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Laser Takes Out Truck Engine From a Mile Away
MutualFun (1730480) writes Aerospace company Lockheed Martin has used a laser to obliterate the engine of a small truck from more than a mile away. (Finally, Star Wars is making a comeback!) The company says, "The demonstration marked the first field testing of an integrated 30-kilowatt, single-mode fiber laser weapon system prototype. Through a technique called spectral beam combining, multiple fiber laser modules form a single, powerful, high-quality beam that provides greater efficiency and lethality than multiple individual 10-kilowatt lasers used in other systems."
0.1% of the kill rate of an A10 Warthog, for only 1000 times the cost. But hey, somebody's making a lot of money here, so we can't complain.
It took "mere seconds" to burn through the engine manifold.
Paint it white (specifically, something with high albedo in whatever frequency range the attacker favors) and you can probably increase that time by a factor of ten. Paint it with that retroreflective paint that they make street markings out of and you've blinded anyone near the firing station.
Laser weapons look effective now because nobody's taking rudimentary countermeasures against them (because they don't need to). But if these things start appearing on battlefields, there are some simple countermeasures that will make their life a lot more difficult.
0.1% of the kill rate of an A10 Warthog, for only 1000 times the cost. But hey, somebody's making a lot of money here, so we can't complain.
Speed-of-light weapons that have virtually linear trajectories certainly have the potential to change warfare though.
Put it this way - if you pointed that A10 cannon upwards at an aircraft at 70k feet, you'd be hard-pressed to hit it at all. On the other hand, a laser would have relatively little difficulty hitting the aircraft even if it were in geosync orbit, or even on the surface of the moon.
Stick something like this on a plane and you could use it to shoot down incoming missiles, shoot artillery shells in mid-flight, shoot aircraft, and so on.
Sure, the technology is immature, but it certainly is a capability that is valuable for a military to posses.
You're limiting your thinking to the short term. Expand it out a decade or two and try to picture what the tech can evolve into.
:| Those pesky whistleblowers taking refuge in a non-extradition country ? Pffft. No problem. Start some wildfires, disable power grids, use your imagination.
Imagine a satellite ( or something like the ISS ) based weapon that will fire an invisible high-kilowatt ( or even megawatt ) beam on any target it can see from orbit. Maybe combine a few of these satellites onto the same target for even more power output.
Then realize you can pretty much incinerate any human target on the planet, instantly. From orbit. Crank the power output up enough and you can do the same with aircraft, other satellites, light vehicles, ICBM's, etc. The puppet you installed during your regime change a decade ago giving you shit ? No problem. Hope they remember to wear their SPF-10000 today . . . .
On the ground, the target will just heat up, catch fire and die horribly. No collateral damage, nor explanation as to wtf just happened.
Is the tech clumsy today ? Sure it is. All tech starts that way. Compare computers from 20-30 years ago with what is common today if you want to see tech evolution in action.