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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.
t doesn't make any sound, it's completely silent and it's incredibly effective at what it does,"
But does it make popcorn?
The reason to ban nuclear weapons is the dangers they pose to places and times far away from and long after the battle. Lasers are as ecologically clean as a weapon can be. They are also precise, unlike nukes. Why should they be banned?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Who the hell named that ship?! Are the sister ships the USS Wanker and USS Berk?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
> "It operates in an invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum so you don't see the beam, it doesn't make any sound...
Hopefully, future versions will come in a variety of badass colors, and will make a BWEEM noise.
High energy lasers are the only effective way to block incoming Ballistic Missiles from hitting American cities, so the Pentagon should install (high energy lasers) around the edges of North America instead of spending all that money on the Kinetic Interceptor missiles.
Oh, I don't know... Could be true as long as you totally zero out the "R&D", "Labor" and "Fuel costs" lines in the spread sheet.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
And the target used a mirror...
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Woah, hold up. This is possibly the first weapon that actually makes sense. Want to stop that truck far away? Target the engine, or the tires, long distance. No collateral damage and one cleanly disabled enemy vehicle. Now if only you could see red or blue lines whizzing in the air :)
Indeed. I don't quite understand how you could classify a laser weapon along side nukes. Nukes are indiscriminate, tend to cause a lot of collateral civilian damage, and as you say, the fallout can have effects far from the point of the nuclear detonation, not to mention long-term effects in the area of the detonation.
A laser weapon, on the other hand, is more like a bullet in that it is aimed at a specific target, so short of the target crashing to the ground and taking people out, the level of collateral damage is going to generally be low. Since this is on a ship, the target is most likely going to fall into the water, so unless we've suddenly decided the death of sea gulls and krill is a crime against humanity, I'd say we'd be better off seeing more laser weapons and less nuclear weapons.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Even factoring in maintenance, I bet it's still quite a bit cheaper than a thousand round burst of 20mm Vulcan cannon fire.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I think more importantly here is the fact that it doesn't cost millions of dollars per shot. Interceptors like patriot missiles and more complex ones are stupid expensive to shoot. A laser emplacement doesn't really use fuel (excepting chem lasers, but this one isn't one) so "per shot" it uses however much the power cost to create. So likely fairly cheap or even negligible when put on a nuke ship with basically "free" excess energy to use.
I would tend to agree. If it's 30kW at full power, and assuming $0.10 per kWh, then it's at least $3.00. Probably more like $5.00, when you take various overhead and losses into account.
Well, they are still not quite safe. If the target has a reflective surface, there is the possibility of witnesses being blinded. This thing does use light outside the visible spectrum, so you would not even get any warning of being blinded.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Looks like new weapons arise to face Russian and North Korean threats. Actually, probably not really "new" weapons - they were kept hidden in case of a real conflict. The new president in charge decided to exhibit them.
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The "dollar a shot" plan is included with your $35m/month premium.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Only if you fire it for an hour.
They should be banned for two simple reasons:
1. "Lasers"
2. Sharks
Enough said.
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in fact, the world's first -- active laser weapon.
No, is not the first active laser weapon.
Russian ships deployed laser weapons since 1980's.
New generation are we must say far more capable :)
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
Since this is on a ship, the target is most likely going to fall into the water, so unless we've suddenly decided the death of sea gulls and krill is a crime against humanity,
If you do nothing and let your ship be sunk, instead of shooting down the missile, that'll probably kill way more seagulls and krill. Burning ships are ecological disasters.
Sure, but if you just destroy some poor bastard's eyes then another poor bastard will just jump in and continue moving the weapon. Makes more sense to disable the weapon than the operator.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
So you'd rather ban lasers and force armies to stick with bullets, so instead of the chance someone might get blinded, we'll just make sure to kill them entirely?
How the hell does that make sense?
I would tend to agree. If it's 30kW at full power, and assuming $0.10 per kWh, then it's at least $3.00.
You should probably check your assumptions there. Your numbers are only true if you have to run the laser at 30 kW for a whole hour.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
What if you miss? A laser beam is very coherent and will keep traveling until it hits something.
What if you hit your target but it has a highly reflective surface?
What if another nation has these weapons and decides to use them against us?
The beams are invisible and effectively instantaneous, with the potential for extreme range. Air travel would be a no-go if certain nations had these things.
And at a buck per kill, even North Korea can afford to cause some actual trouble if they manage to get their hands on one.
OP's mom offers a "dollar a shot" plan. Oooooh, sick burn.
But it only costs $1 per enemy soldier to do it, you can easily outspend any army. We could win even the largest wars for less than a billion dollars.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Are you suggesting we violate The Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, Protocol IV of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There are several ways of doing it. Remember that a reentering spacecraft also needs to withstand a lot of friction and heating. The reflective surface does not need to reflect the entire spectrum just the wavelength(s) of the laser. If it's a liquid fueled rocket (the Russians have some of those like the R-36) you can store propellant under the skin of the vehicle and push the heated propellant out through the exhaust. You can also add an ablative coating to the missile similar to a reentry TPS.
What are your own calculations on the cost of generating 15-50kw of power on a ship which displaces over 16,000 tons and can move at 20 knots, how much power do you think it can generate? Now let's assume that the laser also has its own generator.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The reason to ban nuclear weapons is the dangers they pose to places and times far away from and long after the battle.
Another reason that NW could be banned is that a ban could actually be enforceable. Nukes require a lot of infrastructure and emit detectable radiation. With these $1 per shot lasers, there is no way a ban could be enforced. They are dual-use technology, so it would be easy to disguise a weapons program as an industrial or scientific project.
You assume mostly incorrectly and technically correctly.
Laser beams are designed to not diverge and thus not suffer loss with distance that other things do.
Get a shitty $5 laser pointer and point it at the wall from 1 inch away, 2 inches away, and 20 feet away. Compare the size of the dot on the wall.
Do the same with a flashlight.
