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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.
I hope a system like this will one day make nukes obsolete so that we can start having big wars again....
"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..."
No mention of sharks.
How much energy goes into the laser to get the 58kW out? 58kW is just over 78 horsepower, so it's not a huge amount of energy coming out and, at 100% efficiency, it could be driven by a fairly small power source.
Are we talking efficiency on the order of 10%, 1%, 0.1% less?
The question comes down to, can the beam be powered by a couple of car batteries or do we need a nuclear power plant?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
...this upcoming war will be the Pew Pew War.
Reflective coatings tend to not be efficient enough; they ablate and/or lose reflectivity when heated, and then the laser is into the target's vitals. Also, thick armor is heavy; that makes it impractical for missiles. The corresponding truth is that missile skins are very thin.
Also, given a reflective "enough" coating, now the target is easily visible on the battlefield. That tends to work out poorly for the target.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nothing is 100% reflective; some energy will be absorbed, the object and it's coating will heat, start to char and the reflective properties will be lost.
The issue is holding the beam on the target long enough so that the absorbed energy will start to damage the coating and what's underneath. The time required drops as the energy level increases.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Shut up, Russia. :P
Anything with mass can't magically change direction at infinite acceleration. A laser moves at the speed of light (O RLY?), and likewise, so does vision, so the only thing that has to keep up with the gigantic, multi-thousand pound rocket trying to change direction rapidly is the processing stage. We've had cameras that can auto-follow a target for decades. What's the difference between that and firing a big-ass laser at the focus point?
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.
We could already do that. We needed the increased wattage so we can oppress lighter-skinned people, too.
If we gain the ability to disable missiles carrying nuclear warheads, then nuclear warheads will just be delivered in shipping containers.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
This gets us about 95% of the way through the plot of Real Genius. All that remains is for Val Kilmer to distract everyone by hitting on Melania while someone else hacks the laser to fill Trump Tower with popcorn.