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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)
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No mirror exposed to the open ocean will be clean enough to not explode fairly quickly when a 30kw laser beam hits it.
Honestly, I'm surprised the laser itself doesn't have issues with its own optics in that sort of environment. One tiny spec of dust on the lens would be disastrous.
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But Light can be reflected!
Stop hitting yourself, it's only c/2 fast but I think anybody can hardly dodge this!
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
Hopefully that 40 million was spent wisely!
couldn't you pop it into a big tube, that constantly pushes out air?
Why make the laser smaller when you can make the shark bigger?
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.
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>> 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.
Could probably pump a gas out at the lens so debris and dust don't make it onto the lens.
What remains to be seen is whether jets and missiles can shrug off (either through brute-force thickening or more sophisticated ablative armor or actively deployed particulates that effectively scatter incoming light) the relatively tepid amounts of energy that lasers (especially anything that dodges the rather nasty requirements of chemical lasers) are good for, particularly at range, under optically sub-optimal conditions (never have those at sea!).
.50 BMG. Now, if you can't put a bullet on target, that's irrelevant; but in terms of expected stopping power the finest in combat laser technology is...distinctly middling... compared to guns that date back to the period between the world wars. Obviously the fire control system has evolved out of sight; but given how long it'll have to stay on target, you'd hope so.)
Even under the ideal and closely controlled conditions of industrial laser cutters, lasers are abundantly unsafe for ocular exposure; but by no means the speediest remover of bulk material. In an atmosphere, range is going to be constrained by thermal distortion if nothing else, so the ease of keeping photons on target won't be quite as dramatic as it would be in space, and against close-in non-aircraft, there'll be a lot of cheap 'n nasty (but probably embarrassingly effective) countermeasures involving coating things with mud, spraying them with seawater, and generally making a 3rd world nuisance of yourself.
(By way of comparison, assuming that this 30Kw laser delivers 100% of energy to target, it'll take 2/3 of a second of continuous exposure to deliver the same number of joules to the target as a
One tiny spec of dust on the lens would be disastrous.
No. That's a myth. A tiny speck absorbs a tiny amount of energy before ionizing. These lasers are made of a large mass of tough material and they don't explode or whatnot when a tiny piece of matter ionizes on a ruby or YAG crystal surface.
Powerful cutting and welding lasers are used all day long in manufacturing environments around the world. They don't go haywire when a tiny speck of foreign material vaporizes in the beam. The laser degrades over time as damage accumulates.
Cracked lenses or lenses with significant contaminants on the surface can be damaged or even explode when the laser is activated. A speck of dust won't get you there.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I'm sure that the crew includes a contractor to wipe the lens before firing and then invoice Uncle Sam for precision optical services.
As for mirrors, purely reflective countermeasures will be a waste of time; but ablative ones or water cooled open cell foams might be an issue.
According to stuff I've read before, dust particles are mostly a problem inside the system, on mirrors and on targets. This is because dust hit by a laser tends to accelerate away from the beam source, as the side of the particle that is illuminated by the laser vaporizes first. So dust on the near side of a lens, on a mirror or on a target would get blown into the object's surface, causing pitting. But dust on the far surface of a lens would get blown off of the lens. Inside the system, this would be a problem because that dust would get blown into the next element in line. But on that last lens/window where the beam exists, I think mostly the external surface dust merely gets accelerated off of the surface. I'm sure they make an effort to keep that surface clean, but I'm not sure it's as crucial an issue as your post makes it out to be.
>> Does the FAA know about this?
They probably would after the fried plane drops into the sea.
Well, they do have a rather large heat sink right under them.
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Honestly, I'm surprised the laser itself doesn't have issues with its own optics in that sort of environment. One tiny spec of dust on the lens would be disastrous.
Not really a problem. The laser isn't focused at the objective, and the 30kw of light energy flowing through the objective tend to keep it pretty clean.
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.
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What remains to be seen is whether jets and missiles can shrug off (either through brute-force thickening or more sophisticated ablative armor or actively deployed particulates that effectively scatter incoming light) the relatively tepid amounts of energy that lasers (especially anything that dodges the rather nasty requirements of chemical lasers) are good for, particularly at range, under optically sub-optimal conditions (never have those at sea!).
Current missiles ride pretty close to the edge, it doesn't take much of a hole or even for thermal forces to screw them up. Plus, any armor or countermeasures aren't fuel to increase range, warhead to increase damage, or guidance packages to make it hit the target.
