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Navy To Deploy Lasers On Ship In 2014
Velcroman1 writes "The Pentagon has plans to deploy its first ever ship-mounted laser next year, a disruptive, cutting-edge weapon capable of obliterating small boats and unmanned aerial vehicles with a blast of infrared energy. Navy officials announced Monday that in early 2014, a solid-state laser prototype will be mounted to the fantail of the USS Ponce and sent to the 5th fleet region in the Middle East for real-world experience. 'It operates much like a blowtorch ... with an unlimited magazine,' one official said."
Next up, sharks.
A fleet of these and all the missiles North Korea wants to waggle at the US will mean nothing.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The suggested way to deploy a laser is this .
"Hello, IT... Have you tried turning it off and on again? Yeah... No problem."
Somali pirates begin to feel the heat. Original recipe or extra crispy.
I wonder why they went with Infra-red frequency light.
Seems to me that some higher-energy, shorter wavelength frequency would be more efficient. Something like a blue or violet laser, as they use in certain industrial apps. Better yet would be a laser in the UV frequencies.
Maybe the it's an inaccuracy in the article?
Defense contractor - "Which laser should we install?"
Navy "What do they do?"
Defense contractor - "The first one will light your enemies on fire and incinerate them. The second one one will give your enemies a nasty sunburn"
Navy - "The first one"
Actually, I'd be curious to know why they use IR.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
TFA says:
Video released by the Navy shows the laser lock onto a slow-moving target, in this case an unmanned drone, which bursts aflame in mid-flight. The drone soon catches fire and crashes into the sea below.
But how well does it work against a fast moving target that's actively trying to evade a laser lock or even spinning to prevent a continued lock on any particular part of the target? Would a polished/mirrored skin work as a countermesure? How long does it need to be locked on the surface of the target to cause damage?
Lasers ... cutting edge ... I see what you did there.
Fox News. My bet is on inaccuracy in the article.
A bigger why, as far as I'm concerned, is why this is mounted in the fantail - the aft end of the boat - rather than in the front? Is a captain supposed to order the crew to "Turn tail and fire!"
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Higher frequencies get absorbed by the atmosphere more easily. By using IR they can reach a little further at the same power. If military lasers have followed consumer laser development IR is also a little more mature technology wise.
It's more complex than that. You want a laser in a frequency you can generate easily, focus well with optics, and that will not be absorbed by water vapor, gas, or dust. Higher frequencies don't necessarily net you any kind of energy efficiency yield (while per-photon energy is higher in higher frequency, you can just produce more photons for the same energy cost, so there is not efficiency gains from the physics). This [PDF warning] report gives quite a lot more technical details (including, yes, they do use IR), but not all of them.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
AC. My bet is that no one gives shit what you think.
It's probably due to scaling problems. Every type of Laser scales differently with regard to the power of the beam. Then there's the cooling and power supply.
Not to mention that the frequency doesn't really matter when you're pumping Kilowatts of energy towards the target - you want to melt the target, after all. And IR can do that just as well as UV.
CO2 Laser technology @t 10 microns is well-known and already massively used for cutting machines in the range of 6-12KW, or even more, for the industry.
disable" or "damage" would be more accurate descriptions based on the article and photos.
Government spending is bad, unless of course you are mounting infrared lasers on Navy ships to shoot down Zeroes. Banzai!
Austerity my tired buttocks. They just don't like that, what was it, 48%. Spending is good when you fund jobs programs that make layzers.
Next up: lasers on planes, which will make targeted assassinations done so much more quietly.
I always thought blowtorches has tanks of fuel, not magazines of fuel. Damn public school education!
Be seeing you...
Look for what wavelengths that solid state laser diodes have the most efficiency and you'll have your answer.
...capable of obliterating small boats and unmanned aerial vehicles with a blast of infrared energy.
And what will it do to people on those small boats, or if fired at a manned aerial vehicle? What kind of horrific injuries will occur that I won't be seeing on CNN, who's still convinced Tazers are perfectly non-lethal and have no long-term effects? It's like these crowd-control devices that use microwave radiation to create searing heat and pain in protesters -- that's all fine and dandy but it's just like water cannons: You assume that a blob of several thousand people can just up and run away in a few moments. If you've ever seen actual footage of these devices in use, you know that people are hurt and killed by them either due to being unable to get away (and drowning, or getting severe skin burns and blindness), or they get trampled to death.
