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Combat Lasers To Be Added To US Fighter Jets (nextbigfuture.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NextBigFuture:
The US Air Force plans to arm its fleet of drones and fighter jets with high-tech laser weapons.... Ground testing of a laser weapon called the High Energy Laser, or HEL, was slated to take place last year at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, service officials said...
The Air Force plans to begin firing laser weapons from larger platforms such as C-17s and C-130s until the technological miniaturization efforts can configure the weapon to fire from fighter jets such as an F-15, F-16 or F-35. Instead of flying with six or seven missiles on an aircraft, a directed energy weapons system could fire thousands of shots using a single gallon of jet fuel.
The Air Force plans to begin firing laser weapons from larger platforms such as C-17s and C-130s until the technological miniaturization efforts can configure the weapon to fire from fighter jets such as an F-15, F-16 or F-35. Instead of flying with six or seven missiles on an aircraft, a directed energy weapons system could fire thousands of shots using a single gallon of jet fuel.
Gotcha Bitch!!!!
Ground testing of a laser weapon called the High Energy Laser
It will also be referred to by some as the High-Powered Laser, or "HP Laser" for short, and jets with this type of weapon mounted upon them shall be known as HP Laser Jets
The thing is current hel are 10 kilowatt and are the size of a car(often towed behind a Humvee)
To get to the mega joule requires a lot more fuel than a gallon of jet gas.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Have laser power requirements really changed that dramatically since the Boeing YAL-1 project ended? The chemical oxygen iodine laser aboard the YAL-1 was a 1MW laser, and destroyed its targets (ICBMs) by heating the target until its fuel tanks ruptured - it didn't destroy the target in the traditional sci-fi sense of directed energy weapons...
Whether you can use the same approach for enemy aircraft, tanks etc remains to be seen - it will probably be more likely that such targets need an ablative weapon to be destroyed, as jet fuel can be heated considerably more than the pressurised tanks on an ICBM.
The YAL-1 carried enough fuel for 20 shots at 1MW strength, and it needed a Boeing 747 to carry it, so the summaries "thousands of shots using a single gallon of jet fuel" sounds a little ... optimistic when you consider the energy densities in play.
You sure about that? I remember seeing a documentary back in the 80s where they were able to get 5MW into a plane. It might not have been a pulsed laser though...
About the same time they fill a house with popcorn and figure out how to use the laser to pop it all.
John
Well, considering the long-standing figher tradition of painting shark teeth and eyes on the nose of a fighter plane. . . it's going to all depend on whether the laser is on the nose or not.
If under the wing, it will be "sharks with fricking lasers under their fins". . . .
Yeah, I recognize that it's kind of the military's job to maximize their potential for destruction, but this definitely seems like one of those combat technologies that the whole world joins together to condemn after it's been in use for a couple of years, and the US is all like "you other countries are just jealous you don't have it", until one day they do have it, and then all of a sudden we're totally against it too, only we have to keep using it because now everybody's using it. Eventually everybody but Iran and North Korea signs a really unsatisfactory treaty and we all go home feeling bitter and aggrieved for generations to come.
I just hope the inevitable tribunal is available in audiobook format.
Deliberately-blinding weapons are illegal.
That said, some of the obvious uses are pretty low-hanging fruit, such as detonating incoming missiles or burning through aircraft aluminum. Things like taking out tanks with airborne lasers are obviously completely impractical with current technology (though there may be some weak points, such as tank optical systems and such).
Fairly compact, high power lasers are a reality - they've been doing this with chemical lasers for a while (they're basically fancy rocket engines that generate a lasing plasma exhaust). The problem is, it's easy to keep your planes stocked on jet fuel - nitrogen trifluoride and deuterium, not so much.
"I know you have questions." "That would be why I just asked them."
Laser far too easy to counter. Smoke and larger air particles can counter for ground troops. For missiles, drones, and airplanes simply roll or make the exterior 'wiggle'. But a rail gun with say a varying 1-16 mj esp with smart ammo, is going to produce hits regardless of counter measures.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
However, if it's a side affect of killing them, then that's actually okay.
I think loss of vision is a side effect of being killed in 100% of fatalities.
Air to air missiles are made of thin aluminum, and high powered lasers are not exactly "a lighted candle". Even if you don't trigger a detonation, you're looking at burning through wiring, damaging control surfaces, damaging guidance systems, and a whole host of other things.
Missiles are not built like tanks.
"I know you have questions." "That would be why I just asked them."
You're right, although, if they actually do get lasers right, you could have one plane shoot down missiles that are fired BVR. That would then require the opposition force to close to visual range to intercept the incoming.
Of course, nobody has really mentioned ground-based laser anti-aircraft weaponry, which is much, much more feasible than jet lasers, and would have both the stability, and the ability to have a big generator to actually fire those thousands of high power shots per minute. Then all you need is BVR radar and you can pick off thousands of incoming missiles as soon as they enter visual range.
A jet is a much better firing platform for a laser weapon, mostly because a jet always has a look-down ability to ensure they have line of sight on a target, but an AA weapon with sufficient visibility would seem a much better first project for the technology.
This is great for defense. Unlike some people have said, you don't need to physically destroy the entire missile engaging you. For IR heat-seekers, you just have to blind the seeker. For radar guided missiles, deform the radome. Missiles tend to travel at high speeds, if you can screw up the radome or any part of the structure sufficiently it'll make a big difference to the attacking missiles pk (probability of a kill).
Your same offensive weapon makes an awesome countermeasure against HOBS (High-Off-Boresight) stuff that someone might launch using a HMCS (Helmet Mounted Cueing System). If you have decent secure networking, there's no reason why a bunch of your team couldn't target the same target too. So instead of being hit by one laser, you hit the target with N lasers. The enemy having better kinematics becomes moot too. A rotating mirror can rotate much faster than even the most maneuverable airframe.
The best countermeasure to this stuff if you don't have equivalent stealth? It's tough. You can't detect attackers well enough to get a firing-solution, you have nothing on your warning receivers for your team. Best case, let's say you know somethings up there due to VHF radar. So you send up your stuff, and all of them just get swatted from the sky. You ask your best engineers what to do about it, and they say 'Our best idea is to make the environment so nasty we deny the enemy access'. How do you do that? Nuke your own airspace. If you can't see the enemy but your assets start exploding, fire off a pile of SAMS (in nice solid reflective casings, no fine guidance necessary) and nuke your own the airspace.
If they are at altitude then that's one thing (not much fallout). If they are using terrain shadowing / strike teams going in to take out your ground assets, then you are talking about basically carpeting yourself with fallout.