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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."
TFA(although horribly light on details) specifically mentions that these devices are too feeble and short ranged to pose any threat to such larger missiles. TFA also expresses uncertainty about hitting fast moving targets(I'd hope that the tracking capabilities are at least not-worse than existing CIWS hardware; but if it takes several seconds to set the target on fire, that would entail a greater delay...)
In fact, short of being a tech demo for something that might eventually be mature, it isn't entirely clear what this system can do that any of the better regarded WWII-era light cannon(retrofitted with modern targeting systems) couldn't...
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
The pilots of those actual Falcons never called their fighters by the AF-approved name. They called it the Viper.
Named after the original Battlestar Galactica fighters, by the way.
Crew-assigned nicknames are almost always better and/or more-colorful than the official ones. For instance:
B-1: Lancer vs. Lawn Dart
B-52: Stratofortress vs. Big Ugly Fat Fucker (BUFF)
C-5: Galaxy vs. Fat Albert or Linda Lovelace (I presume that last comes from the fact that the C-5 can tilt the nose section upward to, err, "swallow" large items of cargo.
F-105: Thunderchief vs. Thud or Lead Sled.
F-111: No name at all! vs. Ardvaark or Switchblade.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."