So... the "unintended" consequences of ship-mounted lasers? You know, the ones the popular media doesn't report on? I'm all ears.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So we can deploy Particle Impactors ASAP.
The reasons are simple - it is easy to build solid state IR lasers and hard to build solid state lasers at other wavelengths. The bandgaps of most of the convenient materials, which are easy to work with fall into the infrared region. This is also one of the reasons why do we use IR for fiber optic systems (850 nm, 1300 nm and 1550 nm).
Probably using a DPSS laser. Conversion to a different wavelength would mean inefficiency.
and, from (random googling to find it)
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-an-infrared-laser-diode.htm
"Wavelengths around 1,330 nanometers (nm) provide the least dispersion, while 1,550 nm allow the best transmissions [through the atmosphere]."
Oh Yeah? We not aflaid of laser. We have bigger better laser. Two of them. Will cut earth in half.
Nex year all pirate ships will look like floating disco balls.
I've read a few articles about the future directions the US Navy wants to take for ship technology. Basically, they want the ship to have a huge amount of electrical generation capacity onboard, then multiple redundant busses to route the power all over. Propulsion will be giant electric motors driving propellers or waterjets. Power can also fire railguns and now lasers.
If they have multiple generators as well as multiple redundant busses the ships might not have any single spot where damage could put the ship out of commission.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_electric_propulsion
Railguns and lasers also have the nice property that they don't explode when hit. A magazine full of gunpowder, or a rack of missiles with liquid fuel, could explode when hit; but railgun projectiles just sit there, and the laser doesn't even have any consumables other than the electricity.
Let's just hope they don't use Windows 8 for the power management computers.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Except the article mentions that the laser is solid-state.
Definition of ponce
noun
1: derogatory an effeminate man.
2: a man who lives off a prostitute’s earnings.
Maybe being invisible is a good thing, especially when you could try to reflect/douse the area in water if you saw where it was hitting.
You'd think all of this would be illegal under The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
I imagine everyone on board will be blinded. I also imagine blinding a whole crowd of spectators would only take one piece of shiny metal.
I'd assume that the wavelength chosen represented a compromise between what team engineering could get to operate without catching fire and the wavelength that theory would expect to be transmitted most efficiently in the atmosphere(and, in a naval context, that probably means generous doses of water vapor and possibly aerosol droplets in addition to the usual oxygen/nitrogen).
Anybody more familiar than I with variations in transmission efficiency by frequency have a guess as to whether IR was chosen for good behavior, or because that is what they could get a solid state laser to do at sufficiently high power?
USS Ponce ? Really...?
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography
Solid state Nd:YAG and similar lasing media have a huge industrial backing and use. IR lasers are a rather mature technology, compared to some of the shorter wavelength lasers.
"The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.'" --George Carlin
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Lasers. Ship. Slashdot....
Release ... THE SHARK-JOKES
Watching the clip next to the story immediately reminded me of this opening scene from Real Genius... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTx_qTwQqjU
no doubt by 2015, terrorists and mass murderers can mount these lasers on their drones, to prove the value and effectiveness of this technology. Gotto love the "death industry" for turning every technological advance that comes along, into some sort of weapon. So a shout out to all those scientists, engineers and coders, making our world a richer and more powerful place to cower.
I'm not familiar with transmission in air. Although, I am familiar with IR lasers, and the efficiency of existing IR laser technology would probably make it such that my guess is that transmission through air probably doesn't even factor into the decision as long as you avoid a couple bands where there is significant absorption. A 10% difference in transmission won't matter when the technology has an order of magnitude difference in power.
The convention you linked to specifically deals with laser weapons designed to blind - they're prohibited - and specifically omits other laser weapons which are not specifically designed to blind the target.
Yes, if your face happens to be in the path of this beam, you will probably be blinded - but that's really of minimal concern, because your head will probably also be incinerated in the process - this beam's purpose is to burn a hole in your aircraft/ship, and cause you to lose control and sink/crash.
