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Army Creates a Directed Lightning Bolt Weapon
Sparticus789 writes "Army researchers at Picatinny Labs in New Jersey have developed a prototype weapon which uses a directed lightning bolt to destroy vehicles and unexploded ordinance. The weapon works on the premise that 'A target, an enemy vehicle or even some types of unexploded ordnance, would be a better conductor than the ground it sits on.' Are we one step closer to C&C:Red Alert Tesla coils?"
Does NOT work. the car would not be affected enough by that.
This is what I got into science for.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Ordinance = A piece of legislation enacted by a municipal authority; An authoritative order; a decree.
Ordnance = Military weapons, ammunition, and equipment used with them.
What a terrible fucking summary. Also, this has been all over the web for nearly a week.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser
It works by ionizing the air with a UV laser to create a path of lowered resistance for the arc to follow.
This is my dream device. I have sat on my bike, in my car and had someone do something so stupid. Now I can fry the snot outa something and nothing left to say it was me!
Make the C&C:Red Alert Tesla Coils more offensive by mounting them on trucks. Then the US would be interested in them!
With all apologies to Nikola and his 'Death Ray', wouldn't the skin effect of ultra high voltage used for these kind of arcs make this totally useless as a weapon? The bits you want to zap are inside the external metal casing. They are not the easiest path to ground, therefore they are not getting any significant juice.
I'm wondering who will be first to aim the laser at a storm cloud :-P
I'm thinking the Faraday Cage effect of the vehicle will protect occupants. Also for the money spent to develop this weapon, how cheap will be the counter-measures?
I remember seeing stories about the anti-vehicle/IED lightning gun back in 2007, maybe earlier. Every single time it comes up, it gets shot down as being utterly impractical. It can't stop vehicles reliably enough to warrant use in a life-or-death situation, and it's a laughably inefficient means of IED detonation (they need to be within arms reach of the bomb to do anything).
And yet the story keeps coming back. I suspect some congressmen just feel that, like the laser plane, this weapon is too cool to give up on.
Unexploded laws? It should be "ordnance."
There has long been a prototype of a taser which uses lasers to ionize a path. This from the same guys?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Zot!
They have clearly too much money in their hands.
Instead of spending millions on dumb sci-fi fantasy weapons, they should be doing better killer drones than, after bombing an area, land, transform into humanoid form and chase the survivors while threatening them with a hard metallic voice. "We must destroy! Death to humans... TERRORISTS! We meant terrorists!"
Shocking!
Damn it! I thought of that first!
This is from Applied Energetics. It's not yet clear if it's militarily useful. Range is going to be a problem. It has potential as "something to shoot at a potential IED that causes less damage than an IED".
Unless it becomes a more generally useful weapon, though, it will probably suffer the fate of most overspecialized weapons.
... Life catches up with Girl Genius.
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20071126
or it didn't happen.
I don't know how practical a weapon this would be in a military engagement (like with other guys shooting back at you) but in a situation where you needed to scare the bejeezes out of some people (like a riot or maybe a hostage situation) I can definitely see it being useful.
I mean most weapons (flamethrowers excepted) are pretty hard to see (not hear). You can see the flash of muzzles and maybe the pitting of concrete from near misses but other than getting hit you wouldn't know how close they were to you.
THIS on the other hand would be a terrifying weapon. Like a thunderbolt thrown at you, the flash would probably blind you for a few seconds and the clap of thunder make you deaf. People would just start running unless they dropped dead due to a heart attack! Think of it as god's version of a taser.
It reminds me of that lightning weapon used in "District 9". Don't know if it's powerful enough to make people literally explode.
First time i ran into the description of such a weapon was in the GURPS based Transhuman Space RPG.
Lightning normally consists of two pulses, one up and one down. The latter usually contains most of the current, but as it is a pulse with a rapidly rising leading edge, the EM field is considerable. The terms "AC" and "DC" do not really apply in this case.
The significant thing is not so much the frequency spectrum of the pulse, but the actual cross section of the ionised region through which the current is passing. If this is relatively large, the current density is low and a Faraday cage is effective. If it is small, the current density may be so high that the actual resistance of the target becomes important; the heat generated may melt a hole in the target resulting in the penetration of ionised gas into the target and current flowing down it. This explains rare cases where a lightning rod has not sufficiently reduced the potential gradient over a building, and the first strike has blown a hole in one of the conductors and then perhaps jumped into the building and started a fire. (I have seen photos of this effect but not seen them anywhere on the net.)
