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Many Lasers Become One In Lockheed Martin's 30 kW Laser Weapon
Zothecula writes "In another step forward for laser weapons that brings to mind the Death Star's superlaser, Lockheed Martin has demonstrated a 30-kilowatt fiber laser produced by combining many lasers into a single beam of light. According to the company, this is the highest power laser yet that was still able to maintain beam quality and electrical efficiency, paving the way for a laser weapon system suitable, if not for a Death Star, for a wide range of air, land, and sea military platforms."
Lets keep them in one place, nice and tidy.
I know where I would attach that - to a shark's head! Imagine that - sharks with frickin lasers strapped to their heads, and hookers too! In fact forget the sharks.
Can we get this on that fighter? Seems only fitting...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
When has that been a problem with weapons, really? It's not like we have any way to stop any of those billions of bullets shot every year..
Here's an example of what can go wrong with beam weaponry: a fighter plane with a big-ass laser has an enemy fighter in its sights, but at the moment of truth the beam not only blasts the prey but also continues firing long enough for the coherent beam of destructive light energy to go onwards to strike a school in the metropolis below, causing a fire. Think of the children!!!
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
That doesn't respond to the issue of what happens to the killer beam(s) after the target is either missed or destroyed.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Does it not seem most unfitting for a state which, though pridening itself in its alleged openness and democratic nature, can only keep itself afloat by a debt-raising mechanism, and by printing money, as well as for a state where a substantial portion of its citizens live in deepest poverty ( not to speak of their virtual illiteracy ) to develop weapons no one ever asked for ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Let me know when they get to the 30 MW mining laser. Then I can go harvesting some asteroids.
Lasers might be safer than bullets, since bullets always land somewhere, while lasers disperse in space if you take care in what direction you fire them in.
Lasers, as most weapons, are directional. War, as most confrontations, is positional.
Thus, collateral damage does not damage the shooter.
Collateral damage to "not the shooter" hasn't stopped a weapon from being constructed ever in the history of mankind.
You can aim laser quite well - you don't event need that much of lead on moving target... Regarding misses - it is not like it will go around earth looking for first person to kill. Good chances is that everything around the target you are aiming at is hostile anyway. In most cases they will be aimed either down (from airplanes) or up (as anti-rocket/mortar weapon), so there will be either ground or empty sky near the target. And diffraction/scattering will make sure that laser is harmless for sattelites if it missed that plane/rocket (http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/LaserDeathRay/DeathRay.html - look at 'Range' section)
Generally, I would expect collateral damage being orders of magnitude smaller than with conventional weapons.
Even for sidearms (which is not possible at this moment), it would be a lot safer due to no ricochets. Just don't get into shooting fight in hall of mirrors ;)
...does it go.... pew! pew!... pew! pew!... pew! pew! pew!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
The same fighter fires a stream of lead at another fighter, missing and the lead raining down on a school below. How does the laser do any more/worse damage?
Learn to love Alaska
If you think that the beam of light is a problem, think of the many tons of burning fuel, explosives and scrap metal that are gonna fall out of the sky after the prey got blasted! Think of the children!
Seriously? Light is subject to the physics of electromagnetism. A laser will send a beam in a predictable path based on well understood science of photonics.
What else would they mount on Akula-class submarines?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
If a fighter plane is blown up over Kentucky, a family in Oregon or South Carolina need not worry about the debris falling on them. An errant 30kw beam of coherent light would be dangerous even in far away places.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
I don't know the physics of it, could someone tell me whether it would be both feasible and helpful to combine various lasers of differing bandwidths into one beam?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Bullets fall, lasers don't
If you shoot a gun, even a high powered rifle, it isn't going to blind someone 20 miles away like a laser would
Could you even imagine a Beowulf cluster of those?
