A few points: The fiber lasers used in the demonstration can approach 80% efficiency.
I believe the catch here is "when total output is low".
The higher the output, the more waste heat you generate. It is possible of course that military has succeeded in developing new revolutionary technology that indeed allows for 80% efficiency.
First of all, at 32MW output, this would RAPE ship's energy supply. Even if carrier's reactor and electric network can handle bursts of 160MW throughput (current tech cannot even on land without massive sacrifices to efficiency and cost, look at wind farm connectivity to grid struggle), it is NOT a fleet defense ship. It needs to be able to utilize its weapons while actually handling all of its main tasks, which draw quite a lot of power themselves. Additionally you need multiple close range AAA systems to cover various approach directions, and when swarmed, ALL of them need to be firing a once.
Phalanx, Kashtan, Goalkeepeer et al already allow for this, while providing minimal stress to hull and electric network and a very low cost solution for the same problem.
Finally, it's one thing to dump a little heat into the sea. It's another when heat output is so tremendous that there few if any materials in existence that could conduct heat away from the system at speed necessary before system melts or even vaporises itself. The ocean around doesn't help any here, the problem is the heat conductivity at heat-generating parts of the mechanism. Problem would likely be on similar level to fusion reactor cooling as over 100MW converted to heat every second in small space builds up REALLY fast. You still need to have the system as a one package, and it still needs to be mounted on a relatively mobile turret. Finally it needs to be light enough to be able to turn fast to track targets, which even if modern heat sinks could handle the heat output of a 32MW laser, the weight and size factor alone would make this more of a "this is the only thing a ship can carry" kind of a system. Considering the smallness of space which will generate the heat, it's pretty much given that you will need materials that can handle heat transference better then anything we have, as laser's heat generating components need to stay operational during firing and not melt themselves.
Finally in spite of the huge size there is little to no free room on a deck of aircraft carrier. Most AAA systems are located on the sides, in very limited spaces. Carrier's main job is functioning as an airport, not shooting down incoming missiles. The huge size is actually tiny when you consider its main task, and just how much real estate that requires - on carrier's deck, every square meter typically has a purpose and is one of the most expensive real estate in the world.
Doubtful. Russians who are undisputed masters of Surface-to-Air weapon systems have essentially mated their two close range fleet AA defense systems together in Kashtan. RAM seems more of an US attempt to copy the concept of short range missile part of the system to augment weaknesses of Phalanx CIWS. If you place both systems on the ship + standard Sea Sparrow, you theoretically get to where Russian fleet medium ship AA defense is - medium range missile, short range missile and kinetic high volume of fire weapon.
West is still lacking a proper long range strategic SAM that has a quality comparable of S-300 and S-400 systems, but that will likely be rectified in time with massive investments in Standard Missile, this is bound to be caught up at some point given the lack of development funds that Russians military has suffered from for last two decades.
Payload. Much of energy is wasted as such lasers have very low efficiency. You will have to dissipate around 4-5 times the energy you get on laser's focus around the laser itself as waste heat. When it's lasik, you have nice and low power ratings which can be cooled easily. When it comes to large powerful lasers, it is simply not doable with current materials. Your installation will simply melt down or even vaporise itself if you have to output the energy needed to burn through metal in that kind of a small time window.
For the record, gatling CIWS systems like kashtan and phalanx have muzzle velocity at around mach3, which even with slowdown caused by drag, means that they will be at least at mach 2 at impact point.
And when two metallic objects collide at mach6-mach7, there isn't going to be much problem with lack of mass. Kinetic energy formula is still 1/2mv^2, and v is going to be pretty crazy.
This laser is 32kW, and it's already pushing the limits of solid state laser tech. 32MW laser is nowhere in sight for several decades, unless we make major breakthroughs in materials needed, not to even talk about power draw, which for current laser at 20% efficiency would be around 160MW for your suggested 32MW laser. And with increased power, the efficiency of laser installation is likely to decrease significantly.
You're gonna have some pretty hardcore power cabling, cooling system and a nuclear reactor to power that kind of a thing, not to even mention the epic size of a weapon. Cooling system alone will probably be bigger then a modern missile silo.
This replacing a small, localized and largely autonomous system that performs better in most conditions? I think not.