The idea of a target surrounded by a "dense gold shield" is just plain silly, by the way. All gold is dense...and a thick gold shield would be impracticably expensive. Copper is fine (higher melting point and greater thermal capacity than aluminum) but reinforced concrete with the rebar internally welded together would be much cheaper, more generally effective, and should easily be able to cope with the very limited power available from any human-built weapon.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Years ago a few of us playing with a 500W magnetron did manage to light a small bulb connected to a dipole a few meters away, and deflect the needle of an Avometer with a loop aerial at about 10M. But focussing is a pig, and your claims of knocking out wifi over a mile away with a poxy little 200W is nonsense. There is this thing called the inverse square law. You would be better off with a maser, but even so to do any damage you would need to keep the beam in the same place for quite some time, and with two moving vehicles this will be difficult. Vehicle electronics are rather well protected nowadays, and there are few points you could hit where the beam would transmit significant energy into the ECU. The ECU connections are protected with transient suppressors, and can normally withstand 28V for a while.
You'd do much better with a high intensity cobalt-60 pulse source, but again getting the range without either killing yourself with radiation or having to transport the ass end of a nuclear sub around with you might prove difficult.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
"Zeus"
And you make a neat gun.
For the people who are still alive.
I feel sorry for the next baddie Uncle Sam gets "Thor" at.
We want war! WAKE UP!
...was discussed on Slashdot many years ago. The original idea, IIRC, was that they'd shoot a UV beam to actually ionize the air between the shooter and the target - the lighting would then travel down this path as it would be the path of least resistance. I guess either the UV wasn't ionizing enough or they felt the lensing effect would be better.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Makes me want to puke ... again !
We're one step closer to having the Lightning Gun from Quake 1. Aw yeah. The world gets better each day. 8)
To put the energy output in perspective, a big filament light bulb uses 100 watts. The optical amplifier output is 50 billion watts of optical power, Fischer said.
But how many ELOCs (Equivalent Libraries of Congress) is that?
Lightning bolt :)
Shooting lightning bolts is all very cool but I need more pictures. Preferably pictures that aren't low res and highly compressed. For all I know it could be fake. Just saying.
I can't believe everyone missed this fact: now we finally have the Lightning guns to fight Godzilla!
DoD and Homeland Sec wet dream. Might work better in more backwards areas - Wrath of God, "wrong side" and such for govt enemies.
Urgh, I just sicked up in my mouth a bit. Proud to be chowing down on pork that could be spent on better boots and body armour rather than fantasy zap guns that will never come out of the lab.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
What keeps me from firing this type of laser to high voltage powerlines to charge up my electric car? Of course if I have such laser ?
In lightning an initial spike ionises air, and then the next spike of current travels down the ionised track. Electrons move one way, ions move in different directions depending on charge. Because the velocity and population density of both is changing very rapidly, EM fields are generated with gradients in varying directions. It is about as unlike a one-way current in a wire or an electron beam in vacuo as you can easily get.
My complaint with the GGP was that it is an inaccurate description of what happens, contains nonsense like "surrounded by a dense gold shield", and yet gets moderated up to +5 despite it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
"We have literally fucked this up for 2000 years," If Ive told you once Ive told you a million times don't exaggerate.
You don't even have much more than 500 years of history.
For IEDs a high pressure water jet is all you need.
Cheap.
Effective.
No need for millions in research.
Or it was misspelled on purpose. Grow some man-parts, unclick the "anonymous" box, and come back when you are all grown up.
sudo make me a sandwich
If you can got away with choosing the location of a bolt strike,as is claimed. :-)
If you can find some way to store quickly large amounts of energy (Maybe melting salt).
If you can convert the energy stored in electricity (Hea a conventional steam generator with molten salt)
It could be a hell of a energy source.
Of course, I'm assuming that the lases will use less power than the usable energy recovered, and I can even be right
Extra Crispy!!!
Need a Jump??
http://goo.gl/Ed1Wg (tesladownunder.com)
Idiot! The BFG is a plasma weapon. I think you're referring to the lightning gun. Though if you meant to do that in a truly innaccurate /. fashion then you succeeded... but then again so did the original article title and summary so your point is redundant.
Ok this gets me thinking along the lines of Thor going after the minority group du'jour and after seeing the article's image, I was really reminded of phasers from Star Trek.... I'm sure there could have been some TNG episode in there...
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
just wait until the "alien invasion" begins and watch them use this exact same weapon
i mean, it's not like they are playing with fire.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You weren't supposed to bring stuff from the real world IN to the Matrix, Neo.....
I was hoping I would see something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4UcGgqam7Y
Would it not be the latter? Dear golly, if the military did actually explode its ordinance, well, dandy it'd be.
WRONG .
LOC is a viable unit in all dimensions. It just takes a bit of imagination to come up with the proper derivation in some cases.
data - the amount of data corresponding to all the volumes of the LOC
mass - how much do all the books in the LOC weigh?
length - how long is the LOC?
area - how much carpet is there in the LOC?
volume - how much space does the LOC occupy?
power - how much does the LOC owe PEPCO every month?
temperature - what's the AC thermostat set at in the LOC main reading room?
frequency - how many times has the LOC existed in human history?
luminosity - how much light does the LOC give off when burned?
time - how long is the waiting list for Fifty Shades of Gray at the LOC?