Too many unknowns to get exact numbers, but assuming visible light and 10cm aperture, we are probably talking about few mm per each km of distance. Geostationary satellites are completely out of range, but lets take ISS as example - 400km. This means that 30kW would be spread over circle with 2m or so. ISS has a speed of 7-8km/s (as all low orbit satellites, otherwise they would fall down). This means that each part of station would be in the beam 'focus' for 0.005 seconds. Given radius of the beam and speed, there would be no localized damage - just total energy transferred to station. Assuming it goes in most unfavorable way, it can probably get around 100m of length through the beam, giving a total of 0.013s exposure. So, in most unfortunate situation, we are talking about 390 joules of energy being transferred to the ENTIRE station. For comparison, light shining on _earth_ hits with 1000 joules per second for each square meter (a probably a lot more in space). So, we are talking about effect being few hundred times smaller than sun radiation station received each second.
Please note that we are talking about _collateral_ damage due to missed shots, not active tracking of satellites. But even with perfect tracking and a lot more powerful lasers, it would be very hard to do lasting damage. Current anti-satellite laser developments are about _blinding_ satellites, not blowing them up.
If you think that collateral, non-tracked shot from realistic laser with 30kW of power can do any damage to any satellite, please provide your calculations. Otherwise, too much watching StarWars, not enough science.
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but the curvature of the earth would definitely prevent a laser beam from an aircraft in Kentucky from hitting a building in South Carolina, to say nothing of Oregon.
Serious question: Would this be a useful way of clearing up all the junk that's floating around in orbit? Surely if you sliced each one up a few times it'd fall out of orbit sooner rather than later, and be more likely to burn up than intact satellites. (I mean, I've seen Dark Star - as long as you don't put any AI on the laser we should be fine)
"There's something very important I forgot to tell you. Don't cross the laser beams. It would be bad. Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously."
E Pluribus Unum!!!!!!
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
The physics of electromagnetism and photonics will somehow stop an errant beam from destroying anything else as it travels onwards? Nope, of course not.
Okay so you clearly have no idea how lasers work, or the physics of electromagnetism.
For one thing, they defocus over long distances. At sufficiently high energies they lose energy because they turn the air to plasma and bleed off intensity as heat. It's been a struggle to make ranged laser weapons work, because you can't exceed a couple of kw/cm2 before the air turns to plasma and your beam blooms out of existence.
And for the example given, lasers are much less likely to cause collateral damage - they can "unfired" instantly, and they will travel at a tangent to the Earth meaning that once headed any amount above the horizon they will never fall below it. Bullets, missiles, bombs - well those always come down and they are lethal when they do.
Cutting things up isn't useful. In space you need to impart delta-V - lasers have been proposed as a way to trigger outgasing on orbital debris from the ground. Add enough upwards delta-V away from the earth and you could shift the orbit enough for a deep-dive into the atmosphere (space, the only place where thrusting away from the ground sends you straight into it).
Photons are affected by gravity.
It goes into the ground when fired from above, into space when fired from below,
Will someone think of ET?
Water.
shh the Earth is flat. Kentucky schools told him so.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
So your example of a nice, predictable weapon is a stream of bullets subject to gravity and wind, or a self-guided package of explosives, while your idea of unpredictability is a collimated beam of photons.
Sweet deus.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
What stops an errant stream of bullets or an incorrectly guided air-to-air missile from doing the same thing? Magic?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
ah another one.
The world is round. unless the beam hit the planet it is being pointed out into space.
think about it.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I'm highly dubious as to the real world applications of this system. Every other laser "weapon" has turned out to be highly ineffective, prone to failure & unable to meet any of its design goals. Just look at the ABL (Airborne Laser), they burnt over $5 Billion and were well on their way to burning more until some in the military hierarchy noticed that you would need dozens of them positioned inside even a small enemies airspace to be effective.
Laser weapons as they are being developed just don't work that way. The pulse is actually quite short when applied, and the target goes boom. You've watched way too many science fiction movies.
They are also far more accurate than kinetic energy delivery weapons (big bullets).
You're either trolling or an absolute idiot. Lasers are an order of magnitude more accurate than any projectile weapon. I really do hope you're just blissfully ignorant and not a troll.
Depends what you are trying to damage. A CCD doesn't need nearly as much energy to destroy as sheet metal.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Could be, actually. Cut them up and you're looking at a higher cross-section to mass ratio, which hastens the process of very, very slowly falling down from wispy atmospheric drag. But you couldn't do it from the ground - too far, too much air in the way. Perhaps a 'junk hunter' sat could work.
