The US Army Finally Gets The World's Largest Laser Weapon System (bizjournals.com)

It's been successfully tested on trucks, as well as UAVs and small rockets, according to a video from Lockheed Martin, which is now shipping the first 60kW-class "beam combined" fiber laser for use by the U.S. Army. An anonymous reader quotes the Puget Sound Business Journal: Lockheed successfully developed and tested the 58 kW laser beam earlier this year, setting a world record for this type of laser. The company is now preparing to ship the laser system to the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command in Huntsville, Alabama [according to Robert Afzal, senior fellow for Lockheed's Laser and Sensor Systems in Bothell]. "We have shown that a powerful directed energy laser is now sufficiently light-weight, low volume and reliable enough to be deployed on tactical vehicles for defensive applications on land, at sea and in the air..." Laser weapons, which complement traditional kinetic weapons in the battlefield, will one day protect against threats such as "swarms of drones" or a flurry of rockets and mortars, Lockheed said.

Comments

Re: Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

You could get a cat and mouse game, buy it would not last long as it is much easier to get an order of magnitude more laser power than to get an order of magnitude reduction in absorbed energy in the real world. I've used expensive mirrors in the lab that would never be practice outside of a clean room, and they still get their reflective coating stripped off by an off the shelf laser from time to time if you go slightly too high in power density. When reflective surfaces fail, they become no reflective in a fraction of a second and very quickly absorb a a lot of energy. You would probably buy yourself more time with ablative armor assuming you have room for that.

Re:Chrome

[Crispy Critters]

Maybe a better way to put it is to think of three ranges: At low enough power, a coating isn't needed. At high enough power, any practical coating will be burned through. The in-between range where a reflective coating can make a difference is surprising narrow, not much more than a factor of 10 in power, because really good wide-spectrum reflectivities will be less than 99%.

The best reflectivity is fragile. A 10 W laser can burn a crater in a beautiful lab-grade mirror. (Flaw in the coating? minuscule deterioration? speck of dust?)

This can be translated into time instead. So if the laser damages the target in a microsecond, no coating will help. But if the beam has to be held on target for tens of seconds, some reflectivity will turn this into minutes and may make a difference.