I think that covers some common units, and all the basic ones. Deriving the rest is trivial, and left as a exercise for some bored nerd on teh intarwebs.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Perhaps these guys provided some expert advice to the Army?
"The lightning is guided in a laser-induced plasma channel"
They stole this idea from the Unreal Tournament game developers. ;-) Though I think the Unreal lightning gun sent a stream of protons, it's close enough.
who thought about Outpost 2 and its Thor's Hammer tank? Man those dual turreted Tiger chassis Thor's Hammer could dish it out.
Has begun work on something called a 'Wave Motion Gun". Details are sketchy at this time, but the plans seem to involve the recycling of a sunken World War Two battleship...
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
The Air Force had a similar weapon in 1978, albeit using what was effectively ball lightning in the plasma channel rather than full arc charges like the Army weapon -- I don't think the arc charges terrifically useful any more than people die in the Farraday cage at Arc Attack concerts at Maker Faires (hint: they don't).
The air force work was based on work by Pyotr Kapitsa, the Russian Nobel winning physicist. The idea was to create a plasma channel with a laser, drop a ball of lighning into it, and let the closing channel push it into the target. I'm pretty sure the project was scrapped for the same reason the army project isn't going to go anywhere (unless they deploy it against combat troops, rather than vehicles.
HERF guns would probably be more fruitful, if the intent wasn't fried humans; at least HERF guns actually work against avionics/vehicle electronics.
Modern car tires are sufficiently conductive that static buildup is rarely a problem except when conditions are so dry that ground resistance is very high - which would stop the conductive strip from working. (And yes, I have done work in this area, while working in R&D for a company that made antistatic and lightning protection products.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I suggest the demo was performed within 6 feet of the car not so that you would have a good view of the effect.
It's 6 ft because that's as far as the effect can be demonstrated.
If your "weapon" is only effective if your target need to get so close that you can see his nose hair with your naked eyes, you might want to shoot the bastard who wasted all your development funds on the said "weapon".
... may Roger Zelazny forgive me. :-)
Thor, meet your match!
Light version just creates dreary raincloud above enemy.
While this may be called "lightning" - it has to be some other form of energy, that mearly appears to be lightning to kill a car or other vehicle.
Cars can withstand most lightning strikes because they are not grounded to the Earth.
The bolt may strike the metal shell of the car and run around it before jumping to the ground, but it would rarely ever cause physical damage to the car itself.
However, you may be able to create a charged particle beam of some kind that is capable of frying the electronics in a car or vehicle, that appears to be lightning to the casual observer. The military has long lusted for an EMP pulse weapon which could be directed to hit a single target, without harming surounding potential targets. Think about being able to fry an inbound missle, or plane at a distance, and simple watch it tumble out of control.
Why must it be something other than lightening?
From the original article it sounds exactly like lightening -- and it doesn't show the car being destroyed by it -- but being hit by it.
They guide the lightening with a laser which pre-heats and pre-ionizes the path of least resistance to the target. Thus the electronic bolt naturally follows the path of the laser. The laser only has to be powerful enough to create a lower resistance path through the atmosphere for the electrical charge to follow.
As for your assertions about cars having metal shells? I guess you haven't bought a new car lately? They are generally plastic. There is likely to be a metal cage under the plastic, but the main damage here, will likely be to the cars electronics. Since nearly all new cars have EFI these days, the car will instantly die with no pump to drive the EFI...
The lightning gun may technically rank higher in your arsenal than the rocket launcher, but anyone who's played Quake would know that rocket launchers are ultimately much more powerful than lightning guns.
A "lightning bolt" is a resonant effect with a wide spectrum. Most of the energy is around the 200-500kHz range. So yes, skin effect does come into it. It's more than just "one up and one down" - bear in mind that high speed photography is picking up the ionisation path, not the electrical impulses.
A lightning laser magnetically-pinched-nuclear-fusion power-generator is described in the Nasa Create The Future Design Engineering Contest entry May 17, 2012 where a lightning laser is used to capture real lightning from the sky which is then used to ignite nuclear fusion reactions! Atrificial lightning generated by a tesla coil is sent along ionized channels of air which were ionized by an ultraviolet or other lasers into the clouds and ionosphere to discharge available lightning which then travels down the lightning laser ionized path beam to a magnetically confined fusion generator. The captured real lightning is transformed to higher amperages which are used to magnetically pinch deuterium-tritium creating supersonic shock waves that ignite the fuel while it is confined in a magnetic bottle. Heat generated is used to produce steam for a steam turbine which rotates an electric generator to power the grid.
Coinmcidentally, the contest entry was proposed on the day before the Army released its news.