No, it wouldn't. A laser beam *defocuses* over long distances and becomes harmless. In an atmosphere it'll also suffer severe energy loss to the atoms it travels through.
They dissipate due to defocusing and interaction with the atmosphere. It's not a problem.
In how many circumstances do you have a clear 20-mile line of sight to a (potential) collateral victim? From where you stand right now, how far can you go on a horizontal plane before running into something (like a building, forest, mountain) that would stop a laser? Bullets do have limited range, especially compared to a laser, but in most battle zones, a bullet or laser will both probably run into something before it has a chance to run into an unintended victim.
There are obviously many uses for this technology, but a lot has been focused on anti-missile (ballistic, surface-to-surface, etc.), in which case the beam is going to be pointingup, above the horizontal. It's not likely to be blinding anyone up in the sky.
Oh, no ... I can hear it now: "I have a right to carry one of these if I want to!"
Considering that a "gun" is defined in a stereotypical law as something that has a muzzle and fires a projectile, it probably is legal to carry one ... if you can lift the silly thing!
The sporting goods store will announce it to their customers .... as the only gun that cooks its target so you don't have to!
Oh, this one's going to be ugly.
What would be great is if there were, say, 30 lasers mounted in a circle 1-2 meters in diameter. That way, in order to hit their target, they will focus on it, with all the lasers pointing inwards. The point the meet in the air being their intended target. Constructive interference, focused bean and all that jazz makes them effective. If they miss, then they are just 30 smaller beams scattering off being 'mostly harmless'.
It's like, if you 'miss' with a magnifying glass, you don't burn the ants so much.
This is not an issue at all for 2 reasons:
1) Lasers have a focal length. This is where all the light converges to a point and becomes powerful enough to cut steel in industrial applications or do damage in military applications. Go much beyond the focal length and the laser beam becomes practically useless.
2) The Earth has an atmosphere, not a vacuum. At any significant range, there will be energy losses.
If anything, a missed laser shot would cause far less collateral damage than conventional armaments. If you are 100 feet behind the target and take a hit, you *might* have to worry about a sunburn or some minor retinal damage (similar to looking at a welding torch or directly at the sun). Might.
Source: I worked at the world's largest producer of laser optics
Well... it depends on how high up over Kentucky that [s]air[/s]craft happens to be.
In an unrelated note, is there any way to do strikethrough text on slashdot?
Bullets fall, lasers don't
Einstein is rolling in his grave right now....
Well it isn't going to be "slashed around", but laser weapons are always on. A pulsed laser has an enormous energy output (far far higher than 30kW), but it really doesn't have much in the way of energy output. You're not looking to ablate away a few micrometers on the surface of the target. You're not even looking to burn a hole through it. You're looking to slowly heat it up over several seconds until structural failure of some vital component, like a fuel tank or wing spar.
A pulsed laser has an enormous POWER output (far far higher than 30kW), but it really doesn't have much in the way of energy output.
Fixed that for me.
What happens when they take the wall wart away? How are they going to power this stuff in the field? And will that power system be hardened enough for combat while still being transportable?
Except for causing permanent eye damage to anyone who so much as looks at a reflection of the beam?
Are you trying to fight Medusa? Walking around a battlefield while looking at a mirror is going to get you killed in soo many other ways.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
Can it pop a giant bowl of popcorn in a house from a plane?
If ET is in range, they he probably has some way of announcing his presence. Say for example by taking over Channel 4, or possibly FOX News.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
With a beam that powerful, it won't take a direct hit to the cornea to cause eye damage. Catching a glint off of the windshield of the target (car, plane, tank, building) might be enough.
Forget walking around with mirrors, battlefield dress of the future might include welding goggles or a helmet mounted HUD to protect a soldiers eyes behind a video feed.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Nobody will ever suspect a drag racing millionaire playboy
Is that you Justin Beiber?
"Mr. President, we must not allow a mine shaft gap!"
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Mirrors? Really? You must be joking. This kind of power would destroy even a perfect mirror. There would be no reflection.
It is not obvious. First - _perfect_ mirror is perfect, so it would reflect it. Question is, could
1) Best mirror we have currently
2) Normal 'shop' mirror
reflect it without melting?
