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US Navy Breaks Laser Record
ectotherm writes "The US Navy has broken the existing record for the power of a laser. Their new free-electron laser can burn through 20 feet of steel per second. 'Next up for the tech: additional weaponization. The Navy just awarded Boeing a contract worth up to $163 million to take that technology and package it as a 100 kW weapons system, one that the Navy hopes to use not only to destroy things but for on-ship communications, tracking and detection, too — using a fraction of the energy such applications use now, plus with more accuracy.' Now all we need to do is upgrade the sharks..."
Who needs to burn through 20 feet of steel? Or even 2 feet of steel?
What's even more crazy is that their ultimate goal is to reach a megawatt of power and burn through *2000* feet of steel per second. I'd imagine seeing a phalanx of tanks, and with one 3 second FWOOOONG! from the laser, our military crosscuts through them all in one sweep. Here's the Wired article I'm referring to: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/unexpectedly-navys-superlaser-blasts-away-a-record
The article said it can burn thru 20 feet of steel per second, not 200 per the slashdot version.
Even the 20 feet is likely misleading since I doubt it can sustain that power output for more than a fraction of a second, and anyways if you really were borign thru multiple feet of steel then all your vaporized steel in the borehole you were creating would get in the way of the laser.
Still very impressive though. I'd love to see the face of the first crackpot dictator whose ICBMs are shot down by one of these.
This 500kV test was of just the accelerator (i.e. the bit the produces the electron beam part of a Free Electron Beam laser), not the FEL itself. It's this electron beam that is purported to do the extraordinary steel-cutting, not the laser beam. There is no mention of whether this was a momentary or sustained electron beam output. A 500kV accelerator on it's own isn't all that impressive, but once they package it into a small volume (room rather than building), and actually use it to lase, then that will be very impressive indeed.
Who needs to burn through 20 feet of steel? Or even 2 feet of steel?
Well, not so much 20 feet of steel directly, but there's a lot to be said for a weapon that could punch through 1-2 feet of layered tank armour, or melt a substantial hole in a warship. While many warships are not heavily armored nowadays, there are still exceptions.
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There some more information to be found here: http://www.jlab.org/FEL/ You could also watch the video http://www.jlab.org/FEL/Movie28.mov , but that was a bit disappointing (no KABOOM).
Well, you may drive at 60 miles/hour and not mean to drive for 60 miles. In this case, it could cut through 1/2" steel plating in 1/2 inch / (20 ft/second) = 2 milliseconds. Does that make sense?
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Mach 1 is about 340 m/s. At that speed the Navy could send up a fighter and throw a rope around it. ICBM reentry speeds are usually over 4,000 m/s, with in-flight speeds of over 6,000 m/s. Or about Mach 16. A different magnitude of problem...
the humans of earth are a jealous lot, full of hate and mistrust, and belief that their way is the only way to live, and that all other ways must be eliminated
Suddenly the foreign policy and economically destructive wars perpetuated by the United States make sense.
Uh ... what? Do you really believe that the United States is hell-bent on eliminating other ways of life? Do you really believe that (because if so, that's just bizarre) or are you just America-bashing for fun? I'd say the Soviets did a hell of a lot more in that regard than the United States ever did. Many of our previous conflicts were ostensibly driven by ideological differences (although, if you dig a little deeper you'll usually find that there was more to it than that) but since the Cold War is over we're far more focused on the economic benefit of our overseas campaigns. Which isn't necessarily better, but it still has nothing to do with converting everyone to our brand of representative republicanism. We don't really care how you want to live: just buy our stuff and sell us your oil. Oh, and listen to our music and buy a lot of our DVDs.
but the truth is that the United States is not paying for a defensive military.
Why would you ever have thought that? More to the point, what do you mean by "defensive"? Not all conflicts have to be fought on one's own territory to be considered "defensive", and sometimes investments have to be made because of obligations to allied nations. Hell, World War II, if you have the ability to grasp the big picture, was in fact a defensive war. The reality is, though, that we've cut back substantially on our military capability since the end of the Cold War. Why? Because (so it was believed at the highest levels of our government) the world is now safe because the Soviet Empire collapsed, and we don't need all these men and machines. So this idea that America is continuing to build this ever more massive military is just wrong. Period. Furthermore, the current Iraq conflict is stretching our ability to deploy personnel: we just don't have the manpower or equipment that we used to have, even going back to the first Gulf war.
Whether or not we made the correct choice in downsizing our military machine remains to be seen. But it is most definitely not what it once was.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Mirrors don't work against extremely high power lasers. The electric field strength at the focal point is such that electrons are ripped directly out of the atoms. This forms a plasma which is an efficient absorber regardless of how shiny the surface originally was.
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