Heck, the laser getting the guidance and blinding the missile would normally be a mission kill for the missile.
I don't read AC A human right
Don't necessarily need to "burn through" thick metal to disable a missle. If you hit control surfaces, instrument surfaces or impact sensors, you can disable/destruct fairly fast.
This has to be a milestone in warfare, right up there with the gun, or bow and arrow.
Uh, why?
The practicality of early designs isn't the issue - just as early guns were inferior to bows yet rapidly improved, lasers suck now and will get better.
The issue is the physics of the matter. Lasers may be very precise but they're very easy to counter (add some reflective bits) and they require a lot of energy per damage done. Ejecting mass at velocity requires much less energy per damage done and we've gotten very good at getting guns and other ballistic systems to be incredibly precise. And this makes sense when you consider the extremely energy-dense nature of mass.
In terms of payload, mass at velocity is very effective. Why waste energy and effort designing systems to bundle energy and deliver it to a target when we already have extremely-densely bundled energy in mass? Laser installations will have uses beyond targeting, but soldiers with super pew pew rifles compared to soldiers with M16s isn't anything like bows and arrows vs clubs or rifle vs bows & arrows.
But they can dodge targeting systems and the motors that control the laser
XDInd
Hey, I think I was actually at that one
XDInd
Exactly, just overheat the electronics and let the thing do what ever the missile version of the Red Ring of Death is called. Whether it explodes or just falls out of the sky, it's not going to do much without any control systems working.
XDInd
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.
The DOD probably could find $40M in loose change from the couches in the Pentagon.
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Not all of the damage is done by the warhead, some of it comes from mass and momentum, and any shielding that survives until the missile hits just adds to that effect. In fact, most of the weight of a classic armor-piercing shell is simply a mass of metal in front of the bursting charge (with a time-delay fuse) that's intended to batter its way into (and if possible through) the target's armor before the warhead detonates. As an example, a 16 inch armor piercing shell weighs 2700 pounds of which only 150 pounds are HE. Bombardment rounds are 2200 pounds, including 500 pounds of HE.
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Have you watched the video? It seems reasonably destructive. The missile target (carried on a platform on a boat, as the weapon seems manually aimed in this demo) just detonates - presumably the fuel goes up. It's hard to see how much damage the drone target took, as we only have the gun camera footage, but it clearly changed from flying to falling. Thermal energy is generally going to be more of a threat than a puncture to anything that's carrying a bunch of jet fuel.
I don't know about this weapon, but the ABL (a much larger and heavier and more expensive beast) actually compensated for atmospheric distortion using the same flexible-lens trick that spy sats use - that's a mature technology now.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There are a few significant advantages I can think of for lasers off-hand. Near perfect accuracy with any line of sight to the target is essentially assured. That is, if you can see the target, you can hit it. That's extremely important for fast, inbound targets like anti-ship missiles, in which you may only get one real shot at it. The speed of the laser assures that the inbound target will be hit as far away from the ship as possible. Additionally, there are no limitations of ammunition - it doesn't have to be stored and it can't run out. The only limitation is the power requirements, presumably generated by the ship itself.
You're probably underestimating the difficulty of making targets perfectly reflective enough to actually deflect a high powered laser beam. You're not going to be able to coat flight surfaces with optics-grade mirrors easily - low grade mirrored surfaces would likely be all but worthless as defense in actual practice, especially since they'd need to protect equally against all viable laser weapon frequencies. Moreover, warplanes and drones would not be good candidates for being covered with highly reflective surfaces for rather obvious reasons.
I don't think the Navy is reckless enough to replace all weapons with lasers, especially early in their life cycle while they're still unproven. Even though current warplanes have guided missiles, most still also carry guns or cannons as well. The military is pretty big on defense-in-depth, since all different weapons types have advantages and disadvantages. Lasers are no different. Downsides are degraded capabilities in poor conditions, less power on target then bullets or chemical explosives, and probably a few others.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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!
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but
1) “It would be [used] against those [unmanned aerial vehicles], slow moving helicopters, fast patrol craft.” - not likely to have countermeasures of any sort
and
2) they say it costs about a dollar per shot..
The system is powered and cooled by a so-called “skid” that provides power through a diesel generator and is separate from Ponce separate electrical systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Among the advantages of this device versus projectile weapons is the low cost per shot, as each firing of the weapon requires only the minimal cost of generating the energetic pulse; by contrast ordnance for projectile weapons must be designed, manufactured, handled, transported and maintained, and takes up storage space.
safe, cheap (consumables) and effective.. what more do you want in a weapons system
Not perfectly, and the energy absorbed from a 30kw laser will quickly darken the surface accelerating the rate of energy absorption. Here's a video of a 500W laser cutting into a mirrored surface.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Absolutely agree. Where I see lasers being useful is in point defence. The tracking speed and their "instahit" nature make them excellent for shooting down incoming missiles.