Certain frequency bands of IR radiation penetrate the air well and we can easily build lasers in those frequencies. Far-ish and Far UV radiation also has good atmospheric penetration but our ability to make those lasers isn't there yet. AFAIK.
Another laser was experimented with for about a decade in the role as a replacement for the even older Phalanx CIWS and "testing" was discontinued several years ago. Israel seemed rather upset that we discontinued the "testing". I suspect this one is a bit more powerful.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Protocol IV, Article 3:
"Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol."
Looks like a loophole large enough to fire a multi-kilowatt IR laser through...
Center of gravity of the ship is probably further back than the geometrical centre which would make the aft of the ship more stable.
Probably both. The cross section for Rayleigh scattering (scattering from things smaller than light's wavelength, like atoms in the atmosphere) goes as 1/lambda^4, so longer wavelengths scatter much less strongly. This scattering is what makes distant landscapes look hazy, and the sky away from the sun look blue (scattering bluer light back towards the earth instead of letting it pass straight through); as you move to the red and near IR, you can get much clearer views of distant objects (thus also more effectively laser-zorch them).
> of the USS Ponce
USS Ponce: "Come on. Make fun of my name now, jackasses. What's that? 'Nothing.'? God damn right nothing."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
> USS Ponce
"If the tests are successful, the Navy intends to begin rolling out production systems in 2016, starting with the USS Little Lord Fauntleroy."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
With an on-board nuclear reactor and being surrounded by a massive heatsink floating in water I'm not sure how big of a problem electricity and cooling will be.
What happens when targets develope mirrors, ceramics, and alloys to point the laser back ?
I think they were playing Battlefield 3 and said, "hey this would be awesome with a laser!"
Funny thing is the USS Ponce is a landing ship and the whole back of the ship opens where the fantail would be.
But it is a landing ship and lightly armed as navy ships go, so running away seems a viable tactic.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
It's not like the FORTY-FIVE year old Ponce has a nuclear reactor on it.
The laser will only last as long as they can provide power to it, which I am sure is substantial.
I can't believe you're too ignorant and stupid to actually look up the ship and learn the derivation of her name. But this is Slashdot, so I should have expected such juvenile behavior - and for it to be moderated up.
Ponce is named after a town in Puerto Rico, which in turn is named for Ponce de Leon. (And in Spanish, the word "ponce" means "prince".)
Looks like this will be the first real world deployment of a ray gun, although admittedly a bit too big fit in your average holster. It took about 80 years from the pages of scifi magazines to reality, which isn't bad. Bet it won't take but 10-15 years before you can actually have one in a holster strapped to your leg like Han Solo.
I suspect to protect it from heavy seas.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
...capable of obliterating small boats and unmanned aerial vehicles...
Could it not also obliterate *manned* aerial vehicles?
Also, if it can take out a small boat, what about aiming it at the bridge of a large boat? That seems like it could have a potent effect.
And what will it do to people on those small boats, or if fired at a manned aerial vehicle? What kind of horrific injuries will occur that I won't be seeing on CNN, ...
For starters: Permanent blindness.
Unfortunately, the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons only bans weapons specifically designed and deployed to permanently blind people, not weapons that blind as a side-effect.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
As if there is going to be an 2014....
Behold the phaser.
... future directions .. for [US Navy] ship technology. ... they want the ship to have a huge amount of electrical generation capacity onboard, then multiple redundant busses to route the power all over.
Note that it's the Navy that's funding the polywell fusion generator research. If that works out, you're talking a nuclear fusion power plant that would fit in even very small ships, taking far less room than existing engine systems, producing hundreds of megawatts output per unit, with efficiencies of 60% or greater nuclear-reaction-energy-to-electricity, from minute amounts of hydrogen and boron fuel, with negligible, easily-shielded, radiation from low-level side-chain reactions.
This would be ideal for such a ship.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
lets find more ways to waste power , and driv eup the cost to people....YES GIANT LASER CANNONS THAT BLIND EVERYONE....
perfect....
These probably are not meant to kill anything but suicide attack boats.