Comparing this to Sea Sparrows or any other ship based medium range SAM in any way other then augmentation is just plain foolish anyway. This caps at a few kilometers, depending on weather. It's a potential kinetic CIWS replacement (i.e. phalanx). It's in no way even a contender for SAM CIWS replacement. Not even because the tech isn't ready, but because the tech is unsuitable by default. Weather and fact that Earth is a sphere will make sure of this.
This offers far less hope against missile swarms and fast cruise missiles then lead-spewing kinetic weapons. With this you need to affect a single point on the missile from the front for quite some time to get results. If it's a fast cruise missile with mach3-mach5 terminal approach, laser is useless - it simply won't have enough time to do damage. So is kinetic CIWS. Missile based CIWS has a chance as it can engage at decent range and score a one shot kill.
Against swarms, this is even worse. You have to burn every individual missile, retarget and burn next one. Even if by some stroke of luck you succeed in this titanic task and can get missile terminated in say 3 seconds of burning it (completely impossible with laser as weak in tests), all that opponent needs to do to counter it is to program missile to go into a spin in terminal stage, making it impossible to focus at a single point of the missile. Or install a high-albedo tip. Or just attack in a stormy weather where laser energy will dissipate into water droplets long before it hits the missile.
Kinetic CIWS like phalanx/kashtan on the other hand actually have a decent chance of shooting slow and small missiles of this kind down, as they can usually kill a missile in one-two hits and are largely unaffected by weather conditions. Missile CIWS are better, but tend to get overloaded with sheer numbers.
All in all, this is just a PR stunt to show US taxpayers that their money is spent on yet another hollywood-style toy with little room for real life applications. This is a weapon for space age and space warfare where weather does not exist and laser can be effective at far greater ranges.
Let's see. In chronological order, we have satellite warfare initiated by:
USA: 1985, F-15 fighter plane as platform USSR: Unconfirmed shortly after, MiG-31 fighter plane as platform. China: Land based ballistic missile, 2007 USA: 2008, second launch, naval based ballistic missile.
Currently announced to be working on new types of satellite killers: Russia (laser or missile based, literally "developing a fundamentally new weapon that can destroy potential targets in space."), India (ballistic missile).
I.e. I mixed 2007 and 2008 launches, however the general idea stays the same: USA is the main instigator of anti-satellite weapon development with everyone else essentially following suit using their own tests to show the same capability.
In all the honesty, China as a nation resembles USSR a lot. It has a major nationality (han), and a boatload of "little brother" nationalities, all spread across largely autonomous regions.
So yes, it's a nation, but definitely not like most western nations such as Germany, UK, France et al. Those are ethnically very solid, with vast majority of population being of same or very similar ethnicity.
This is more of a show that if US shows up to defend Taiwan, the China can cripple US military without resorting to nuclear weapons.
Essentially this means that they're putting themselves into a better position when it comes to diplomacy over Taiwan. It's pretty unlikely that China or US want a hot war in there in any case. But when pressing for diplomatic gains, having this kind of military technology allows China to take a significantly tougher stance.
They're not threatening the GPS constellation which is known to be disruptable through jamming as much as the real spy satellites - ones that take images, help aiming and guiding missiles (beyond GPS) and so on. US will lose most of its air force potential and cruise missile strike potential if it looses the intel and high accuracy guidance for its weapons - inertial guidance is shit, and not knowing what's at the target site you need to hit makes all the difference between a successful strike and a total clusterfuck with near 100% casualties.
Remember that earth is a sphere, and the moment you're out of direct line of sight due to horizon, the only meaningful way of communication is via the communication satellites.
Actually US is. They made a launch of similar weapon a couple of years ago off a ship. Essentially that was a starting shot for anti-orbital missile warfare tests.
It's quite possible that this isn't as much about hardware as about buying out a major competitor, taking their contacts and deals and dumping the IP and hardware to anyone interested, or just keeping it, seeing what they can integrate into their tech and tossing out the rest.
Essentially at start this seemed brilliant - Nokia's cellular networking + Siemens' more of the same. Standard fusion, same amount of function but less people due to axing redundancies (this is the company that makes cellular towers and such, typically entire networking solutions that it sells to operators as a package).
Problem was, Siemens' part of the deal was poisonous. Almost instantly after the merger, it came out that Siemens bosses had taken part in some nasty bribery in the recent past before the merger, and the new fused company was forced to take the blame for the entire thing. They lost quite a lot of reputation, had to pay fines, and cut people even more then expected. They seem to have recovered now though, and have a very solid part of infrastructure market now. Iirc their main competitors were motorola's networking division and sony eriksson's networking division, one of which they're now buying, in addition to many smaller makers (and I think I'm missing at least one major asian one whos name eludes me).