Really good mirrors (one used to focus lasers in physics) absorb maybe 0.2% of energy. Assuming 1cm radius of laser, we would have 60W of power focused on roughly 1cm of metal. There is no magic in laser - it would just need to melt metal behind the mirror. Even assuming no termal conductivity and no special cooling of that 'almost perfect' mirror, we are talking about 60 joules of energy getting there per second. Assuming thin layer of metal in that section, weight maybe 1g, it would heat up by 100-200 C per second. This means you would need to aim in exactly same spot for 5-10 seconds to melt it (well, probably mirror would become less perfect by then - but at same time, there would be a termal conductivity, which can increase time by orders of magnitude)
For the normal shop mirror - yes, it would break fast if you use continous beam. But not before deflecting a LOT more energy around. If you would stand on reflection path from the mirror, you would get fried a lot faster than even shop mirror would break.
Yes, but they mention 'cripple' rather than destory. It might be same variation on the 'blinding spy satellites'. Only data I can find about anti-satellite lasers which reached production stage are about ones used for blinding optics (for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...).
As opposed to having your eyesight damaged by fragments of the thing that was just hit by a bomb... This is a weapon we're talking about, damaging people isn't an unfortunate side effect, it's the desired effect.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Hence the failed strike through on the "air" part of "aircraft". It's hard to make a joke when you cannot format your text suitably.
Jesus Christ, the first to harness your stupidity as a weapon would rule the universe.
Fortunately, with lasers that aim up, you don't really have to worry about them falling back down. Maybe the Martians will have something to worry about, but that's not our problem.
Also - in other news - war is dangerous. Details at 11.
Gentlemen, phase three. We place a giant "laser" on the moon. Let me demonstrate. ... The laser is powerful enough to destroy every city on the planet at will. We'll turn the moon into what I like to call a "Death Star". ... Since my "Death Star" laser was invented by the noted Cambridge physicist, Dr. Parsons. I thought we'd name it in his honor - the Alan Parsons Project.
I am officially gone from
A few mm per km of distance, this is theoretical colimation limits you are talking about? Do 30kW lasers even approach that level of coherence in practical implementations?
I was doing good to keep a spot size under 2m at a distance of roughly 300m when trying to collimate a foot long HeNe tube laser with a pair of lenses.
You've asserted that a laser is less predictable than balllistics. When you are in ship to ship and your fighter fires on one at a higher altitude, what will the ballistics do? Fall. Possibly on someone. We could theoretically calculate exactly where, but we can't because we don't know all the variables at the moment of release. But the laser will go up, forever, endangering nobody, except a near-zero chance of an unintentional hit on the space station. In that case, the laser is infinitely more safe than ballistics. Even when firing down, the spread of destruction will be lower with the laser. I can't see how someone could have the stance that a laser is more dangerous to bystanders than sprayed high rate of fire lead, or even better uranium (or is that mainly tank shells).
Learn to love Alaska
Anybody know if that old dream of powering a vehicle into orbit using ground-based lasers is still alive? And if so, how powerful a laser would be required? That might be a worthwhile spinoff of this R&D..
it get's even harder as the power goes up if your medium is atmospheric. There are multiple effects when pushing a shit ton of energy through air that disrupt the coherence of the bream.
The most popular application for laser defense currently is to have the laser mounted in an aircraft of some sort, which means that it will be fired horizontal, or even slightly downward.
Ok, lasers do technically still follow the laws of gravity, but because light has such little mass compared to it's velocity the gravitational effect doesn't really apply in the kind of scale we are dealing with (20 miles or less)
e pluribus... burnem?
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Now as soon as I get all those darn laser pointers I ordered, and then get them to point at the same spot ...
Sweet!
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
In the Star Wars technical books they describe the Death Stars weapon as a "giant hyper-matter laser". Hyper-matter is what they use to go faster than light but I would guess that its not completely totally different to an anti-proton beam. .... would make the planet tear itself apart. Exotic matter would be a much better bet to do the same thing..
If the physics works a certain way an FTL beam might just be able to disrupt a planets gravity field. That would allow it to destroy a planet with far less energy because the gravity field compresses the planet like an enormous spring and releasing it
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..