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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.
Somali pirates begin to feel the heat. Original recipe or extra crispy.
From TFA: "close in" and "slow moving". So as long as the North Koreans can arrange to have their rockets hover over US ships on clear days, yeah, nothing to worry about at all.
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.
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
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.
I always thought blowtorches has tanks of fuel, not magazines of fuel. Damn public school education!
Be seeing you...
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...
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).
Yup. Too risky, let's go back to bullets and artillery shells.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
Oh Yeah? We not aflaid of laser. We have bigger better laser. Two of them. Will cut earth in half.
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
Lets see:
CIWS ammo 1 second fire: ~$250
Solid State Laser: ~$1
Yeah, no reason at all for the new system....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
What it can do is not run out of ammo.
CIWS has 1550 rounds in its magazine - about 20 seconds of fire. At which point you'd better be praying that the other side doesn't have anymore missiles to toss at you, since you can't reload a CIWS quickly....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
War is about murdering the other people and breaking their equipment before they use their equipment to murder you. If you're using a laser, or a bullet, or a missile, or any of a myriad of weapons against a boat or an airplane, then it had damn well better pose enough of a threat to you that you are perfectly okay with everyone on it dying, and perhaps maybe even want to kill them. This isn't a "less-lethal" weapon (and I agree with your assessment of tasers and microwave pain rays); it's a "you, over there, die" weapon.
I'm quite critical of the US military contracting industry and of US military policy, but saying "this weapon is bad because it might kill people" is a little disingenuous. It's a weapon; it's for murdering people. If you don't think something's important enough to kill anyone who gets in the way of it, it's not worth going to war over, since that's what war is.
Definition of ponce
noun
1: derogatory an effeminate man.
2: a man who lives off a prostitute’s earnings.
Exactly, lasers just can't deliver enough energy fast enough to take out missiles or anything but the slowest aircraft. Range is also a major problem because the light is refracted and dissipated in the atmosphere. It's a demonstration of the technology, with the hope that it can be developed into something more useful.
As for NK's missiles, if they have the range to hit the US then they are virtually impossible to stop. Shooting down ICBMs is pretty much impossible to do reliably, unless you are able to somehow hit them all during the boost phase. Even then you wouldn't want to rely on that capability to protect your cities.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
USS Ponce ? Really...?
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography
"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.
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.
You should learn to google. There are multiple publicly documented examples of laser doing just that.
These were conducted in pretty 'ideal' conditions, clear sunny days, and from stationary immobile platforms, but it's been done and verified to work to at least some level.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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...
War is about murdering the other people and breaking their equipment before they use their equipment to murder you.
No it isn't, you nitwit. War is about achieving specific objectives by force. The force doesn't have to be lethal, and very often it isn't. As even Sun Tzu wrote, "Preserving the enemies army is best, destroying it second best." Your myopic, sociopathic way of looking at war is disturbing in the extreme. Thankfully, the modern military has no use for poorly-adjusted rambos like yourself.
If you're using a laser, or a bullet, or a missile, or any of a myriad of weapons against a boat or an airplane, then it had damn well better pose enough of a threat to you that you are perfectly okay with everyone on it dying, and perhaps maybe even want to kill them.
Terrorists have just taken control of an oil tanker in San Francisco's bay. They have over a hundred hostages and have threatened to blow holes in the hull and scuttle the ship, causing a massive environmental disaster, unless a dozen of their copatriots from Guantanamo Bay are released. You have twenty four hours to comply. Do you:
a) Blow up the tanker with your orbital ion cannon because war is about murdering other people, and thus causing a massive ecological disaster and billions of dollars in economic damages, or;
b) Sneak a small team of Navy SEALS on board, neutralize the terrorists, and retake the ship with minimal casualties.
As anyone who doesn't have a serious screw loose in their brain can see, there are military options that don't involve going all murder-happy... because, you know, the military, unlike you, doesn't have some deep-seated anger management issues.
If you don't think something's important enough to kill anyone who gets in the way of it, it's not worth going to war over, since that's what war is.
What disturbs me about your logic here is that murdering people is 'Plan A' in your world, and 'Plan B' isn't. The military isn't some gun-ho institution where people get to freely kill others. There are rules of engagement and a whole host of other things designed specifically to limit the loss of life whenever possible. And despite us having nuclear weapons, for example, we still rely on less damaging weapons all the way down to rubber bullets and tear gas. The military wouldn't need any of these options if it didn't make saving lives a priority. That's ultimately what our soldiers do: They don't take lives, they save them. Ours, to be precise. War is often about protecting what we value most, not just kicking sand in other people's faces.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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).
see, Tom Clancy - Red Storm Rising - Chapter "Dance of the vampires". A bit dated, yes, but the concept still stands.
