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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.
Hi Kent. Have you been touching yourself?
- 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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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..
Why are you targeting retreating forces? Isn't there something in the Geneva convention about that?
Until the beam diverges to a larger area than the target, the only thing attenuating the power delivered to the target is the atmosphere.
They've tested this on moving boats and UAV's, so I'd assume the answer to "can they target moving objects?" is "yes"
The laser is continuous, it's made from modified 6 welding lasers that all focus on the target.
It's designed to compliment traditional weapons, not replace them. If the conditions are too bad for it to work, they're going use a gun or missile. Which is going to be much worse for the bad guys.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org...
The Geneva protocol does not prohibit attacking retreating forces, quite the opposite.
Retreat shows an intention to continue combat from another location.
The Geneva protocol prohibits attacking persons that are hors de combat (wounded, unconscious, shipwreck)
It prohibits attacking forces that clearly are attempting to surrender and are not attempting to escape.
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.
> 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.