At distances of many miles, a halfway coherent laser beam will suffer most of its loss due to the atmosphere, not divergence.
However, we're probably safe from instantaneous, space-based, pinpoint-precision death lasers both due to atmospheric losses and divergence. At least for now.
When you say "this marine clearly knows nothing", are you referring to yourself, or the person quoted in the article and pictured in the video clearly wearing Navy lieutenant insignia?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Explicitly not, since the word was "chance", in other words it's not designed to blind nor is that a combat function.
Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons prohibits the use of laser weapons specifically designed to cause permanent blindness. The parties to the protocol also agree to not transfer such weapons to any state or non-state entity.[2] The protocol does not prohibit laser systems where blinding is an incidental or collateral effect, but parties that agree to it must take all feasible precautions to avoid such effects.[11][12]
-Wikipedia
So, it would seem that if we target the engine or wheels and someone is blinded as a collateral action there is no issue, similarly if we target the soldier long enough to raise their temperature thousands of degrees and kill them there is no issue...
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Good point. All we need to do is target a truck driver, and sit back and watch while every other member of the army drags the bodies out of the way to keep that truck moving.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Read TFA. It does have it's own generator.
https://youtu.be/vjFG-4Ge668?t...
Reflective at what wavelength?
A bigger issue is likely rain/fog. The attenuation at any real distance makes this thing useless.
They mean the extra cost it will be now to fire another shot as opposed to not firing a shot. You know like it would in normal english.
I was mocking their math. ;-)
So you'd rather ban lasers and force armies to stick with bullets,
Throughout history, people have claimed that new more efficient weapons would lead to less killing. Prior to WW1, some people claimed that a future war would have few casualties since a single machine gun could replace 20 soldiers with rifles. It didn't turn out that way.
The best way to keep the peace is to insure that the dominant enforcer of the current world order remains dominant. In 1914, that was Britain, and the challenger was Germany. Today, it is America, and the future challenger may be China.
The laser beam itself, yes ... But what about the tracking/aiming system latency and mount system? The gimbal has to track the trajectory precisely and slew with it. And that gets more complicated if the target is wobbling.
The reflective surface does not need to reflect the entire spectrum just the wavelength(s) of the laser.
I understand that, but it needs to reflect the vast majority of the incoming energy or else the imperfections in the surface are going to be fatal flaws. I'm not an astrophysicist, but from what I understand engineering a surface that is both highly reflective with no imperfections, and also sturdy enough to withstand use in wartime, tends to be difficult and/or expensive. It's not like the knee-jerk jokes we get every time there's a laser story where someone suggests that someone just needs to hold up a mirror they bought at a drug store and, voila, the laser destroys itself.
You can also add an ablative coating to the missile similar to a reentry TPS.
How much weight is that going to add to the missile? Then, how much fuel do you need to add to compensate for the additional weight of the coating? Then how much fuel do you need to add to compensate for the weight of the additional fuel? It sounds like you're redesigning a missile. If we force enemy forces to redesign their weapons every time we come up with something new, good. At least we're at the front of the arms race instead of trying to catch up.
I'm sure that you could surround a missile or warhead with ceramic tiles and get some pretty great insulation from a laser, but we're talking about several hundred pounds of additional payload here. At a minimum that means your warheads are smaller, which by itself is a pretty great effect of fielding a laser weapon.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
It's almost like I was trying to make that point.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
to be clear, Grishnakh put words in my mouth earlier in this thread, so I returned the favor.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
What if you miss?
The ship is generally lower than the target, and the earth is a sphere. So a miss will exit the atmosphere and dissipate in space.
Air travel would be a no-go if certain nations had these things.
Commercial aviation tends to avoid war zones. But the risk is infinitesimal anyway. During WW2, 50,000 anti-aircraft rounds were fired for every downed enemy aircraft. These were actually aimed at the aircraft, and many of them had proximity fuses and were area weapons. Even in the extremely unlikely even that this laser hits a commercial aircraft, it needs to be held on target long enough to heat it up, and that is even more unlikely to happen inadvertently.
You kill someone, they get a hero's funeral. You blind someone, they need retraining, and they are a continued drain on morale of friends and family. Morale back home is important - all the Vietnam vets who were only injured represented costs in both morale and money that continued long after a funeral would.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Are you suggesting we violate The Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, Protocol IV of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons?
Looks to me like you are the one suggesting we do that.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
It's not rent-to-own, it costs a pretty penny to develop and deploy them.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Fair enough, but it seems that the easy way to avoid breaking the treaty is to apply the laser long enough to kill... an interesting side effect of the law; that death is more acceptable than blinding.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Article 3
Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol.
But since when does the US obey protocols? They signed the Protocol on Child Soldiers, and then violated it with Omar Khadr.
Article 6
3. States Parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons within their jurisdiction recruited or used in hostilities contrary to the present Protocol are demobilized or otherwise released from service. States Parties shall, when necessary, accord to such persons all appropriate assistance for their physical and psychological recovery and their social reintegration.
Putting a 15-year-old into Gitmo and torturing him is a clear violation of the protocol. Considering he was dragged from his home in Canada to Afghanistan at the age of 10, what outcome did anyone expect when he was captured at 15?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Eh, a well placed round out of a .50 rifle will stop any vehicle quite effectively, without targeting the occupants. Just put it through the engine block.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
You seem to think typing up a document that says "henceforthwith hereby big ass lasers are banned" and getting it signed at the UN somehow prevents people from building one.
When you havw a moment of clarity and logical thoughts, ask yourself "How do you enforce this ban without the use of banned weapons?"
Translated: "I fought the LaWS and the LaWS won."
Have gnu, will travel.
Can we shoehorn an L in there somewhere so it's the LAWLS?
So I have no idea if this would work, but I imagine that if I was told to build a drone capable of thwarting this laser attack, I'd deploy a simple lightweight mirror on a retractable arm that would track the location of the ship and position the mirror such that from the ship's perspective, all that is visible is the mirror.