CIWS and even 5-in guns with optimized shells are not good at killing agile craft at ranges beyond point-blank. When a small target with judiciously applied armor jinks, it is almost unkillable until the time of flight comes under 3 seconds (about 1-2 km), as any "motivated" use of the rudder causes a wild displacement in deflection that makes perfect aim mean a perfect miss on every shot. The "best" fire control in such a condition is a pattern of fire about the projected aim point, and this actuarial risk is moderate to a determined enemy who has numbers on his side: the guy you fire at goes defensive and becomes all but invulnerable while his friend bore in with rudders centered and throttles opened wide.
These weapons, if they can keep their power up with enough regularity, will bleed a swarm attack at the intermediate range, leaving the ballistic weapons for the few that might have bobbed past.
tone
Many of the weapons on naval ships can't fire forward. Usually a ship needs to keep a threat to either side for all the weapons to come to bear. For things like anti-missile defenses you want to have the missile approach perpendicular to your course anyway. A few reasons for this:
1. You're going to be firing flares and chaff, and you want the missile to go after those, and travelling at a right angle to the missile means that the bearing angle between you and the decoys is maximized (that is, after it passes the decoys without setting off the fuse you won't be still in the path of its sensors when it comes out on the other side).
2. Many missiles use radar for guidance, and if you're travelling perpendicular to the line of travel then your relative motion is zero compared to the water around you, which means that returned signals don't have a doppler shift, which means you don't stand out nearly as much. Granted, this makes a bigger difference for aircraft.
3. If for whatever reason another wave of missiles is coming in, you want to get away from the point where you were when you were spotted. As with #1 a right angle course means you're further from the center of the target bearing. With missiles bearing matters more than distance, since the missiles just travel in a line until they spot something and then they blow it up.
Aren't blinding lasers prohibited by treaty ?
How well does an infrared laser do against a corner reflector ? How good does the corner reflector have to be before making things unpleasant for those firing it, even if the target gets fried eventually ? Probably one made from a 1" polished Al plate would work quite well, and if you water cooled it, results would be impressive.
because there are way fewer Bravo One Bravos to crash than there are Vipers. And hell, bones got 4 engines...it's like training wheels...
sheets of corner cubes
A bigger why, as far as I'm concerned, is why this is mounted in the fantail - the aft end of the boat - rather than in the front? Is a captain supposed to order the crew to "Turn tail and fire!"
It's where there was room for it. Things don't have to be complicated. If you look at the Austin-class LPD, which is what the USS Ponce is, there's a whole lot of open real estate back aft. LPD's have a welldeck at the stern used to lauch LCAC's and other amphibious landing vehicles. I assume they'll utilize that space for some support gear for the laser. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually installed a generator to power the laser in the welldeck. Ship's service power may not be sufficient, or be "clean" enough in terms of stable voltage and frequency (especially given the limited amount of power and the multitude of uses a ship has for that power during general quarters, and the fact this is a new and relatively untested system). Pure speculation on my part, however.
That is really a rather small isn't it? ;)
I can see point 1. You want to be as "thin" as possible so that the missile travels past you while distracted by the chaff. However, the other two points don't make as much sense. When you are presenting your broadside to a missile, you are a much bigger radar signature than if you had your bow or stern facing it, doppler shift or no. If it were a dumb projectile, it wouldn't matter which way you went, you'd be velocity*time out of the way no matter which way you were travelling. If it is a guided missile, you won't be able to travel fast enough to out manoever it, so again, it doesn't matter which way you're facing - provided it has a lock on you. Preventing a lock means presenting minimal aspect (bow or stern facing).
So basically, it all boils down to how many defensive weapons can be brought to bear, and as you say, a broadside aspect is best for that. In which case, it doesn't matter whether if the laser is mounted fore or aft, as long as it has a good angular range on either side.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
My boat has no lasers. In fact, I dont even have a boat. I have a Geo Tracker; also no lasers.
Interestingly enough, cloaked ships would be impervious to IR Lasers.
Expect the science of Meta Materials to be furthered in leaps and bounds shortly.