It's worth noting that htc, apple, rim, et al and in fact most mobile phone makers have no part in this particular business - this is strictly network-side stuff.
StarCraft (1) had a battle.net "replacement" for pirated games and those banned on battle.net. It essentially run battle.net-like server called fsgs that required you to replace a single file in your starcraft directory to connect to. After replacement, clicking battle.net in game took you to fsgs lobby.
And it was pretty active community until blizzard shut it down (iirc) a few years ago. I would be very surprised if someone won't make a similar service for SC2, especially in light of how quickly world of warcraft server software leaks and is used on private servers after every patch.
There are quite a lot of schools outside US in EU that also allow various TI calculators for standardised tests. I did my finals in 2000, and one of the worst things from schools perspective even back then was customised software. They required us to give the calculators away a week before the test so that faculty could check for software changes and reset the calculators to factory settings.
Actually, there was a VERY good suggestion early on in several countries that have police force equipped with tasers, but that was shot down by the corporate lobbyists because it would reduce sales:
Every time police fires a taser, they would have to account for it in the EXACTLY SAME WAY AS IF THEY FIRED A FIREARM. Essentially making taser a proper "use only when there are no means other then firearm to diffuse the situation" kind of a tool, as it was marketed to the public, rather then the current "tase just because you're too damn lazy to even try other methods" situation.
Question would be "why". Being essentially an add-on, this really won't solve anything for those that IE as a browser is designed for - the average mom and pop crowd that won't even know what CSS stands for.
This sounds like a technical solution to a social problem of people generally not understanding the tools they're using and not caring about them.
The argument here is similar to that of taser - that you would injure more people by not having this tool and having to disperse crowd in other ways (i.e. tear gas, water cannons, possible gunfire).
Of course, the problem is that it ends up being used to solve problems it wasn't initially designed for, such as torturing without leaving marks, just like taser did.
Slashdot Mirror
A few points:
The fiber lasers used in the demonstration can approach 80% efficiency.
I believe the catch here is "when total output is low".
The higher the output, the more waste heat you generate. It is possible of course that military has succeeded in developing new revolutionary technology that indeed allows for 80% efficiency.
You're missing the point:
First of all, at 32MW output, this would RAPE ship's energy supply. Even if carrier's reactor and electric network can handle bursts of 160MW throughput (current tech cannot even on land without massive sacrifices to efficiency and cost, look at wind farm connectivity to grid struggle), it is NOT a fleet defense ship. It needs to be able to utilize its weapons while actually handling all of its main tasks, which draw quite a lot of power themselves. Additionally you need multiple close range AAA systems to cover various approach directions, and when swarmed, ALL of them need to be firing a once.
Phalanx, Kashtan, Goalkeepeer et al already allow for this, while providing minimal stress to hull and electric network and a very low cost solution for the same problem.
Finally, it's one thing to dump a little heat into the sea. It's another when heat output is so tremendous that there few if any materials in existence that could conduct heat away from the system at speed necessary before system melts or even vaporises itself. The ocean around doesn't help any here, the problem is the heat conductivity at heat-generating parts of the mechanism. Problem would likely be on similar level to fusion reactor cooling as over 100MW converted to heat every second in small space builds up REALLY fast. You still need to have the system as a one package, and it still needs to be mounted on a relatively mobile turret. Finally it needs to be light enough to be able to turn fast to track targets, which even if modern heat sinks could handle the heat output of a 32MW laser, the weight and size factor alone would make this more of a "this is the only thing a ship can carry" kind of a system. Considering the smallness of space which will generate the heat, it's pretty much given that you will need materials that can handle heat transference better then anything we have, as laser's heat generating components need to stay operational during firing and not melt themselves.
Finally in spite of the huge size there is little to no free room on a deck of aircraft carrier. Most AAA systems are located on the sides, in very limited spaces. Carrier's main job is functioning as an airport, not shooting down incoming missiles. The huge size is actually tiny when you consider its main task, and just how much real estate that requires - on carrier's deck, every square meter typically has a purpose and is one of the most expensive real estate in the world.