The stuff you hear about is not the latest generation. The latest generate weapons you don't hear about. I can assure you of this fact as someone who served in the military. I worked with stuff you still haven't heard about.
Here are some of the quotes for the original CNN article by the lieutenant in charge of the system or things not said:
"...we don't worry about range..." The energy of the "shot" delivered should drop with the square of the distance from the target. If the laser's target is moving away from the laser device as it heads towards some destination, it's possible that the energy delivered might not be enough to destroy it.
"All the $40 million system needs to operate is a supply of electricity, which is derived from its own small generator, and has a crew of three. No multi-million-dollar missile, no ammunition at all." and "It's about a dollar a shot" I don't know if the $40 million is the cost per device or the development cost. The three operators also get paid whether they're using the device or sleeping, though they will likely have other duties. Nevertheless, this one shot cost at least $40 million +. The second will result in a cost of $20 million per shot. And, what's the lifetime of the hardware, replacement of end-of-life parts costs and other maintenance costs? It'll take many more than 40 million shots to get down to $1 per shot.
"I can aim that at any particular spot on a target, and disable and destroy as necessary" Moving targets can take a circuitous and rapidly change directions. The aiming system, presumably RADAR or some such, must be able to follow such a target and likely uses a mechanical motor driven gear system for that. Can the aiming system follow that spot during the target's travels?
The article doesn't say whether this uses a pulse laser or a continuous laser. If pulsed, what's the recycle time? A fast moving target may reach its target during the recycle time if that's the case.
How does this system work on targets obscured during rain, fog, cloudy weather or dusty conditions? Light beams become scattered under these conditions and the ability to deliver a destructive energy blast could be hampered.
Of course, the effectiveness of this device will be determined while used under combat conditions with simultaneous multiple, fast moving offensive weapons approaching the laser device. Likely the navy will have several redundant defenses on its valuable targets.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Properly shaped mirrors might be able to send the destructive beam right back to its source. Bag! There goes your laser weapon.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
This ship and laser have been in the gulf and other areas since 2014. What makes this story news now?
Passionately Indifferent
Fair enough, but it seems that the easy way to avoid breaking the treaty is to apply the laser long enough to kill... an interesting side effect of the law; that death is more acceptable than blinding.
It is the intent of the law. In normal warfare, it is preferable to seriously wound an enemy soldier rather than kill them. Your enemy only loses 1 soldier if you kill them, but if you wound a soldier the enemy additionally has to expend resources to take care of them. It's way too easy to do this with laser weapons so it's better for all sides to just agree not to do that.
Enigma
The best way to keep the peace is to insure that the dominant enforcer of the current world order remains dominant.
That only keeps the peace for the people back home... in the land of the dominant enforcer. Everyone else has to deal with war on their doorstep.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now we just need a few sharks with the lasers.
When I get my hands on those laser-sharks, my fortress will finally be complete!
You're right, it's bullshit. It costs 59c per shot.
How about a smoke generator at the nose of the missile, cloaking the body in a cloud of energy absorbing particles?
30kW for 2 seconds... 60kJ of energy. That's the same amount of energy stored in 1.4 grams of crude oil
I don't know what they run their ships on, but more refined oil has a higher energy density. Even if their generators are only 20% efficient, that's 7g of oil per shot
Even if it were effective, I would imagine that it would undermine other stealthy features. Plus I imagine it is possible to weaponize more than one frequency of laser, which would mean that your coating would need to be effective at more than one wavelength.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'd deploy a simple lightweight mirror on a retractable arm that would track the location of the ship and position the mirror such that from the ship's perspective
Are you saying that the mirror would be big enough to completely shield the drone? If so, no it wouldn't work. If not, then you can't completely shield the drone. Even if all of that didn't matter, you're going to add a lot of weight for this to work as you'd need a fairly intelligent controller, the mechanics to move the arm/mirror, a strong enough arm to to actually hold the mirror and a high quality enough mirror to actually reflect the laser. If you manage all of that, you're going to create a control surface that is going to screw with the aerodynamics in all sorts of ways that have nothing to do with how/where you would want the drone to fly.
Compare this to previous weapons systems, like the Phalanx or Goalkeeper close in weapons systems. I don't know what those cost per shot but a .50 BMG will run about $5 per shot, and a 12 gauge slug is about $1 per shot. These systems will automatically fire a multiple shot burst upon finding a target. Assume $20 per shot, 10 shot burst, that's $200 gone in a fraction of a second. They don't always get their target on the first burst, so it goes again and again until the target is destroyed, ammunition is depleted, or the target impacts the ship.
I don't know what the maintenance differences would be between a Phalanx and LaWS but I can imagine based on the ammunition costs alone they likely have a cost saver on their hands.
Even if it's not a cost savings in real dollars per shot there is a lot to be said about a weapon system that will not run out of ammunition and can always land a hit on the first try. This will likely mean savings in not having damage to the ship from an enemy asset getting too close.
I also have to wonder about the psychological damage this weapon can do to the enemy. Imagine flying a dive bomb run on a ship and all of the sudden your wing is on fire. You saw no muzzle flash from a gun, no noise was made (assuming you'd hear it anyway), and you saw nothing approach on radar (even bullets will show up on modern radar).
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
",,,50,000 times the speed of an incoming ICBM."
That's nice, but if the missile is moving at an angle to the ship they still need to be able to slew the laser to hit the missile. A missile moves far faster than an aircraft.
The only advantage light-speed has is that there is no need to "lead" the target as it moves through the field of view.
Actually, as a safety measure, some kind of ramp-up sound prior to firing might be good, in case any crew members are in its line of fire.
No.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
That only keeps the peace for the people back home... in the land of the dominant enforcer. Everyone else has to deal with war on their doorstep.
It keeps the peace for everyone who accepts the current world order. Today, that is most of the world, which is more peaceful than ever before in history. Even most muslim countries accept American hegemony. The only real challenges to the Pax Americana are in a few Shiite countries (Iran, Syria) and a few non-state entities (ISIS, Hezbollah, the Houthi tribe in Yemen). China may challenge America in the future, but their current activities in the SCS don't amount to much, and are not a direct threat to American interests.
