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US Navy Authorizes Use of Laser In Combat
mi writes The U.S. Navy has declared an experimental laser weapon on its Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB) in the Persian Gulf an operational asset and U.S. Central Command has given permission for the commander of the ship to defend itself with the weapon. The 30 kilowatt Laser Weapon System (LaWS) was installed aboard USS Ponce this summer as part of a $40 million research and development effort from ONR and Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) to test the viability of directed energy weapons in an operational environment. No word yet on a smaller, shark-mounted version.
Really? Does "ponce" mean something different in US English or is there some story behind it?
I thought poncy names for ships was the preserve of the Royal Navy.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Jets and missiles can't dodge the speed of light.
It's finally happening! When do we get to call our guns "DEWs" now?
Overly reflective vessels have been banned as have mirrors.
One of the religious prohibitions in Islam is making war with fire.
If this is used it will be interesting to see the effects on recruiting by the Islamic State and other anti-US organizations among those Muslims who are currently either opposed to them or unaligned.
Also: How do you keep a 30 kW laser, at any frequency, from blinding everybody in the general direction of the target? The last I heard, weapons that blind are banned by the current "laws of war" as recognized by the western powers - and that's been the major impeidment so far to deploying laser (and other directed energy) weapons. Has something changed? Or did the current administration just decide to play with the new toy despite past promises to the other kids?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why make the laser smaller when you can make the shark bigger?
Where the rave will be with 30 kilowatt lasers! Seriously it needs to be tested with Sandstorm by Darude! ;-)
Is it the kind of continuous beam that sounds like it is activated by an industrial elevator servo and emits a high-pitched screech even in space, or is it the kind that goes in segmented little blasts that go ptew ptew ptew and bounce off of bulkheads with little sparks?
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Navy faces fine for pointing laser at aircraft.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
>> U.S. Navy has declared a "laz-er" ...an operational asset and ...has given permission for the commander of the ship to defend itself with the weapon
Today, we finally begin to close the Shark Gap.
This has to be a milestone in warfare, right up there with the gun, or bow and arrow.
>> Does the FAA know about this?
They probably would after the fried plane drops into the sea.
Michael Brown attacked a policeman, who confronted him. The officer was perfectly justified in killing the thug.
That Michael Brown was "unarmed" is irrelevant. Similarly, it would've been perfectly Ok — by all ethics standards — for owners of all the looted stores (and burned cars) to shoot the attackers, whether or not the looters were armed.
We are better if only because the things you listed raise eyebrows here. For Russia, China, or Cuba they are perfectly normal.
Please, don't hate.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Goldeneye was a Magic Directed/Focused Electromagnetic Pulse weapon, not a laser. I thought that was obvious.
I'll wait until the light sabers are operational.
How about the copper. Just copper back metal surfaces and you have a nice thermal dissipation... :)
The last I heard, weapons that blind are banned by the current "laws of war" as recognized by the western powers - and that's been the major impeidment so far to deploying laser (and other directed energy) weapons. Has something changed? Or did the current administration just decide to play with the new toy despite past promises to the other kids?
The US does not honor International Law on banned weapons, nor does any other country in reality. Weapons that are "banned" are normally relabeled to make them look good, but does not change what they are. As long as you are on the winning side who is going to prosecute you? As a prime example, cluster bombs are against the law yet the main artillery round of the MLRS fires a warhead packed with 1001 "grenadelets". See that? By renaming "cluster bomb" to be "grenadelets" you have not broken the law. Firing a weapon at a "person" with a round of .50 caliber or higher is illegal by international law. The main sniper rifle used by all troops in the Middle East has become a.50 caliber, and look at the video of the Reuters reporter killed by the 30MM chain gun on an Apache.
Countries today use what they think they can get away with, and in the case of Western countries that is quite a lot. Look at all the depleted uranium dumped in the middle east causing serious health problems for over a decade.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Use the beam as fuel to increase the missile speed.
Hitting the tail would probably be the most effective to interrupt the steering controls. The missile won't hit its designated target.
I bet they get a seal-mounted version first
What people are missing is that this is meant (mostly) for inbound missile defense. It isn't a matter of *pew* *pew* *pew* *BOOM*; a sustained beam is held on target for a fairly long period of time (up to a second).
Also works well against motor boats and other third world potential mass suicide attack.
Thank you for thinking out of the box and kicking ass Lt. Gen. Riper!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
You got DEWd!
And 'Man up and do the DEW!'
And don't forget the ever favorite: 'Looks like a pile of DEW crap.' -- Will usually be referring to enemy combatants and rarely unidentifiable civilians claimed as enemy combatants.
And at a dollar a shot, it'll make the next generation of concentration camps all the more effective at filtering the undesirables out of our society!
Like everything else Americans gorge out on, take this as food... for thought.
... If you fire shells at the laser which have a retroreflector mounted on their noses? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector refers.
Even if they don't cause the laser to blow up they should blind everyone on the operating ship...
A couple thousand years later the USA is catching up to the ship destroying technology of the great Archimedes.
Americans with laser mounted warships.
In adding a sig, for no other reason, than for aesthetics.
Couldn't we have shocked Japan by just dropping the nuke in the nearby ocean?
At what point is it okay to kill civilians in order to save the lives of soldiers?
Now everybody in the midle East need to purchase laser safety goggles.
nm
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
I want to see the railgun. That is where things change. With the railgun, you can shoot 100 miles and over the horizon.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ok, now use this laser on a rainy day
Nearly all of what you say are valid points. But one carries a misconception:
By it's very nature of being a focused, collimated beam a laser does not affect anything in "the general direction" of the target - if it was not focused and accurate, it wouldn't be an effective weapon and might not even be dangerous.
That's SO not true. There are two issues here:
- Forward (and back) scatter: A laser beam "leaks" light, primarily in the "general direction" of the main beam and, to a lesser extent, in the general direction of back toward the source. It's not a big percentage. But when you start out with kilowatts of colimated light it can be more than adequate to burn out a human eye.
- Scattering (also specular reflection) from the target, or the cloud of gas that remains of the target. This can be a substantial fraction of the incident beam.
"Do not look at the beam or the target with the remains of your face."
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A directed energy weapon at sea has limited offensive potential and would be primarily a defensive weapon due to its inability to shoot over the horizon. The video of the "twin boat surface" test supplied by the US Navy leads me to have serious doubts as to its effectiveness in actual combat. The system appeared to be manually aimed, and it looked like the mechanism that rotated/elevated the device moved fairly slowly, so it probably can't be used for missile defense. Likewise and for the same reason it is probably not going to be effective against incoming jet aircraft, though it looks to be quite effective against slow moving drones. Also, the 2nd motorboat test target only took damage to a series of black pipes mounted on an overhead bar (probably simulating weapons) but the boat itself was not touched by the weapon (probably deliberate, so they could re-use it in further testing).
This does not have the look of a polished, ready to deploy weapon system and I don't think this has been tested sufficiently to actually rely on it in combat. Have they tested it against a target with a highly polished aluminum hull for example? Lasers also tend to have problems with things in the air like rain, fog, smoke, sea-spray, etc. which can greatly reduce its effective range. The Navy's experimental rail-gun has much more potential use than laser weapons inside an atmosphere. IMHO of course.
NAVSEA? It looks like the classical Latin spelling of "nausea". There was an episode of the Flinstones that had a similar naming. IIRC, it was a boat that Fred acquired.
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Another example are Land Mines, they are banned by much of the world, however the US never agreed to any ban/treaty.