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Navy Unveils First Active Laser Weapon In Persian Gulf (cnn.com)
schwit1 shares a report from CNN: In the sometimes hostile waters of the Persian Gulf looms the U.S. Navy's first -- in fact, the world's first -- active laser weapon. The LaWS, an acronym for Laser Weapons System, is not science fiction. It is not experimental. It is deployed on board the USS Ponce amphibious transport ship, ready to be fired at targets today and every day by Capt. Christopher Wells and his crew. It costs "about a dollar a shot" to fire, said Lt. Cale Hughes, laser weapons system officer. LaWS begins with an advantage no other weapon ever invented comes even close to matching. It moves, by definition, at the speed of light. For comparison, that is 50,000 times the speed of an incoming ICBM. For the test, the USS Ponce crew launched the target -- a drone aircraft, a weapon in increasing use by Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and other adversaries. In an instant, the drone's wing lit up, heated to a temperature of thousands of degrees, lethally damaging the aircraft and sending it hurtling down to the sea. "It operates in an invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum so you don't see the beam, it doesn't make any sound, it's completely silent and it's incredibly effective at what it does," said Hughes.
Only if you fire it for an hour.
I think there's a certain amount of urban legend in that whole reflective surface defense strategy. First off, the surface would have to be nearly perfectly reflective. If there are any imperfections at all it seems like they would rapidly heat up, creating larger imperfections, and the runaway effect would quickly destroy any reflectivity. Granted, if it's a 50kw laser then it doesn't need to reflect very much for very long to damage someone looking right into the reflected beam, but I still think the usefulness and practicality of actually fielding a target with reflective armor which a laser would fire at is vastly overstated. It seems kind of silly to go through the trouble to coat a drone, boat, or missile in reflective material when it's probably only going to buy the target another second of life before the laser destroys the reflective coating.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Puerto Rico is a United States territory - so yes, Ponce is an American city.
Here's the relevant section of that Wikipedia page you linked to:
"Ponce is the only ship of the United States Navy that is named for Ponce in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which in turn was named after the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, the first governor of Puerto Rico and the European discoverer of Florida."
#DeleteChrome
Once a warhead is into its reentry phase, your goose is pretty much cooked. You could theoretically stop them with a kinetic kill, but the probability of intercept extremely low. Warheads also tend to be extremely rugged, dense objects (given the Uranium casing and all that), and so aren't a good candidate for LASER weapons.
Where a LASER really shines (if you'll pardon the pun) is destroying the launcher during the boost phase, or in the case of what's on the USS Ponce, also dealing with cruise missiles and the like. In order to maximize their throw weight (how big of a warhead and/or how far), missiles tend to be built as lightly as possible. During the boost phase of a ballistic missile, all you need to do is weaken its structure enough that the launch forces cause it to fall apart. You don't need to burn a hole through it, you don't need to melt it, you just need to weaken it enough that it buckles under the g-forces. It's a similar thing with the cruise missiles that would be affecting a warship, you just need to compromise them structurally.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Why are you targeting retreating forces? Isn't there something in the Geneva convention about that?
Until the beam diverges to a larger area than the target, the only thing attenuating the power delivered to the target is the atmosphere.
They've tested this on moving boats and UAV's, so I'd assume the answer to "can they target moving objects?" is "yes"
The laser is continuous, it's made from modified 6 welding lasers that all focus on the target.
It's designed to compliment traditional weapons, not replace them. If the conditions are too bad for it to work, they're going use a gun or missile. Which is going to be much worse for the bad guys.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org...
The Geneva protocol does not prohibit attacking retreating forces, quite the opposite.
Retreat shows an intention to continue combat from another location.
The Geneva protocol prohibits attacking persons that are hors de combat (wounded, unconscious, shipwreck)
It prohibits attacking forces that clearly are attempting to surrender and are not attempting to escape.
Ponce is the only ship of the United States Navy that is named for Ponce in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which in turn was named after the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, the first governor of Puerto Rico and the European discoverer of Florida.
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The class of ships is named after U.S. cities The USS Ponce is named after the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico, which in turn is named after Juan Ponce de Leon, first governor of Puerto Rico. While English is its predominant language, U.S. place names are heavily influenced by the languages of other past colonial power (Spanish and French), immigrants (Italian, German, Dutch, etc.), and native American languages.
Don't classify all laser weapons equally. Some laser weapons (like this one) are exactly like the bullets you are talking about.
Others (like every other one anyone has come up with so far) are effective only at blinding large populations without killing and are banned according to Protocol IV of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
> During WW2, 50,000 anti-aircraft rounds were fired for every downed enemy aircraft
Completely incorrect.
At the beginning of the war, the number was about 40,000. Using nothing but basic statistics, changes to the battery layout and firing instructions reduced this to about 5,000. The introduction of the first range-only radars like GL Mk, I reduced this to 4,000. Adding range-and-laying radars like GL Mk. III and SR584 reduced this to 2,500. The proximity fused halved this, at least.
At the end of the war the V-1, a small target flying at high speeds very close to the ground where radar was hard to use and tracking angles were very fast required about 4,000 rounds. Against bombers at higher altitudes, the effect of late-war AAA was so devastating that such operations against UK targets were basically suicidal.