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."

Comments

One million dollars

[danbert8]

But can they be mounted on sharks? That is the real question...

Re:One million dollars

[Megane]

Sharks, hell, where's the popcorn?

Re:One million dollars

[The Fifth Man]

Sorry man, the thing is, he wants /. to be like it was and not how it is now, which is like reddit, with movie quotes and in-jokes. Don't be too hard on the old timers. I get that we need to evolve and talk about Pokeyman and make references to '10 era teen comedies or whatever but we have a hard time with that :-/

Re:One million dollars

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

This is Jesus.

Stop playing with yourself.

how much it took

[cachimaster]

Maybe it took a week to make a small hole, that's an important detail.

Re:how much it took

[pr0fessor]

The article said "The ground-based laser prototype burned through the engine manifold of a mounted truck in mere seconds." so at least two seconds and less than a minute, but you are correct the longer it takes the less practical it would be to use it against a moving target.

Re:how much it took

[itzly]

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.

Re:how much it took

[meta-monkey]

They should do some tests to see how many seconds a 120mm shell fired from an M1A1 at ~1700m/s needs to be in contact with the truck to disable it.

Re:how much it took

[Richard_at_work]

How many billions of dollars of development for the A-10 and the cannon it carries?

Re:how much it took

[Entropius]

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.

Re:how much it took

[BCGlorfindel]

They should do some tests to see how many seconds a 120mm shell fired from an M1A1 at ~1700m/s needs to be in contact with the truck to disable it.

It'd be much like comparing a musket loading firing line to guys with long bows and seeing who had a better firing and kill rate. You could get off a lot more arrows for a long time before guns were improved to the point that the bow was only valuable when you couldn't get your hands on a gun.

If lasers can be improved to parity in damage, they will be immeasurably more useful when attached to something a like a naval nuke. You get a firing rate only limited by your cooldown, and never need ammo for the years it takes the reactor to need a recharge. Meanwhile a gun battery with gunpowder would run out of rounds in very short order and need to get more shipped out to it.

Re:how much it took

[amicusNYCL]

Do you have any idea what the actual cost of development of this program is, then the cost of actually operating the laser, or are you just going to assume it's in the billions and then try and compare it with the A10 program? Have you made any attempt at research? Or are you "just asking questions?"

I love the A10 as much as anyone, but it's pretty difficult to compare a laser program with the A10. The A10 does not exactly excel at shooting down rockets in flight, and the entire purpose of the laser program is not to develop a laser that can disable trucks. It's to develop a general-purpose laser system that can track and engage targets, and this test is a demonstration that the power output is sufficient to disable a vehicle. That gives us a frame of reference for the power of the laser.

But apparently you want to scrap the laser program and instead have fleets of A10s just flying around Israel or aircraft carriers or any other place where a laser defense system might come in handy? Yeah, that sounds a whole lot cheaper than having a trailer with a laser and radar sitting there waiting for targets.

Re:how much it took

[amicusNYCL]

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.

Well won't you be embarrassed when you actually click on the article and note the color of the target vehicle.

Re:how much it took

[afidel]

$159,279,888 in 1973 or ~$837M is 2015 dollars for the A-10. The GAU-8A develop cost was $49.7M in 1974 or $235M in 2015 dollars for a total system development cost of just over $1B.

Re:how much it took

[afidel]

Even near perfect mirroring makes damn near zero difference to a cutting laser so I doubt this attack laser would be any different.

Re:how much it took

[Rich0]

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.

Re:how much it took

[nehumanuscrede]

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.

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 . . . . :| Those pesky whistleblowers taking refuge in a non-extradition country ? Pffft. No problem. Start some wildfires, disable power grids, use your imagination.

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.

Re:how much it took

[Bugler412]

the Navy is interested in this because they would really like to get out of the carrying and storing lots of explosive ammunition on warships in hostile areas business. If all they need is bigger generators and this device to have essentially unlimited shots, and not carry ammunition, some reduced capability of the individual shots is likely acceptable.

Re:how much it took

[Ralph Wiggam]

Keeping the 300 A-10s operational costs over $800M per year. That's a lot of money for a plane that can only do one thing under specific circumstances. Newer, more flexible systems can take over those missions at little additional cost. The Air Force has been trying to get rid of the A-10 for years, but Congress won't let them.

Yes, the A-10 appeals to the inner 12 year old in all of us. But the days of a pilot flying slowly in a straight line directly towards its target are behind us.

