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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.'"
clearly too much money
indeed. check the NASA budget vs. DOD budget. I don't ever see a republican complain about DOD budget ...
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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.
indeed. check the NASA budget vs. DOD budget. I don't ever see a republican complain about DOD budget ...
But we need thirteen aircraft carriers, railguns and lightning bolts to protect our freedoms from Somali pirates, or something.
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.
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."
As Max Hastings (UK military historian) observes, the problem with the US military is that they imagine that a sufficiently large and advanced weapon will bring a war to an end quickly. The Manhattan project reinforced this mindset, although the conventional bombing of Japan was more lethal than the atom bombing, and it may merely have provided a pretext for the Emperor to rule that the war should end. Since WW2, the approach hasn't worked. But generals and military bureaucrats are always trying to fight the last big war over again.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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)
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.
Or, for the matter, money that could be spent by the general civil population of the country instead, and not necessarily on military tech.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
US military is that they imagine that a sufficiently large and advanced weapon will bring a war to an end quickly.
The Atomic Bomb brought WW2 in the Pacific to and end in a matter of days.
The Cold War was won when tactical nuclear weapons were placed in Europe to negate the Warsaw Pact's significant numerical superiority in conventional forces.
Air power, smart bombs, superior armor, the MLRS, and the use of GPS (which enhanced maneuvering of allied troops) enabled the US led Coalition to defeat Iraq in Gulf War 1 and later, in Gulf War 2. Both were quick victories. The occupation, of course, was a completely different matter.
Peace through superior firepower works.
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."
The surrender was already under negotiation.
Not by anyone who had authority to surrender. Which makes it a pretty useless observation.
But generals and military bureaucrats are always trying to fight the last big war over again.
Almost. They are trying to fight the last big victory over again. Defeat, contrary to common perception, isn't much of a lesson unless it is crushing.
Germany was successful in WW2 initially because after WW1 they had completely reworked their military. France was crushed because it held to the WW1 strategies, and initial deployments of US troops were slaughtered on the battlefield until the US had re-worked their training program.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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
Extra Crispy!!!
Need a Jump??
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.
I can assure you, those are real pixels.
Only for some definitions of "better".
Going with the average IQ of the military as shown in movies, the codename is probably "Neptune" or "Poseidon".
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
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
The advanced weapons DO make short work of things like Iraqi ground forces, and reduce US casualties to tiny levels compared to those inflicted on their opponents.
Tech overmatch saved South Korea, temporarily saved Viet Nam (and even the South Vietnamese until the US cut all their funding and left them to swing in the wind!), and ensured that US ground troops don't come under attack by enemy air forces.
War is awkward, but tech overmatch is Very Nice to have.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Perhaps these guys provided some expert advice to the Army?
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."
... may Roger Zelazny forgive me. :-)
Thor, meet your match!
the problem with the US military is that they imagine that a sufficiently large and advanced weapon will bring a war to an end quickly.
Well, there are a number of wars where that did happen. In US history, both the US Civil War and the First World War had technologies that were going to end the war on their own (repeating rifle and machine gun for the first, the armored tank for the second).
But I think he ignores a more fundamental issue. I think it can be described in a word, "procurement". The militaries of the world always have problems procuring the equipment and resources that they use. And it is frequent that someone tries for personal gain to get an army to use certain suppliers or strategies.
I see procurement as the great glaring weakness of current US military strategy. There are a number of related problems. First, the supplier market is notoriously uncompetitive. There are only two shipyards which produce almost all US military ships. Lockheed is the only producer of the F-35, the next generation fighter jet. At the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, there was only one supplier of small arms ammunition despite the ease of making such ammunition (it was easy for the US government to expand to additional suppliers when the first supplier couldn't keep up with demand, but they should have been doing that from the very beginning).
Second, is the favoring of big expensive projects, not because they are militarily effective, but because they're great vehicles for doling out political pork. A notorious example is the Sea Wolf submarine which has been funded by Congress over the protest of the Department of Defense. I believe this use of military activities as a pork vehicle has resulted in very expensive contracts for such things as food and janitor service.
In summary, I think that procurement is handled by a very limited number of suppliers and often for reasons that run counter to military needs. This I believe to be the great weakness of the US military.
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.