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Boeing Demonstrates Drone-Killing Laser
An anonymous reader writes: Boeing has successfully tested a new weapon system that tracks unmanned aircraft and shoots them down with a laser. The system is surprisingly small — it can be transported in a few medium-sized boxes, and two techs can set it up in minutes. The laser needs just a few seconds of continuous [contact] to set a drone aflame, and the tracking gimbal is precise enough to target specific parts of a drone. "Want to zap the tail so it crashes and then you can go retrieve the mostly intact drone and see who is trying to spy on you? Can do. Think it's carrying explosives and you want to completely destroy it? No problem." The laser is controlled with custom targeting software that runs on a laptop, with help from an Xbox 360 controller. Boeing expects the laser system to be ready for sale in the next year or two.
You are all Drones. Drones make Rrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrr Drones rrrrrrrrrrr! Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr make the drones. YOU DRONES!!!
can you mount it on a shark?
My guess is that this will be marketed towards governments to protect capital buildings from drone attacks. Just recently in Japan someone managed to fly a drone with radioactive and onto the roof of the parliament building and left it there for a week before anyone found it. There have also been other such incidents involving drones, and the white house, to which the secret service have admitted they have no way to stop. These will be far out of reach of you average Joe.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
"Shooting drones down will not solve the problem."
Shooting drones down will solve the problem of having drones in the air. That's the problem this device is designed to solve. None of the other things you mention come under the remit of this device, and the device was not intended to address or solve them. This is just the latest in anti-aircraft evolution.
Mirrored surfaces on the drone?
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
mozzies are way more annoying than drones
The laser needs just a few seconds of continuous to set a drone aflame
I'd give it a few minutes of continuous just to be safe.
Sigger than your average
Cue the knuckleheads with their "just put mirrors on the dronze herp derp!"
Mirrors aren't 100% efficient reflecting all wavelengths. Mirrors are heavy; a mirror covered drone won't work very well.
it can be transported in a few medium-sized boxes"
How big is a medium-sized box?
Rosanna Arquette or John Edwards
This device seems to be an adaptation of the mostly-failed experiments to knock down mortars and grad-style rockets with lasers. Those systems only worked if the projectile was following a previously-known flight path and the laser was set up to protect that specific path, because they couldn't target fast enough. Real-world mortars are less predicable, but drones are slow enough that the targeting seems to work on them.
It is rather convenient for the researchers that a slower, more media-visible target for their mortar-laser was developed!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I'll stand by my previous post that #4 birdshot is still more fun, plus it it mirror resistant.
The mirror coating is barely reflective to a laser, and will burn off just about as quickly as the camouflage coating which you propose. What is needed to have any real effect is an ablative laser coating which continues to be reflective as it is burned away. AFAIK no such material exists as of yet, in spite of being prophesied in roll-playing games (i.e. Battletech.)
However, yes, there will be some reflections while the target is being cooked, and if it is at low altitudes that could be quite dangerous to any spectators.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Which has me wondering just how much unpredictable manoeuvring a small autonomous aircraft would have to do to defeat it.
What color is it? What about highly reflective surfaces? Many cheap products have "chromed plastic" surfaces. How about ablative surfaces? This is only going to work for a while, as it's going to be easy to design around. But at least it might help keep drones from dropping pistols into prison courtyards for a while.
My guess is that this will be marketed towards governments to protect capital buildings from drone attacks. Just recently in Japan someone managed to fly a drone with radioactive and onto the roof of the parliament building and left it there for a week before anyone found it.
This is a failure of detection not interception. The laser will only work if somebody first spots the drone.
I don't want to shoot down the drone. I want to shoot the person piloting the drone. Triangulate the signal controlling the drone to locate the pilot, and then shine your own laser at the pilot.
Wow! We don't have a nuclear arms escalation race anymore. But we have a drone arms escalation race. Armaments manufacturers will make a bundle on drone/anti-drone selling weapons.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I don't want to shoot down the drone. I want to shoot the person piloting the drone. Triangulate the signal controlling the drone to locate the pilot, and then shine your own laser at the pilot.
Wow! We don't have a nuclear arms escalation race anymore. But we have a drone arms escalation race. Armaments manufacturers will make a bundle on drone/anti-drone selling weapons.
Triangulating is an arms race too. A drone on autopilot doesn't need to be controlled and even if you needed to control it, you could control it with a burner phone so the only thing you would be triangulating on would be the nearest cell tower. There are plenty of other technologies like multiple repeaters, multiple channels, public channels, etc... that could also very easily prevent triangulation.
... when they figure out how to make it into a bug zapper.
People keep bringing up "reflective" surfaces into laser weapon discussions. Think more "energy" than "light". Surfaces: aren't as reflective as you think; particularly at the wavelengths used; and the amount of energy being dumped is enough to change the properties of the surface from the state it was a microsecond before.
What if the target's shell is rapidly spinning?
Then you play Star Castle.
How do you propose to get vectored thrust in and out of a disco ball?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's a picture in the article. Looks about the size of a small microwave oven, less than 2 feet long. (Plus the tripod)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I do believe some guy in New jersey beat Boeing to this goal by a year, and for hundreds of millions less.... (resubmitted thanks to /.'s odd URL wiping behavior)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
My guess is that this will be marketed towards governments to protect capital buildings from drone attacks. Just recently in Japan someone managed to fly a drone with radioactive and onto the roof of the parliament building and left it there for a week before anyone found it. There have also been other such incidents involving drones, and the white house, to which the secret service have admitted they have no way to stop. These will be far out of reach of you average Joe.
They will be obligatory if you want to have a large wedding reception in Afghanistan.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Begun, The Drone War has!
If you give it too much continuous you could accidentally the whole thing.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel