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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...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
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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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.
OP's mom offers a "dollar a shot" plan. Oooooh, sick burn.
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
They've been working on these for a long time. Still have kinks on them.
Initially the work in the 1980s was with chemical lasers but because those are hard to handle, now they're using solid state fiber lasers. Why didn't they use those before? Poor efficiency meant a regular ship couldn't power one with any decent output. Even here notice they're talking about drones.
I remember hearing years ago that you need at least a 100 kW laser to have something approaching battlefield capability and 1 MW would be better. This one is 30 kW...
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
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 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 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.
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.
Can we shoehorn an L in there somewhere so it's the LAWLS?
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
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.'"
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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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.
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
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.
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.
Congratulations, your super-advanced million dollar rotating reflecting laser-defeating aircraft just got shot down by a $165k Sea Sparrow missile from the 70s because your aircraft has the most fabulous radar cross-section the ship has ever seen.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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
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.
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