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Future lower power version for sniping? that would be a sniper's dream come true. No trajectory to calculate, no wind to take into account, virtually unlimited distance compared to bullets, and *silent*
I'm pretty sure something in the Kw range should be enough to kill someone (or at least seriously incapacitate)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
If it makes that sound and shoots blue ziz zags, it would be so cool...
http://www.cartoonopolis.com/w...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
If it can buy the few second, then it can have an effective strategy to make sure no surface get lit long enough. For example , start spinning so that no surface get those 50 kW dumped long enough to damage the aircraft. And yes, while it reflects, if it reflects 90% , that means your 50 kW laser is only a 5kW laser *effectively*.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Missiles normally move quite fast.
No sig today...
Aimed at a crowd this weapon could certainly be classed as indiscriminate. Not just indiscriminate, you may not notice you're being targeted until people around you start boiling. As if hellfire missiles at weddings isn't enough, now there will be no signature whatsoever who did the deed. It's quite likely that the number of incidents of spontaneous human combustion will go drastically up in the coming years
The mountains of madness have many little plateaus of sanity - Terry Pratchett.
I'd deploy a simple lightweight mirror on a retractable arm that would track the location of the ship and position the mirror such that from the ship's perspective
Are you saying that the mirror would be big enough to completely shield the drone? If so, no it wouldn't work. If not, then you can't completely shield the drone.
With a bit of modification this plan might work. Use a mirror (or retroreflective surface) to reflect the laser back to the ship that fired it. Start fires, blind any US sailors that happen to be looking in that general direction.
No, the drones won't survive very long but they're cheap to build if that's all they need to do. You could fly in a swarm of them with each missile you send. They'll soon turn the laser off.
No sig today...
Yes, exactly! This is why US troops need to come home. The world hates us and we heard their message loud and clear. We are warmongers and our ex leaders including Obama need to be put on trial at The Hague. It's so nice to find people who think alike.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
First off, the surface would have to be nearly perfectly reflective.
That's not even remotely true. The amount of IR energy that needs to be reflected to cause blindness is so incredibly minute that even a reflection off a dull surface as it is heating up can cause blindness. There are off the shelf lasers available with this kind of ability to say nothing of industrial laser cutters or weapons.
But it's really irrelevant to this discussion. This weapon isn't designed to maim, it's designed to destroy. Every weapon that is designed to destroy has a side effect of being able to maim or kill.
and no "pew-pew" sound? We've been had!
You know, I have one simple request, and that is to have frickin' sharks with laser beams attached to their heads!
I'm pretty sure that just shooting the sharks at the enemy would be more effective.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
> First off, the surface would have to be nearly perfectly reflective
Completely incorrect. You can find ample information on the topic from now-public documents of the former SDI program.
Lasers do not have infinite energy. In order to apply the effect you want (whatever that is), you need to leave it on the target for a characteristic "dwell time". That is normally on the order of 1 to 10 seconds. Mirroring the surface of the target can increase this about 1 to 3 times. Adding an aerosol fog can do that again. The idea is not to completely defeat the laser, but make it take so long to work that the target beside it remains untouched simply because you run out of time.
The other thing to note is that the tracking systems pointing the laser are far from perfect and the beam tends to "wander" over the target. Generally, only some part of the target receives continual energy. In that case, the mirrored portions will reflect enough energy to eliminate any effect, as they will cool off when the beam moves off that spot again. While the main target area doesn't have this advantage, it might mean the hole you punch is too small to be useful.
And finally, there is the movement of the target itself. This is gross movement, like spinning the rocket booster of an ICBM or turning your boat back and forth across the path to the target. This only works if the dwell time is fairly long, otherwise, the laser will do its damage while you're still maneuvering. Adding mirroring can stretch that time enough to make such gross movements practical.
Combining these techniques, mirroring, aerosols and spinning, it was pretty obvious any sort of space-based chemical laser would not work against ICBMs. Against boats is another matter, but given the extremely low power of this device, and the obviously faked tests I've seen, I suspect it is essentially useless for anything other than drones, which can't really combine these effects usefully. It remains to be seen how effective it will be in that role.
> 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.
I'm pretty sure the designers of this thing thought of this and have a dynamic focusing system depending on distance to target.
But we still don't know is the maximum effective range and it's likely classified anyway.
A hypersonic cruise missile covers an awful lot of ground in two seconds, not to mention they're pretty good at managing structural heat* problems already.
*Air friction temps are pretty high at those speeds.
So this thing needs to acquire, track and fire before its target reaches its destination. Tough to do with a hypersonic target.
VERY tough to do when you have multiple incoming from all directions which is pretty much standard protocol when you're serious about sinking a ship.
Bilateral treaties limiting where ABM systems can be located are one thing, but an outright ban won't fly. Nor should it - if everyone has the ability to shoot down ICBMs, then they become useless. So long as the first nations to implement them are liberal democracies, the odds of lasers being used to prevent retaliation for a first strike are quite slim as they face prohibitively high non-military costs from using a nuke. As would any nation dependant on global trade, which covers all nuclear powers, at least for the time being.
Besides, you'd need an awful lot of these to take down every warhead in a mass launch scenario. Even if 99.9% effective, Russia would still get about 18 strategic warheads through. And that's only counting one class of warhead.
The laser would typically be used to target incoming anti shipping missiles or ICBMs in boost phase. If you think a hypersonic missile or an ICBM is going to shoogle like a mad bastard in a few Milliseconds I have a bridge to sell you. Cheap.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
decades ago. Excimer, I believe. Took out the middle third of a Titan II that was standing on a launch pad. Out. As in disappeared and the top third fell onto the bottom third. Pretty impressive even back then.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
And you can lead your rifle well enough to hit the engine of a drone in flight? Again, as TFA states, the advantage of this weapon is instantaneous delivery. If you can put an optical sight on the target, there is no need for calculations to predict its trajectory for future arrival of a bullet.