If they can get the weapon manoeuvrable enough and have a fast enough rate of fire expect to see these deployed around carrier groups.
I still think we are more than a few years away from GDI's Ion Cannon.
Huh? There's no way a missile can outmaneuver the optical targeting system on these things, the biggest threat will be surface skimming that will reduce the targeting systems reaction time, but the newest class of ships have pretty good synthetic aperture radar and the computer aided target discrimination is getting better all the time.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Vaporizing in the beam off the surface is different than on the surface.
The process occurring on the surface creates are larger pot mark on the surface, so the surface is no longer 'flawless', which then cascades from there.
There is no way the thing would survive long with sea spray on it. What happens in a lab is not what happens in combat on the open ocean.
They have to have some mechanism to protect the optics on the device itself, even if that is as others have suggested by putting it in a tube that expels air in such a way to ensure no contaminates may enter. That and the beam itself contains some force to expel things from the surface.
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I'm not a sailor, but I have seen what happens when sea spray hits glass. Over time as the sun drys it, an accumulation of salt film builds up. That's not always easy to clean off.
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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.
If it misses because the guidance systems are blinded of fried, all the momentum doesn't matter.
And most missiles aren't bunker-buster/armor penetrating either.
I don't read AC A human right
"free electron lasers..."
Are you freaking nuts? FELs are big contraptions in particle accelerator labs.
The Navy's gadget is a fiber laser. Ie., a diode pumped fiber. Diode lasers are very efficient these days, and fiber lasers and amplifiers are similar. Fiber lasers don't exist except for being diode pumped. This is the only way to get tens of kW from a package size that will fit on a pallet.
It's not the flux that matters. It's the flux per unit area, ie., irradiance or radiant exitance. As long as the laser's exit optic is large, the power per area is low. But at the focal point, it's a different matter.
Where the stress exists a laser like this is that they are developing this level of flux in a friggin' fiber! That's before it gets to the projecting and directing optics.
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
So this shot something moving a few 10s of miles an hour on absolutely flat water and you think that look reasonable destructive?
This looks a lot more destructive. And they only have to fire a few at once. Also point defense is nothing new. Antiship missiles are designed with them in mind.
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Relevant. Exactly how does this increase combat effectiveness outside Somalia pirates?
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
FEL are the size of a football field and even then are a full R&D project just to make them work. Once. You have been reading to many comic books.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Its only 30KW. It won't be all that disastrous at all. It really isn't all that powerful. Even a dirty mirror will significantly increase the dwell time required. Add an ablative layer. You could take seconds to do anything. The if they fired 2 at the same time?
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
WTF are you talking about? This is not a FEL, and 2 FELs don't have plasma but high energy electron beams, and 3 if the FEL produces visible wavelengths normal mirrors work fine. I think your getting confused with some comic book super villain with a touch of star trek technobabble.
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I imagine the beam diameter is larger at the source, converging on the target. This keeps the flux(?) low enough at the source not to incinerate its own optics.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
If only the Navy had hundreds of years of experience with dealing with saltwater. If only somebody could invent covers.
Ah well. Scrap the whole project.
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Well considering that fast small boats have been shown to be a weak point against our large capital ships. Also it seems that a lot of what we do with the US navy is fight Somali pirates so this might be put to good use.
Time to offend someone
I would have thought a few .50cals would be cheaper.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Those are fairly expensive per shot from my understanding. I don't know what they cost the military but the .50 BMG round in the civilian market the cheap end is about $5 per shot. So even assuming the military gets a bulk discount because they bought a billion rounds (from the number pulled from my ass department) it seems unlikely that it would cost less than a $1 per shot. I have looked into reloading but given what I mostly shoot (Finnish M39 with 203grain bullets) I might be able to slightly better than the ~$0.50 per shot I pay retail but that would require finding some 7.62x54r reloadable brass. Given that it wouldn't surprise me if the materials for a .50BMG round cost more that a $1 and then is sold to the government for $1.01 if not $2.