This is a tech demo, a version 0.0.1 effort at something useful in the future. In the future, the navy has rather ambitious, but reasonable plans for their ships. The venerable 5 inch deck gun is to be eventually replaced by some sort of mass driver, be it a rail gun, or other electromagnetic cannon. To supplement that in the CIWS arena will be highly responsive directed energy weapons, similar in concept to this laser. I can imagine two different types, one that's designed to deliver rapid, high energy bursts to a target with a very small focal point and limited range. This is the eventual successor to the RAM, which replaced the Phalanx system. Then, a slightly larger system that has greater range, delivers it's energy in a rather longer, and slightly less focused fashion. This would be the replacement for the 25mm bushmaster/Typhoon cannon/mount based systems to cover the area immediately around the ship from small craft, helicopters, and attack aircraft on shallow attack profiles. This combination would not entirely eliminate the need for missiles on ships. You still need to be able to get at things that are beyond line of sight, things that are evasive, things that have a high deltaV or comparativeV with your vessel. However, having a successful suite of these other systems means that your ships are more survivable, can remain on station longer when under modest attack, and are devastatingly effective in the litoral/line-of-sight arena. If you can see it, you can either melt small holes in it, melt big holes in it, or hit it with enough kinetic energy to vaporize most or all of it.
CIWS has 1550 rounds in its magazine
Oh, those damned new magazine limit laws, again!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
> 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.
The first airborne drone to be shot out of the sky with a (chemical) laser was back in 1979 or 1980 - there was a picture in Aviation Week. Interestingly, this was several years before the DoD admitted even doing research in the area.
There is lots of information on the web about all aspects of military lasers, what they work on, pictures and videos of tests, evaluation of every issue mentioned in every comment here. I've been following this topic casually for some time, and the data is out there. Google is your friend. But I know, nobody on /. reads TFA much less research the topic - not picking on you, this is just a general statement of fact. :)
I will note that the major 'win' for laser systems and to a lesser extent rail guns is logistics. A military organization is basically like UPS - it's all about getting parts, ammunition, fuel, and people delivered where it's needed. Ammunition in particular is a huge PITA - dangerous in transit, bulky, and dangerous when stored on a ship. The classic 'torpedo hit' in the movies is when the torpedo penetrates one of the magazines on a ship, which then explodes en masse, and the ship splits in two - or in dozens! The cost of delivering the ammunition to the ship exceeds the cost of the actual ammunition, and delivery of fuel is several times as expensive as the fuel.
For perspective, the guns on the old battleships like USS Missouri took several 100 lb. bags of cordite to fire off one shell. That's a lot of explosive. Eliminating that explosive makes more room for actual delivered shells, and eliminates a ship's greatest existential threat - an exploding magazine.
Using rail guns the only explosives would be whatever the shell being shot contains (which, if it is hypersonic, may be none - kinetic impact may be enough). Using lasers, a nuclear ship could essentially shoot continuously (at some rate) indefinitely - they would 'never' run out of ammo. So yes, this is still experimental. They are still working on increasing operational (as opposed to research) power output to the 100 KW range where things really get 'interesting'. But General Atomic already has a 150 KW laser running in research.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I pray that our leaders are not insane enough to believe that.
And I hope that an impenetrable anti-missile shield is never invented. We don't need one fewer reason to try to sort out our problems as civilized people. Arrogance+Invulnerability=Disaster for somebody.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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Obviously, for piloted aircraft they just order all hands on deck with laser pointers.
Thing is, it's been demonstrated to work for at least four decades now. They just trot out this old dog and pony show every once in a while either to scare someone or rustle up some delicious pork.
Exactly, lasers just can't deliver enough energy fast enough to take out missiles or anything but the slowest aircraft. Range is also a major problem because the light is refracted and dissipated in the atmosphere. It's a demonstration of the technology, with the hope that it can be developed into something more useful.
The ill-fated ABL program solved both the energy and refraction problems, but that was a larger and more expensive laser (you can overcome atmospheric dissipation almost entirely if you can shape your lens on the fly to exactly counter the distortion of the atmosphere, which I believe is old hat for spy sats).
The equally ill-fated DDX program promised huge amounts of power to feed lasers and railguns, but I believe the type of engine that was proposed has since been abandoned, so I'm not sure where you could get enough power to take out a distant, large missile. It should still be fine for CIWS though.
As for NK's missiles, if they have the range to hit the US then they are virtually impossible to stop. Shooting down ICBMs is pretty much impossible to do reliably, unless you are able to somehow hit them all during the boost phase.