It really depends on the capabilities of the weapon and what its effects are. The article implies the weapon is anti-materiel. Those are sometimes banned from use on soft targets. What happens when the weapon strikes a human target? Does it cause significant burns like white phosphorus? Many weapons that inflict particularly gruesome injuries end up banned. I assume blindness would be essentially instantaneous, regardless of the exposure. Most weapons that are intended to cause permanent injury to the ears or eyes have been banned, too.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
With a bit of modification this plan might work. Use a mirror (or retroreflective surface) to reflect the laser back to the ship that fired it. Start fires, blind any US sailors that happen to be looking in that general direction.
I really don't see how this could work. It would be cheaper and much more effective to send a (or several) missile(s) that deploy a smoke column just ahead of the one with the warhead.
For this mirror thing to work, you would need one big enough to shield the entire drone, or know exactly where the laser is going to strike it. A mirror of that size will make it impossible to control the drone's flight as the drag will probably cause it to go out of control. So if you could somehow know exactly where the drone will be struck and can use a smaller mirror, you will still have control issues, so you won't be able to keep it deployed for long. Which means you will also need to know exactly when the laser is going o be fired. Unless the firing time is prearranged, you won't know that. My guess is that current tech for getting the angle correct to reflect it back will be too heavy to put on a drone.
You will need to account for an aweful lot of variables, besides the ones I've already mentioned. Additionally, I would think there are protocols in place that would minimize this as anyone on this ship will most likely be wearing some sort of eye protection, and probably not looking in the direction of the beam when it's fired. A direct strike on a sailor could be fatal, however it's highly unlikely.
Um, no. This is a precision weapon, as are all lasers. The idea is to focus the energy at the smallest possible point to cause the most damage. If you have clicked through to TFA you would have seen it knock out a very small part of a boat target, leaving the rest unharmed. And area much smaller than one human body. Saying this is an indiscriminate weapon is like saying a sniper rifle is a weapon of mass destruction.
In many countries, soliders are cheaper than the weapons and systems on the trucks... And pretty much all wars are wars of resources - who has the deeper resource pool to draw from (unless it's a war run as a political battle, much like Vietnam). Kill a truck driver, they get another one - 1 for 1. Destroy a missile, waste a lot more money and occupy another 100+ people to build the missile replacement.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Oh, I don't know... Could be true as long as you totally zero out the "R&D", "Labor" and "Fuel costs" lines in the spread sheet.
Yes, I think they're talking about the marginal cost of firing a shot, so basically just the electricity used by the weapon.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
What if you miss? A laser beam is very coherent and will keep traveling until it hits something.
Most munitions of .50 cal or larger will tend to do the same thing, to the curvature of the Earth. Range of most rockets, shells, and heavy calibers is typically more than 7 miles.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Obviously he's talking about variable costs, marginal costs, and not including fixed costs. He's not wrong. He's not particularly right either, but he's not wrong.
> The reflective surface does not need to reflect the entire spectrum just the wavelength(s) of the laser.
What are they, the Borg?
You of course realize that the reflective surface will have its performance degraded or neutralized by things like a bit of dust/dirt or even water droplets (like on a boat) adhering to that surface?
It's a fool's errand to try and mitigate the performance of a laser weapon this way, especially in light of the fact that there's only one laser in theater at the moment (or near future) and by coating your assets with this reflective coating you're throwing away any advantages you used to have with low visibility paint jobs that were supposed to help against conventional weapons. In other words, in a pointless attempt to make a laser slightly less effective, you're now coating your assets with a surface that practically screams "HERE I AM" to normal human eyeballs that can send lead and other conventional ordnance towards it.
The arms race dates back to the beginning of life on Earth. There's always someone with bigger teeth or more spines. Human warmaking is simply an extension of that.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That sounds like a pretty hilarious idea. A mirror large enough to obscure the entire wing span of the drone constantly moving around a gimbled arm or something while the drone is in flight? What if the ship is the target, is the mirror going to obscure any targeting systems on the drone? And how about the effect of a flying object with a constantly shifting center of mass and changing aerodynamic qualities, how do you even fly that? Again, if these are the kinds of ideas we force other people to spend their time and money on, then that alone is a pretty good effect of fielding a laser weapon. You have a drone with a ridiculous looking rotating arm with a simple lightweight mirror on it, congratulations your drone can stay in the air for another second before the laser destroys the mirror and arm. Hope the R&D was worth it.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
A reflective coating could provide a lot of protection.
You emphasized the wrong word, that sentence should look like this:
A reflective coating COULD provide a lot of protection.
I'm still waiting for a single demonstration of any kind of reflective or retro-reflective protective coating. Just a single video showing a higher-powered destructive laser being defeated by any kind of reflective coating at all. I realize the US military isn't going to release a demonstration of them defeating their own weapon, but I know they've done that research and I'm sure that there is plenty of room for amateurs to also produce similar demonstrations with destructive lasers that are less powerful than what the military is fielding. But, like anything else, until we actually see some practical demonstration all of this guessing about reflective coatings is just academic. It could be the case that the laser is working at such a high power that if the coating reflects any less than 99.9% of the laser energy, it's still enough to cause damage to the coating and a runaway effect that sees the laser eat through the entire protection in under a second. Like I said, without testing these things all we're doing is guessing. Yeah, a reflective coating *could* provide a lot of protection, but it could also end up being a very expensive way to manufacture and reliably deploy something that gives you another second of lifetime in the field.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The first generation of combat power lasers, back in the 70s, were ruled ineffective due to the huge power requirements. You needed a tractor trailer size generator to power a rifle sized laser. Obviously things are more efficient now and the high power density of a naval vessel is made for a laser implementation.
That being said, the demo was of taking out an engine. Umm, how well does it do on a target that isn't full of volatile fuel to be touched off? Punching a hole through the hull above the waterline would not be very effective I would think. The CO in the film I think was incorrect, it's another niche weapon. I also wonder how effective it would be through a smoke screen from a low tech smudge pot. Smoke would be a much better countermeasure than any reflective coating that would ablate off.