Time to offend someone
power can be generated as needed (heck it could be "GREEN") bullets need to be made stored and transported.
plus once the missle is detected reaction time is less of a factor, as the missle's path is known: straight to the ship. from the lasers perspective, the mossiel isnt moving, just getting bigger. which means once the laser is on target, it doesnt really need to track or move all that much to keep its energy on th missle. and the missles seeker is in the nose, pointed directly at the laser, which simplifies disabling it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Whereas Bud Light can be rejected.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You miss my point. Shielding on a missile isn't wasted mass. Either it protects the weapon from the laser or its mass does extra damage to the target. (You can think of it as extra shrapnel if you want.) Within reasonable limits, it's a win-win situation. I gave the details on the 16" shells just as an example.
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think phalanx - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
In the short term, the LaWS will act as a short-range, self-defense system against drones and boats, while more powerful lasers in the future should have enough power to destroy anti-ship missiles; Navy slab lasers have been tested at 105 kW with increases to 300 kW planned. Laser weapons like the LaWS are meant to complement other missile and gun-based defense systems rather than replace them.
besides:
In the video, the LaWS disables a small Scan Eagle-class UAV, detonates a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), and burns out the engine of a small inflatable boat (RHIB). Following these successful tests, the US Navy has given the commander of USS Ponce permission to use the laser weapon in combat.
you speak as if RPGs are used exclusively against Captain Phillips.
probably not. didn't have that many nukes to throw around. have to show that you're very willing to use it.
you don't win the war until they admit you've won the war. japan was going to be obstinate about it, and it probably saved japanese lives... hard to call them civilians when they planned to militarize the civilian population.
You miss my point. Shielding on a missile isn't wasted mass.
I did get it. I repeat: "most missiles aren't bunker-buster/armor penetrating". Most missiles are proximity, not impact fused. They get through armor either through size of warhead or the use of a shaped charge.
Also, extra shrapnel is a complicated affair, because if you make the casing too thick it doesn't fragment properly.
'Most' Missiles are a hell of a lot lighter than a 16" shell. I'm looking at antishipping missiles because they're the primary target for this laser, ability to take aircraft is a 'happy bonus'.
16" shells: 2200-2700 pounds, 500-150 pounds HE, per you. Wiki lists max range as 38 km.
Harpoon anti-shipping missile: Loadings vary, but 1,523 pounds(with booster), 488 pound warhead*. range 280 km(it's what's in the wiki). Warhead 32% of weight DOES have a impact mode though.
Exocet: 1,480 pounds, 364 pounds warhead, 180 km, 25% of weight
The heaviest current anti-shipping missile wiki mentions:
P-270 Moskit: 9,900#, 710# warhead. 120 km, 7% of weight.
I'll note that while most of the non-explosive weight of a 16" shell is obviously metal, most of the non-explosive weight on a missile is fuel.
If a missile is already designed to penetrate, and you're removing explosives to add more metal to protect it from a laser(and it has to already deal with existing amounts of armor), it might or might not penetrate further, but it's going to explode with less force afterwards, and whether or not this is better depends on how close the original designers were to optimum, you know? If they went too light(unlikely, ships were actually more armored when many of these were first designed), then maybe. Otherwise they now have more armor/weight than ideal under the old system, ergo performance reduced.
*Which will have varying amounts of explosives, it's a modular system.
I don't read AC A human right
The current standard CIWS is anti-missile missiles. But they have problems: ammo is pretty limited, they take time to get to their target, and they're not built to target incoming slow-moving small boats. While a laser is limited to horizon range, that's fine for CIWS, and being able to kill very quickly after threat detection (the servos on the turret are likely the limiting factor) is a great advantage. The problem today is incoming anti-ship missiles that are faster than the anti-missile-missiles. That makes it really hard for escorts to do their job.
You say they only have to fire a few at once, but naval surface combat is all about launching hundreds of ship-to-ship missiles timed to arrive together to overwhelm defensive capacity - and that's a much lower tech trick to pull off than operating a modern aircraft carrier.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
'Most' Missiles are a hell of a lot lighter than a 16" shell.
Well, yes. Of course. I quoted those figures simply to show the difference (both in total mass and bursting charge) between an armor piercing and a bombardment round because I happen to know them. And, BTW, I'm not sure if the max range is quite right because back when I was in Uncle Sam's Navy, they were listed as reaching out to 25 nautical (not statute) miles. That 38km might be right, I just don't have either the time nor the inclination to calculate it for myself and it's not exactly important. Just thought I'd mention it.
