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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.
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?
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Who the hell named that ship?! Are the sister ships the USS Wanker and USS Berk?
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> "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.
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- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
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Why let them get that far inland? Wouldn't it be better if you had some of them stationed off the coastline, patrolling? Ideally, something relatively small (compared to a ship), fully autonomous, self-sustaining, and that blends in with the ocean? Sharks, for instance..
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
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
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
Can we shoehorn an L in there somewhere so it's the LAWLS?
Once a warhead is into its reentry phase, your goose is pretty much cooked. You could theoretically stop them with a kinetic kill, but the probability of intercept extremely low. Warheads also tend to be extremely rugged, dense objects (given the Uranium casing and all that), and so aren't a good candidate for LASER weapons.
Where a LASER really shines (if you'll pardon the pun) is destroying the launcher during the boost phase, or in the case of what's on the USS Ponce, also dealing with cruise missiles and the like. In order to maximize their throw weight (how big of a warhead and/or how far), missiles tend to be built as lightly as possible. During the boost phase of a ballistic missile, all you need to do is weaken its structure enough that the launch forces cause it to fall apart. You don't need to burn a hole through it, you don't need to melt it, you just need to weaken it enough that it buckles under the g-forces. It's a similar thing with the cruise missiles that would be affecting a warship, you just need to compromise them structurally.
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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
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.
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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.