NRRPT/RCT
This is gross movement, like spinning the rocket booster of an ICBM or turning your boat back and forth across the path to the target.
So... do a barrel roll?
At long last, my starfox training has paid off!
You need line of sight to a nuclear powered navy ship. Unless your wedding is literally ON the dock or on a beach, I think you'll be ok.
This is a defense weapon.
It's a weapon of war. It's not supposed to be 100% safe. How soft can you get? Maybe we should bomb our enemies with loads of kittens?!
Let's assume for a moment that we're not going to replace all of our weapons with lasers. Your mirrored rotating fog-encased vehicle looks like a pretty attractive radar cross-section to the missiles and tracking systems we still have, and which are still going to be developed.
Let's also assume that laser development does not stop at the first version. You've got the systems necessary to defeat our 50kw red laser? Congratulations, let's try it out against this 150kw green laser. Don't spend too much time working on the armor for that one before you see our dial-a-wavelength version that hits the target with 7 different wavelengths at varying power levels if the target can last that long. We call that one Roy G. Biv, and Roy loves looking at things. Oh, you have reflective armor that can handle any wavelength? How about this rail gun projectile that can track your reflective armor and make course corrections in flight?
That's what irritates me any time we're discussing the next weapons systems under development. There's always someone to step up and shit all over it like the defense is so easy and no one ever thought of that.
Oh, you have a missile that can shoot down an ICBM? Well, that's completely stupid. All they have to do is encase the thing in 30 meters of pillows, and your missile is useless. We already have the technology to land a craft inside a giant air bag on Mars, literally all they have to do is put that on an ICBM (they're completely interchangeable, you know, I've seen videos) and all you've done is waste tax dollars.
C'mon, man. Between the Navy's rail guns and laser weapons we're finally getting into Freespace 2 territory. I know that any nerd like myself who played Freespace found themselves chasing a stupid little Shivan Dragon or Manticore or something that's dodging all over the place with your shots going everywhere except where the enemy is, and you're thinking that all you need is a laser and a computer to aim it. And then Freespace 2 comes out and you start yelling "THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!" We're finally entering the age of general-purpose destructive directed energy weapons and there's no shortage of people who are going to step up and talk about how it's useless based on research that was conducted decades ago when the weapons themselves were impractical. It's 2017, the Navy is fielding these weapons (and no doubt developing their own counter-measures), and you're trying to use a program that was cancelled in 1993 as a reason why it's not going to work. Let's assume that the people working on the weapons are aware of SDI, and while we're at it let's also assume that SDI is about a hundred years down the road for people whose major capability is trying to field a swarm of small vehicles.
Basically what I'm saying is that this is badass, and I'm looking forward (in a technical sense, not a humanitarian sense) to the battlefield videos that show a laser system defeating any number of vehicles, with support from our existing arsenal of more conventional weapons and vehicles. Like I said, with most warfighting my interest in this is purely technical, I do not envy anyone who has to fire this or come up against it in a battle situation. Game-changing weapons like these tend to suppress war, when you have a division of tanks that each have a laser on them capable of destroying incoming anti-tank rounds, so that your tanks can't even get shot, then the game changes. Years ago we saw videos of laser systems detecting, tracking, and destroying incoming mortar rounds. This is great technology, this is the kind of weapon that saves lives.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Or, fly a drone towards an boat. Hang a mirrored ball off of the bottom, and blind any sailors looking towards the drone who are not wearing eye protection.
It is kind of hard to bounce a bullet back towards an attacker. Lasers? Yeah, much easier.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I'm pretty sure the designers of this thing thought of this and have a dynamic focusing system depending on distance to target.
But we still don't know is the maximum effective range and it's likely classified anyway.
A hypersonic cruise missile covers an awful lot of ground in two seconds, not to mention they're pretty good at managing structural heat* problems already.
*Air friction temps are pretty high at those speeds.
So this thing needs to acquire, track and fire before its target reaches its destination. Tough to do with a hypersonic target.
VERY tough to do when you have multiple incoming from all directions which is pretty much standard protocol when you're serious about sinking a ship.
I'm sure they did. But I'm also sure they designed it for extreme range as well. So a bad guy wanting to use it at extreme range can, or a moron using it incorrectly can.
As for hypersonic targets, wtf? We're firing at c and tracking and acquisition aren't problematic if the target is at an appreciable distance.
Apparently "1 barrel" of crude is about 158987 grams (you know, give or take), so at ~$50 per barrel that seems like a pretty good price. I suppose factor in some additional costs to get it up to $1 per shot.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Uh, yes, that's actually a very strong point of the Geneva convention. Military weapons should have the goal of killing the target rather than maiming the target.
That makes sense because the alternative to is have thousands of troops come back disabled with missing limbs, blinded, lame, ruined lungs, cancerous, poisoned, or diseased. Bluntly, these people are a burden to society, or at least less productive. That might be changing though. Back in the day, if a wounded vet couldn't perform manual labor, they couldn't hold a real job as that was the work required. These days there's more office and mental work. As long as their noggin still works, they're good to go. ...OH SHIT!
Point being that the Geneva convention bans weapons that purposely try and maim soldiers rather than flat-out kill them. And there's reasons that weapon designers would want to maim rather than kill. The wounded are also a burden on the mission. If a weapon cripples a soldier, someone has to come help drag him back to a hospital. Now you've taken TWO soldiers out of the fight.
So anyway, if your cyber-punk novel needs an excuse for everyone to have cyberlimbs and replacement eyes and external lungs, a no-holds-barred brutal war that takes a piss on the Geneva convention is a good justification.
The best way to keep the peace is to insure that the major powers do enough trade that they don't particularly want to piss off their clients/suppliers.
Mutually Assured Destruction has also worked pretty well. Unless either China or the US can stop the other from completely devastating the other if push came to shove, neither dares to take serious military action against the other. We both have militaries just to kick around undeveloped nations.