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Google says 25 nmn = 46.3 km, so you may be right. I just looked up 16" and grabbed the range for the mod 8. There's also a number of different ranges listed for the Harpoon, which makes some sense when you have booster/no booster, different warheads, submarine vs surface launch, and even have to consider wind patterns and weather when you actually launch it. That's BEFORE deliberate confustication on the part of the military as to it's exact abilities in order to mislead the enemy.
Anyways, if enemy forces start armoring their missiles there's a number of solutions - more powerful lasers or even more of them.
Oh yeah, and especially when you start introducing multiple lasers(possibly on different ships), consider that the laser might be hitting the side of the missile, not the front. Puncture the side of it and there's several possibilities at first glance:
1. Fuel tank ruptured - loss of fuel may deny it the ability to reach the target ship.
2. Solid fuel hit - you now have an uncontrolled jet out the side. Missile rendered uncontrollable, loss of stability(and range), missile no longer a concern.
3. Electronic/mechanical component hit - Results may vary. Loss of sensor capability means it can't aim to hit, mission kill. Loss of power kills the missile. Loss of control surface means the missile can't aim itself anymore either. The engine might be disabled(some of these are more like a small jet than a rocket). Etc...
4. Explosives hit - while they're unlikely to explode outside of the detonator going off, they might catch fire and have much the same effect as the solid fuel hit.
Don't forget that while the electronics are armored and there's a lot of air flow to help keep it cool, that's still a very big laser and the components do have a maximum operating temperature. They can fail from heat alone.
Anyways, armor on the SIDE of the missile wouldn't be helping much with penetration, it'd be lighter and more effective to make it ablative, which really wouldn't help with penetration. Well, other than helping to make sure it actually reaches the target in a laser equipped environment.
I don't read AC A human right
One, they might have just thought it was an error. Two, nukes don't make much of an effect on oceans. Just a bit of steam. You couldn't create a tsunami with one.
Not what he wrote. But by some reckonings, more Japanese civilians could have died in an invasion than were killed by the two atom bombs.
The other option was a blockade. Similar result only slower.
Of course, from a political POV it's their civilians and our soldiers, and they bloody started it. Add on top the mistreatment of prisoners and conquered civilians and I'd have made the same decision as Harry.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Part of penetration comes from mass and momentum. That's why the fuse of an armor piercing shell is at the back and has a time delay. Assuming that the impact velocity isn't lowered, more mass means more momentum. And, of course, if you can't increase the velocity, the only way to increase the impact energy is to increase the mass, which is why musket balls were so big.
I think we're both in agreement here that armor piercing isn't the main issue any more, although I'd be willing to argue that maybe it should be. I'm just trying to explain why I think that some sort of shielding, either reflective or ablative (if not both) isn't a waste of mass on a missile that's going against a laser defense.
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I'm just trying to explain why I think that some sort of shielding, either reflective or ablative (if not both) isn't a waste of mass on a missile that's going against a laser defense.
First, you're telling me things I already know again. The easiest argument it not being wasted mass is 'If we don't put defenses against lasers on this missile it's unlikely to get through and strike it's target'. You end up either armoring them or sending a shoal of them to overwhelm the lasers.
You might not like spending the mass, but you still do it.
This, however, may run into a problem with: Armor tends to be heavy, ergo to maintain range we have to put in a bigger engine and more fuel, which leads to needing more armor, which means a bigger engine and more fuel to maintain speed. A bigger missile may be easier to target by the laser, which means you need even more armor.
It doesn't go on permanently, of course, but you can end up with a substantially bigger and more expensive missile in the end. Or one with a substantially smaller warhead because you couldn't make the submarine launched missile bigger without redesigning the submarines. Or maybe you sacrificed range.
I don't read AC A human right
Armor tends to be heavy...
Armor designed to protect against impact gets heavy, very fast. Armor against lasers, maybe not, but I think we need to think in terms of shielding, not armor because that includes ablative protection which may not be as massive. And yes, there's a trade off, as shown by the fact that the bursting charge in an armor piercing shell is much smaller than what's used in a bombardment round. The problem, of course, is working out the optimal balance, and I have no idea how that's done, but I'm sure that the people designing these things know how to decide how much shielding is enough.
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I guess the cost for firing a missile would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. Whereas the laser would be $0/shot once installed. Also, you can carry a limited number of missiles. Laser will just keep going. And its not like they will remove the missiles. Ponce will likely have both missiles and laser.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Another example are Land Mines, they are banned by much of the world, however the US never agreed to any ban/treaty.
Probably the same as most of the people who built the Burma railroad.
Dead.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."