear reactor to power that kind of a thing, not to even mention the epic size of a weapon. Cooling system alone will probably be bigger then a modern missile silo.
This replacing a small, localized and largely autonomous system that performs better in most conditions? I think not.
Comparing this to Sea Sparrows or any other ship based medium range SAM in any way other then augmentation is just plain foolish anyway. This caps at a few kilometers, depending on weather. It's a potential kinetic CIWS replacement (i.e. phalanx). It's in no way even a contender for SAM CIWS replacement. Not even because the tech isn't ready, but because the tech is unsuitable by default. Weather and fact that Earth is a sphere will make sure of this.
While energy weapons are gosh-wow sexy, their effects depend on maintaining the beam on the incoming missile for some undetermined length of time, until it either ignites the fuel or destroys the guidance systems. As modern ship-killer missiles tend to be supersonic, keeping the beam focused on a particular spot on an incoming missile is far from trivial, and of course will vary from missie to missile, so the defensive sytems have even more variables to account for. Phalanx and other gun systems use radar to track the incoming missile as well as the stream of outgoing rounds, and adjusts the aim until the tracks intersect.
Another problem is that destroying the missile's guidance system alone won't cut it. If it's already locked in the terminal phase chances are it will be blind, but still hit the target. This is the major reason that CIWS tend to use multi-barrel cannon with extremely high rates of fire (20mm/6,000 rounds per minute in the case of Phalanx, 30mm/4,000 rpm in the Dutch Goalkeeper system, which is built around the gun used in the A-10 aircraft). The intention is to cause as much structural damage to the incoming missile as possible, either destroying it or rendering it incapable of remaining on course, and with a missile like the SS-N-19 Shipwreck, which masses 7,000 kg and travels at Mach 2.5, even if the guidance systems and warhead are nullified, impact, even from large fragments, can still cause catastrophic damage to the defending vessel.
Then there's the energy requirements of a powerful laser, along with the transmission and control systems, massive cabling, fire-suppression, safety etc., versus self-contained units like Phalanx or Goalkeeper which basically just plug into a hole in the deck (oversimplification of course, but not by much). I am not a weapons expert, but personally I don't see the advantage of energy weapons over traditional gun systems for close-in defense.
Bullets and lasers deliver this energy differently
Completely true but there are other factors to consider, the most important of which is actually hitting the target. The most important advantage lasers have is target tracking. With bullets you have to consider two trajectories (the bullet and the target) neither of which is likely to be perfectly straight. With lasers you simply aim directly at the target which is a much simpler tracking problem to solve, especially with modern sensors and vision systems. No need to consider the effects of wind, gravity, aerodynamics, bullet speed, etc. This doesn't make it a trivial problem to solve but it does have advantages.
I think the speed of targeting will be especially interesting and important against hypersonic cruise missiles. I'm curious how long it would take to destroy a missile approaching at 2000 m/s (mach 6). From the time the missile appears on the horizon a close in defense system would have 3-8 seconds to destroy a missile traveling at those speeds depending on how high it was mounted.
Not to say that bullets/shells don't have advantages too. Tricks like proximity fuses obviously aren't possible with lasers.
Of course, the Phalanx shoots 50-75 rounds a second , for a total muzzle energy/second of firing of a whopping 2269kJ.
Only relevant if all the bullets all hit, which they pretty much never do.