Not all long-range missiles are created equal. Sure, if NK is using a still-working Russian cold-war era ICBM, with all of its countermeasures, that's a hard target during re-entry. But they won't be launching "missiles", nor getting the advantage of MIRV, if they only have one warhead (which is one more than they likely have). If it's some homebrew NK-built missile, then it will be the easiest possible target (and last I heard we can hit those now), on the slim chance it even makes it across the ocean. Not a danger to ignore, by any means, but we've relied on deterrence for 60+ years now - any actual missile defense is gravy.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This laser is probably in the 10's of kilowatts, and even including inefficiencies, it's a pretty small load. The air conditioning in the bridge probably consumes more power.
A two litre diesel engine generator would produce enough power and run for hours on a jerry can of fuel. That's pretty good going for a weapon.
That's an absolutely massive strawman you've set up there.
Actually this is a reductio ad absurdum, not a straw man. But you were very close. I'm trying to demonstrate the absurdity of saying that every military engagement (war) necessarily leads to loss of life. I'm mocking the original poster's assertion that "war = murder". And it is a legitimate argumentation strategy, though it requires a certain degree of finesse that I often lack, since I prefer to go for a snarky shock and awe campaign when I post here over the coldly academic approach.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
... 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
Only until it runs out of fuel.
Tens of kilowatts is eights of horsepower. That's a drop in the bucket compared to just the ship's lights.
I wonder if it has enough fuel that, if it weren't cruising around, it could run its generators and fire the laser continuously for several times the duration of WW II.
And then there's the prospect of being refueled.
If you want to get picky about "unlimited fuel" you can claim that a device that will run until the heat death of the universe isn't "unlimited".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Would it had helped the USS Stark or the USS Cole? Here is an article on the Stark. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Stark_(FFG-31) and an article on the Cole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing. One can not defend a ship unless one is willing to use the weapons they had.
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.
Terrorists have just taken control of an oil tanker in San Francisco's bay. They have over a hundred hostages and have threatened to blow holes in the hull and scuttle the ship, causing a massive environmental disaster, unless a dozen of their copatriots from Guantanamo Bay are released. You have twenty four hours to comply.
Do you understand that this isn't an example of war? Unless you agree with Bush's definition of the "War on Terror."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Shooting down an ICBM is not impossible. Hard yes. If North Korea shot off an ICBM at the US we would multiple chances of shooting down. First would be with a sea based SM-3 then with the GMDs in Alaska and California and if we are lucky THAADs and then PAC-3s. We would not take on shot at it but I would say there is a very good chance that we could stop an NK ICBM since it would probably lack decoys and other penaids and there would not be hundreds of them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
War is about achieving specific objectives by force.
That's a very Bush Jr. definition of war. You do not need to look any further than Iraq, and you will see that your "definition" falls apart, as they did not "achieve" anything by being invaded (aka "at war"). Next time you need to define something try opening a websters' dictionary or something.
Terrorists have just taken control of an oil tanker in San Francisco's bay....
Yes, I we all know that the Terrorists is the only credible "military" threat that you can come up with. No, scary Terrorists is not what we have military for, and hopefully military is never called into a SF bay, but rather some specially trained police unit. When a neighbour kid steals your candy you don't deploy your "orbital ion cannon" either. Military exists to resolve _extrernal_ conflicts, and hopefully will only ever be used for those, because the only exceptions from that rule are either police state or civil war, and both are very ugly.
I think GP has a firm grasp of special relativity.
If your "missile" moves at light speed, it hits at the earliest time deployment can be detected. In the reference frame of the target, the moment of firing and the energy hitting are simultaneous.
The Navy doesn't use guns to shoot down aircraft any longer, they use missiles, specifically, SM-2 and SM-6 missiles from AEGIS Cruisers and Destroyers. Those missiles can also be used to shoot down cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles. The CIWS (Phalanx) is used for close-in defense against missiles as an absolute last resort, but that capability is largely being moved to Rolling Airframe Missiles. To wit, the latest ships to come out of design in the US do not have Phalanx, they have RAM. I'm not sure if the Flight III Burke Destroyers will have RAM or Phalanx, but I'd expect they'd scrap Phalanx.
In the case of the Cole, not likely. In-port ship self defense regs were very lax back then, and even in a port with potential hostiles, the threat envelope wasn't taken seriously. Again with the Stark, probably not. The Exocet flies faster than this is likely to be able to track and engage. The fire control radar likely isn't fast enough to complete a fire control solution against the incoming threat, and the laser likely won't be able to do enough damage to the missile before it hits. That said, this is clearly a technology demonstrator, as it's not being outfitted on a Burke, Tico, or Nimitz, the real workhorses of the fleet. They'll use this for sporadic engagements when they're sure they've got sufficient redundancy to eliminate any threat where the laser system isn't effective.