US Navy Close To On-Ship Laser Cannons

An anonymous reader writes "The Office of Naval Research and industry partner Northrop Grumman said they successfully tested for the first time an on-board laser defense system known as the Maritime Laser Demonstrator (MLD), using it to destroy a small target vessel. The test actually accomplished several other benchmarks, including integrating MLD with a ship's radar and navigation system, and firing an electric laser weapon from a moving platform at-sea in a humid environment."

Comments

Cool way to kill people

[DeBattell]

Killing people is OK as long as you use cool technology to do it.

Re:Cool way to kill people

[dougmc]

This is essentially a theoretical "possible future weapon" exercise - it has nothing to do with actual, realistic modern combat.

To be fair, there was a time that the machine gun, submarine and airplane fell into this category too.

Though I do have to admit ... the current guns and firearms and such do seem hard to beat.

Re:Patently useless

[vadim_t]

It's not really a new concept it looks like this. It's just not very practical.

From what I heard the problem with this kind of thing is that it takes two trucks worth of equipment to setup, lots of power, cooling and chemicals (since it's a dye laser). Now on a ship that's a lot less of a problem.

From what I understand, the kind of mirror used in a laser is extremely efficient, tuned to the laser's frequency, sealed in a chamber that doesn't have a spec of dust in it, and has an active cooling system. This can be done in a special environment like inside an enclosed mechanism, but a missile isn't going to be able to have this kind of thing on its surface.

Re:Uninformative

[Motard]

It set the the outboard motors on fire. You can see a video here... http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/