They need to put in place a 8-16 Mjoules railgun on the destroyers. It does not need to go far. This would only do about 5-10 miles or so.
HOWEVER, it can be used against approaching boats, planes, etc. And with Iran's developments, they are working towards a multiple strategy on attacks. In particular, small fast boats will allow them to get in close, if the ship is busy with planes, missiles, rockets, etc. And with a small railgun, they can test high-speed production on it. Heck, if they get a small one with say 4-8 MJoules, then it would be possible for the Army to mount it on a M1A1 and replace the main gun.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
More likely, they realize that this isn't ready for prime-time, so they don't want it on a frontline combatant, just in case it really doesn't work. They'll use the Ponce as a technology demonstrator when it's in an anti-piracy group with other major combatants that can back it up, should the laser system fail. Course, they'd prefer to lose a 50 year old, ready to be decommissioned amphib ship, rather than a new-ish Burke or Tico.
but couldnt this be easily defeated with a few large passively or actively cooled mirrors? or heck its just energy, so couldnt it be absorbed by a solar cell on the receiving end?
Good people go to bed earlier.
#1 isn't about being thin, but about being nowhere near the chaff from the missile's perspective.
Imagine the missile is coming from due north. You can run North, South, or E/W. If you run North then the missile seeker will likely pick you instead of the chaff since it will encounter you first - not good. If you run South then the missile will definitely encounter the chaff first, but since the chaff won't detonate it the missile will pass through and go back into search mode, and now you're still in front of it.
Instead you pick E/W (if the missile isn't headed directly for you already you'd escape in whichever option takes you away from its path). The missile is travelling in a line, and the fastest way to get away from that line is to travel away in a tangential course (well, technically the angle is slightly off the tangent away from the missile, but your relative velocities are so different that it is basically a round-off).
I do agree that aspect will increase your radar signature. I'm honestly not sure where the trade-off falls in the case of a ship. In the case of an aircraft you're definitely best off keeping the missile's course tangential to your own, because compared to the ground the doppler shift of an aircraft is VERY large. Plus, a tangential course forces the missile to continuously accelerate which drains its speed (it does not generate power continuously like a jet), but that is unlikely to matter for a ship.
Doppler shift is quite important when detecting aircraft. People talk about stealth aircraft having the radar cross-section of an insect, but that isn't nearly as impressive as it sounds, since the radar can just filter out returns from all the insects that aren't flying at 200 knots, assuming the aircraft is travelling towards/away-from the radar. When the aircraft is travelling tangentially to the radar there is no doppler shift and now the radar has to deal with noise from whatever is behind the aircraft (like the ground in the case of a missile looking down). An anti-ship missile would have the same problem, though obviously they've solved it one way or another (the size and low speed of a ship likely helps with that).
Just FYI: Multiple generators and redundant busses were used at least as far back as the 1930s ;)
So, the way to take out the US Navy is just like Vin Diesel took on those bats in Pitch Black!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Terrorist ship deploys novel new defense of "a mirror" versus new infared laser weapon and sinks us battleship
Wouldn't a mirrored surface reflect the laser? It would also have the advantage of making a pretty, sparkley boat.
Interestingly enough, cloaked ships would be impervious to IR Lasers.
Expect the science of Meta Materials to be furthered in leaps and bounds shortly.
Course manouvers. Optical cloaking doesn't mean invisible to detection, nor does it mean it won't absorb more photons than it can dissipate. Aim where you think it is, it'll burn.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I realize that. I just find it interesting that if you changed a few sentences in the instruction manual, there would be, literally, no difference between the two.
Yes, if you changed a few sentences in any document, you can, literally, completely change the meaning of that document.
We could change just a few sentences in an assault weapon ban, and ban all firearms completely.
We could change a few sentences in other articles of the Geneva Convention, and make it okay to literally torture people.
I don't see how this is relevant.
Then why did you say, above, "You'd think all of this would be illegal under" the UN convention you linked to? There's a difference between "I think this should be illegal, and the UN should add it to this convention..." and "You'd think this would be illegal under a convention which explicitly does not cover weapons like this." It'd be like pointing to an assault weapon ban and saying, "you'd think that pepper spray would be illegal under this ban."