Re:how much it took

[rossdee]

" a plane that can only do one thing under specific circumstances."

But it is the best at doing that one thing , and that one thing (supporting ground troops) is something that we still need to do in the esrs we are hoing to be fighting (against ISIS and Al Qaeda who do not have an air force.) we don't need fast, stealthy fighters like the F35 aginst terrorists.

And we are not going to be fighting a conventional war against China or Russia where we would need the F35.

Re:how much it took

[Ralph Wiggam]

The reality is that the Air Force, Army, and Marines want the A-10 kept alive

You should talk to the Secretary of the Air Force. They're saying otherwise.

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/213844-ayotte-rips-air-force-for-defending-a-10-retirement

Re: how much it took

[fyngyrz]

I"m pretty sure a regular mirror would not be employed.

But here's some hand-wavy math.

If a mirror reflects 99% of the light that hits it at the laser frequency (remember, there's only one frequency to be covered), and the light that hits it can heat proportional to 30 kw (however one figures that), then the mirror is absorbing a 300 watt equivalent and reflecting the rest unless the reflective surface fails.

If the reflective surface is highly heat conductive and the beam isn't all that tightly collimated, likely it won't flinch at all. Like any impact, the effect is all about how much energy you can shoehorn into the smallest possible area. If the beam is ~1/3 of an inch on target, then given 99% reflectivity, it's effectively 1 kw / square inch. If the beam is 1/30th of a square inch on target, it's 30 kw/square inch absorption after reflection. So it makes quite a difference. I think.

Anyone who works with lasers and mirrors, feel free to step in and correct or expand.

Re:how much it took

[dpidcoe]

Lasers aren't quite as infinite as you make them out to be. There's still the matter of upkeep (all that supporting hardware is much more delicate and complex than a big gun), and often the optics and/or bits of the cooling system are expected to be replaced as wear items.

Re:how much it took

[DamnOregonian]

You'd perhaps be surprised how difficult it is to mirror 40kW of coherent light without liquid nitrogen.

Re:how much it took

[angel'o'sphere]

A geo synch orbit is about a tenth of a light second away (actually a bit more).
The object in such an orbit is moving with ~3km/sec, that is over 300m in the time a laser beam needs from the ground towards it.
So: hitting it with a laser without artificial aiming/tracking aids is impossible.

No more OJ car chases

[es330td]

Affix one of these to a police helicopter and that will be the end of police chases. Pinpointing the hood of fleeing vehicle for take out will be trivial.

Re:No more OJ car chases

[Entropius]

It won't even ignite things 2m away, assuming uniform diffuse reflections in the half-volume facing the surface:

30 kW / (2 pi r^2) = 1200 watts per square meter = sunlight.

Vid or STFU

[richy freeway]

Words are cheap, we wanna see shit BURN!

Defense?

[MagickalMyst]

I think that an important question here is how does one defend oneself against this?

Of course, I don't expect to have the local police or military shooting at me (although we do seem to be moving towards a police state); but thugs and gangsters are always able to get their hands on powerful, illegal weapons.

What can the average person do if some whackjob starts running around the city or a shopping mall with one of these things targeting innocent people?

Do we start wearing fire-resistant foil suits?

Terminator at gun shop...

[tekrat]

Terminator: Phased plasma rifle in the 50-watt range.
Owner: Hey, just what you see here pal!
Terminator : Uzi 9 millimeter
Owner: You really know your guns, this baby is perfect for home defense....

Re:Retro-mirrors anyone?

[elfprince13]

Rather: overheats, stops functioning as a mirror, and burns like everything else.

One good thing about star wars weapons

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The regular lead bullets from even a small caliber short barrel weapon is too fast for eyes to see. But the speed of light phasers being fired by the storm troopers leave a neat clean visible tracer lines. That leads straight back to the location of the gun which helps Harrison Ford ample time to find good spot to dive into, no antique plane needed.

Scat

[AndyKron]

How many civilians will it blind from the scatter?

Re:Star Wars

[GameboyRMH]

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."

Hmm, what does that remind me of...

Re:NOT a joking matter: Moths in your pocketbook.

[jellomizer]

But there are other governments/organizations paying other corporations a lot of currency to come up with weapons to kill us.
The nice thing about Lasers is that it is a directed weapon so you can hit your target, and not hurt what is around it.

Re:Impossible

[fyngyrz]

Who said science and math cant be fun?

Congress comes to mind.