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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.
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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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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?
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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?
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Navy faces fine for pointing laser at aircraft.
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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!).
.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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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
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