Right, I wasn't talking about the effect on organics, I was talking about the destructive power against a target. I believe that any reflective surface would have to be nearly perfectly reflective in order to eliminate the runaway heating that is going to end up destroying the reflective coating before destroying the target. Even a smudge of grease or dirt on the coating would probably be fatal, it's going to get so hot that the coating warps or otherwise gets damaged, and the reduced efficiency is going to cause more heating and it's a runaway effect that destroys the protective coating. Even microscopic imperfections might absorb enough laser energy to cause them to overheat, warp their surroundings, and it's over. And I think it would be cost-prohibitive to produce such a perfect coating rugged enough to survive deployment in a battlefield and remain effective, and even if that was accomplished you've just lit up your vehicle like a lighthouse for any radar guiding a missile.
In short, I think that laser weapons like this are actually the game-changer that they appear to be and aren't going to be so easily defeated as a lot of armchair generals try to suggest. Let alone the fact that any existing military vehicle is already vulnerable, it's not like every possible adversary is going to be able to retro-fit their entire forces with laser protection and still remain militarily effective. Look at a country like North Korea, for example, we will be able to surround their entire country with ships fielding lasers long before they can retrofit even a tenth of their forces to counter those weapons.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I guess that makes sense... but gawd warfare sucks balls.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
so the missile is only as fast as the drone swarm defending it? cool, antimissile missiles will have no problem.
Yep, dealing with enough of that back home and people might realize how incredibly stupid wars are and how they don't achieve anything except enriching the people that run them.
It's like these conventions are a form of regulation designed to maximize the number of available bodies for future war efforts. Anything that would erode support for war is outlawed.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
There are no safe weapons. This looks to me to be safer than most (except to the target).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Unless you hang a mirror off of the drone, and the light bounces back and blinds people on the boat.
Of course you could order all people on the ship inside, or issue eye protection.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
You appear to be under the misapprehension that US military forces don't intentionally target civilians.
Some cunt willing to hellfire a wedding sure as shit isn't going to hesitate with a far less traceable laser.
Rightio, I conflated the message of talking of banning laser weapons with the existing conventions that ban laser weapons that blind enemies as their primary function.
Fuck man, where were you years ago when the military was developing this? You could have saved the country so much money! They clearly never considered the impact of rain or fog, if only you were there to clue them in. I mean, shit, in the Persian Gulf where this system is deployed an analysis showed that Bushehr, where Iran has its nuclear plant, gets a mean of 6.8 days *EVERY YEAR* with precipitation of more than 10mm! That's each and every year, man! That means that on *any given day* there's like a 1.8% chance that a system like this isn't going to work at full capacity for the entire 24 hours! Why even bother with a failure rate that high! I mean, except for June, July, August, September, and October, obviously, when there are exactly 0 mean days over 10mm, but this is a serious problem that no one ever thought of, at all, during the entire lifetime of R&D for this project! You could have saved so much time and money if you just told someone. Obviously you're posting as AC to conceal your high-level government position, but come on!
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I'm just going to throw this out there, but if the goal is the maximum number of casualties, civilian or otherwise, a weapon that needs to target people individually is probably less preferable to a big bomb. How many heads do you think you're going to explode before people decide to go inside at a fairly brisk pace?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Nuclear power isn't necessary. I don't think the Ponce is nuclear powered, and regardless the laser weapon includes its own generator. A ship like the Zumwalt would probably be able to field a variety of energy weapons simultaneously, but a single weapon like this doesn't need a nuke reactor.
I'm not suggesting anything about the practicality of using a precision weapon against a crowd of people though.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Why the fuck would the operator decide to target the disco ball instead of the wing? God, I really hope our adversaries have military planners who think like you do.
This is a weapon capable of destroying a boat's motor and leaving the rest of the boat intact, or melting the wing of a drone, or destroying a mortar round in flight, and you think they can just string up a disco ball, and voila, the laser attacks itself?
Oh, and let's make no mention of the fact that a freely dangling disco ball might have any effect on the aerodynamic performance or control ability of an aircraft.
Please, please let our adversaries employ graduates of the Harrkev School Of Military Doctrine.
I think we can settle this like men though. Get out to the Persian Gulf and get yourself one of those small boats, and rush the USS Ponce while holding up a mirror. I'll be here to study the effects. Never the mind the fact that the ship has an extensive array of ballistic or guided munitions hooked up to radars which think that mirror of yours looks pretty fabulous. Hey, don't worry though. Reflecting 50kw lasers? Yeah, totally easy.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Shit, now you've done it. This could be the biggest internal US Navy sweepstake in history.
Are you kidding?
"I'm ordering everyone on deck. You people have to see what these idiots are sending our way. Bring your cameras."
This mirror that is blocking the laser, it's not also obstructing your drone's targeting or flight control systems, is it? Because that would be fucking stupid if it was.
I know! Just attach another, bigger, arm to the drone, with a camera on it, so you can see around the mirror. And then put another mirror in front of the camera. Yeah, this is totally workable. Let's spend a bunch of R&D on this and forget that literally our entire existing inventory of military vehicles is completely vulnerable.
Wait! We just need a mirror as big as a Mil Mi-24 helicopter. Stick with me here. You see, if we just put a mirror in front of our MiGs, and somehow engineer a mirror capable of withstanding supersonic speeds while not shattering and destroying the aircraft, then we're golden. We just need to completely forget that we've turned our air force into a fleet of flying disco balls that any Sea Sparrow missile from the 70s can lock onto while laughing the entire way out.
"Sir, I think our missile just put on sunglasses."
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Yes, avoid the disco ball. Great idea, unless the disco ball IS the body of the drone. Those things do not have to be big.
Drones can do surveillance, and do not need to be big. Standard quadcopters could be made very reflective to blind any viewers.
