New Laser Makes Pirates Wish They Wore Eye-Patches

vieux schnock writes "The New Scientist has an article about a new laser developed by a company in Farnborough, UK, that aims to deter modern high-seas pirates. Devised as a 'warning shot' to 'distract suspected pirates rather than harm them,' the meter-wide beam can scan the pirates' 6-metre skiffs and make it difficult for them to aim their AK-47 or rocket-propelled grenades at the ship."

Comments

Re:I have a better idea

[Jeremy Erwin]

It's actually quite difficult to snipe from a moving ship.

Will not work

[Kupfernigk]

This will not work because:

• Have you ever considered the difficulty of using, say, an Armalite on the bridge of a cargo ship? Last time I checked, snipers did not use moving platforms, or aim at rapidly moving targets . Therefore, range would be greatly reduced.
• It could be several seconds, or even tens of seconds, between clear shots. So: you wound one pirate. The others start firing RPGs and AK-47s. These do not need to be accurate.
• If pirates assume armed response, they will start shooting the moment they come within range. Therefore, casualties will mount.

Bottom line: I suggest before coming up with idiotic suggestions, you actually google a bit of naval history. (And yes, I did do a feasibility study on missile attack defenses based on cannon, not rifles, and even they are not a very good defense.)

Actually... green light.

[denzacar]

From TFA:

"Sunglasses wouldn't help," he says – in fact, wearing them would only exacerbate the effect. That's because the glasses would not affect the green laser light – chosen because that colour is particularly irritating – but the laser would appear even brighter contrasted against the darkened background.

I'm guessing they think that people who can put their hands on automatic weapons and RPGs, sales and purchasing of which is regulated/prohibited in most of the world - won't be able to put their hands on some $25 protective glasses sales and purchasing of which is not regulated/prohibited anywhere in the world.

Re:Actually... green light.

[marcansoft]

To throw some numbers in: The glasses that the GP linked to are OD 4 for 532nm light (i.e. green Nd:YAG lasers, which are basically guaranteed to be the type used by this weapon). That means they block 99.99% of the beam at that wavelength. That's quickly going to turn any beam designed to be borderline non-permanently-damaging into barely a bother.

In fact, I just ran a quick test. I have a 30mW green pointer, which is definitely unsafe for direct eye exposure. I expanded the beam with a lens to about a 20cm radius, which is eye-safe at this power level. Looked at it thought my glasses (I actually have that same model), and it was just a very slight orange glow, about on par with an indicator LED. Took the goggles off and it was very annoying (I had an afterimage for a few minutes). I imagine the laser weapon will be closer to the damage threshold than my quick test, but still, the glasses will totally destroy any effect unless the laser runs at power levels much higher than eye-safe ones.

Or, testing with the (definitely eye unsafe) collimated 30mW, through the glasses, onto a wall: the green dot is barely visible. I'm going going to try pointing it into my eye (see below), but that mount of light is not going to bother anyone.

Note for anyone wanting to try this: don't unless you really know what you're doing. In particular, looking into the bare beam with glasses on is a very bad idea. You probably won't damage your eyes with the green light, but these cheap chinese pointers tend to lack IR filters, and that can screw you since the glasses won't block IR (worse, your blink response won't trigger and you'll slowly cook your retina). In fact, I can see a slight deep red glow around the projected green dot going through the glasses, which indicates there's a considerable amount of leaked IR, probably well above the damage threshold (if you can see IR, there's a lot of it).

Root cause of the problem

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The root cause of the problem is that, most port authorities and countries prohibit a merchant marine ship from having arms on board. So cargo ship with machine guns would not be permitted to dock on most harbors and ports in the world. That is the reason for these ships from being armed. These guys are coming up with stupid weapons like water cannons, beamed sound waves, and now lasers, because they would not be called "arms" by the ports.

Simpler solution would be to have a ship or a platform offshore, just on the international waters as close to the port as possible to act as an armory. Cargo ships check in their weapons into the armory, sail into the port, unload, reload, return, pick up their weapons and go their way. Between the armory and the port, a distance of about 10 or 20 miles, the Navy or the Coast Guard of the country should provide escort and patrol services with destroyers and cutters.

That would be a sane and cheap solution understandable to one and all. All the news reports about gizmos like laser beams really have an entirely different purpose. Some company somewhere making a key component of such a system is looking for investment or begging to be sold out. The PR firms step in, come up with such "news" stories and create some media interest. Once the company got bought out or got its investment goals met, these news reports also would melt away like fog.

Cost and international treaties are why no weapons

[fantomas]

Cost and international treaties are two big reasons why merchant ships aren't armed. If you want military on board with weapons, well a 24/7 hour crew is going to cost a fair bit of money. Merchant shipping tries to cut costs as much as possible.And you aren't just going to put a crate of machine guns and sniper rifles on board and hope that the ship's cook or the 18 year trainee engineer on a cruise ship are going to know how to operate them correctly in an emergency situation, probably more likely to end up hurting themselves or the passengers than anybody else.

Plus international treaties come into play. It's all well and good suggesting you're going to mount miniguns etc or even just AK47s on your ship but a lot of countries aren't too happy about armed merchant ships turning up in their harbours. Can't imagine American authorities would be too happy about accepting an Iranian ship sailing into New York with a crew of marines on board manning deck mounted rapid fire machine guns.