You have to start thinking like an attacker. Is there any way to turn the enemy's weapon against them? Then you try to neutralize that approach.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
I would even suggest that if you target a person with a 50kw laser and only blind them, something is wrong and your laser might be broken.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Great idea, unless the disco ball IS the body of the drone.
Great idea. Let's make an aircraft specifically designed to reflect as much radiation as possible. Let's completely fool the complete range of existing radar-based weaponry into thinking that our little drone is actually an aircraft carrier. And, yeah, round aircraft totally have a long, storied history of being completely airworthy.
You see Ivan, if you put the engines and wings inside the ball, the laser can't disable them!
Standard quadcopters could be made very reflective to blind any viewers.
You know what they aren't going to blind? A single .50 cal bullet. They aren't going to be able to dodge it, either. But, hey, at least it wasn't a laser that shot it down, right? Mission accomplished?
You have to start thinking like an attacker. Is there any way to turn the enemy's weapon against them?
OK, you have to start thinking like a defender. If the attacker sends something at you which is a problem for one of your many weapons, are you going to choose that weapon to try and bring it down? You want to make a perfectly reflective vehicle? Great, spend all of your time and money doing that, because our conventional weapons need targets too. Meanwhile, your entire existing inventory of vehicles will make great targets for our laser not attacking your MirrorDrone(tm).
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Oh, well then, I guess all they need to do is train birds to fly their drones.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
That sounds like a great way for our adversaries to use their military budgets, a surface that absorbs energy and converts it into usable power. Maybe it will be so efficient that it can absorb the explosion from the cheap missile that just struck it.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Wow, listening to you, a person would get this ideal that a can of silver spray paint costs a LOT more than $5.
Plus, if you make a weapon too annoying to use, you have just neutralized one weapon that the military spent millions of dollars developing.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
And, listening to you, a person would think that the Navy has spend decades and probably hundreds of millions of dollars working on a weapon that can be defeated by spray paint. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. This is why it irritates me that every time Slashdot has a story about laser weapons, there's always some idiot to rush in and say "But mirrors!" as if the military never thought of that. It's just stupid. A coat of spray paint is not going to protect you from a 50kw laser, chief. Not even a little bit. There are going to be so many imperfections in that surface that will absorb the energy from the laser and burn up, causing distortions around them which will do the same, it will be a runaway effect and your so-called "protective coating" is going to be a cloud of fine particles floating around the target as it gets destroyed. A protective coating will also possibly be fatally flawed if the surface has any dust, grease, oil, bug guts, water, etc on it. It's absolutely idiotic to think otherwise, but that doesn't stop you guys from running in any time there's a story about laser weapons to suggest "hey, maybe if we hang a disco ball from it." This whole argument is Monty Python-esque in its ridiculousness. "Well, if we build a giant wooden badger..."
Plus, if you make a weapon too annoying to use, you have just neutralized one weapon that the military spent millions of dollars developing.
Says the guy who is proposing that adversaries go around spending however much money spray-painting all of their formerly-stealthy aircraft. Like I've pointed out many times in this story, if the only benefit of fielding a laser weapon is that you force your adversary to spend their time and money on stupid anti-laser projects, or end up with smaller warheads on missiles because they're encased in ceramic tiles or whatever, then that alone is a great benefit of fielding a laser weapon. Otherwise, any and every existing military vehicle is badly vulnerable to being shot with something moving the speed of light that is going to burn, warp, and destroy various control surfaces or engines that really need to be stable in order for the vehicle to work.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Did you even read the Protocol? Obviously not! Child soldiers include ANY child under 18 who takes up arms, even if the person is not fighting as a member of the forces of a state. Read Article 4.1:
Article 4
1. Armed groups that are distinct from the armed forces of a State should not, under any circumstances, recruit or use in hostilities persons under the age of 18 years.
Clearly the protocol includes all children under 18 in it's ban on child soldiers.
The responsibilities of the signatories towards ALL child soldiers, whether they are with the forces of an armed state or otherwise:
Article 7
1. States Parties shall cooperate in the implementation of the present Protocol, including in the prevention of any activity contrary thereto and in the rehabilitation and social reintegration of persons who are victims of acts contrary thereto, including through technical cooperation and financial assistance. Such assistance and cooperation will be undertaken in consultation with the States Parties concerned and the relevant international organizations.
2. States Parties in a position to do so shall provide such assistance through existing multilateral, bilateral or other programmes or, inter alia, through a voluntary fund established in accordance with the rules of the General Assembly.
The US's obligation was to treat Khadr as a child soldier, not a soldier. And to consider him a victim of acts contrary to the protocol, specifically Article 4.1 on the use of anyone under 18 not recruited as the soldier of a nation, and not to use anyone under 18 in combat.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Just like I said above, you put liquid propellant beneath the skin of the vehicle, to absorb the heat on the skin of the vehicle, and dumb it with the exhaust for more speed. It's similar to some regenerative engine nozzles.
s/dumb/dump/g
Aimed at a crowd this weapon could certainly be classed as indiscriminate.
Not just indiscriminate, you may not notice you're being targeted until people around you start boiling.
As if hellfire missiles at weddings isn't enough, now there will be no signature whatsoever who did the deed.
It's quite likely that the number of incidents of spontaneous human combustion will go drastically up in the coming years
How is this different than a firearm and especially a rifle at long range where targets will be struck considerably before the report is heard. How is it different from artillery?
It is not a blinding weapon. It is a killing weapon and any blindness that is causes is secondary to its intended use.
I'm pretty sure they would be able to "see" your drone with it's giant mirror, using the WWII technology known as "radar".
It's different in the way that it does not leave any chemical traces or shrapnel that provides any information on who did it. Although if only one country is using these weapons and you find a heap of seared body parts, it's probably fairly clear who did it.
The mountains of madness have many little plateaus of sanity - Terry Pratchett.
How many heads do you think you're going to explode before people decide to go inside at a fairly brisk pace?
Depends on how many heads in the crowd line up neatly to the line of fire of he laser probably.
The mountains of madness have many little plateaus of sanity - Terry Pratchett.