Doubtful. Russians who are undisputed masters of Surface-to-Air weapon systems have essentially mated their two close range fleet AA defense systems together in Kashtan. RAM seems more of an US attempt to copy the concept of short range missile part of the system to augment weaknesses of Phalanx CIWS. If you place both systems on the ship + standard Sea Sparrow, you theoretically get to where Russian fleet medium ship AA defense is - medium range missile, short range missile and kinetic high volume of fire weapon.
West is still lacking a proper long range strategic SAM that has a quality comparable of S-300 and S-400 systems, but that will likely be rectified in time with massive investments in Standard Missile, this is bound to be caught up at some point given the lack of development funds that Russians military has suffered from for last two decades.
It doesn't. Same goes for smoke curtains.
Payload. Much of energy is wasted as such lasers have very low efficiency. You will have to dissipate around 4-5 times the energy you get on laser's focus around the laser itself as waste heat. When it's lasik, you have nice and low power ratings which can be cooled easily. When it comes to large powerful lasers, it is simply not doable with current materials. Your installation will simply melt down or even vaporise itself if you have to output the energy needed to burn through metal in that kind of a small time window.
For the record, gatling CIWS systems like kashtan and phalanx have muzzle velocity at around mach3, which even with slowdown caused by drag, means that they will be at least at mach 2 at impact point.
And when two metallic objects collide at mach6-mach7, there isn't going to be much problem with lack of mass. Kinetic energy formula is still 1/2mv^2, and v is going to be pretty crazy.
This laser is 32kW, and it's already pushing the limits of solid state laser tech. 32MW laser is nowhere in sight for several decades, unless we make major breakthroughs in materials needed, not to even talk about power draw, which for current laser at 20% efficiency would be around 160MW for your suggested 32MW laser. And with increased power, the efficiency of laser installation is likely to decrease significantly.
You're gonna have some pretty hardcore power cabling, cooling system and a nuclear reactor to power that kind of a thing, not to even mention the epic size of a weapon. Cooling system alone will probably be bigger then a modern missile silo.
This replacing a small, localized and largely autonomous system that performs better in most conditions? I think not.
Comparing this to Sea Sparrows or any other ship based medium range SAM in any way other then augmentation is just plain foolish anyway. This caps at a few kilometers, depending on weather. It's a potential kinetic CIWS replacement (i.e. phalanx). It's in no way even a contender for SAM CIWS replacement. Not even because the tech isn't ready, but because the tech is unsuitable by default. Weather and fact that Earth is a sphere will make sure of this.
This offers far less hope against missile swarms and fast cruise missiles then lead-spewing kinetic weapons. With this you need to affect a single point on the missile from the front for quite some time to get results. If it's a fast cruise missile with mach3-mach5 terminal approach, laser is useless - it simply won't have enough time to do damage. So is kinetic CIWS. Missile based CIWS has a chance as it can engage at decent range and score a one shot kill.
Against swarms, this is even worse. You have to burn every individual missile, retarget and burn next one. Even if by some stroke of luck you succeed in this titanic task and can get missile terminated in say 3 seconds of burning it (completely impossible with laser as weak in tests), all that opponent needs to do to counter it is to program missile to go into a spin in terminal stage, making it impossible to focus at a single point of the missile. Or install a high-albedo tip. Or just attack in a stormy weather where laser energy will dissipate into water droplets long before it hits the missile.
Kinetic CIWS like phalanx/kashtan on the other hand actually have a decent chance of shooting slow and small missiles of this kind down, as they can usually kill a missile in one-two hits and are largely unaffected by weather conditions. Missile CIWS are better, but tend to get overloaded with sheer numbers.
All in all, this is just a PR stunt to show US taxpayers that their money is spent on yet another hollywood-style toy with little room for real life applications. This is a weapon for space age and space warfare where weather does not exist and laser can be effective at far greater ranges.
Let's see. In chronological order, we have satellite warfare initiated by:
USA: 1985, F-15 fighter plane as platform
USSR: Unconfirmed shortly after, MiG-31 fighter plane as platform.
China: Land based ballistic missile, 2007
USA: 2008, second launch, naval based ballistic missile.
Currently announced to be working on new types of satellite killers: Russia (laser or missile based, literally "developing a fundamentally new weapon that can destroy potential targets in space."), India (ballistic missile).
I.e. I mixed 2007 and 2008 launches, however the general idea stays the same: USA is the main instigator of anti-satellite weapon development with everyone else essentially following suit using their own tests to show the same capability.
Indeed. And the last big player is french Alcatel.
In all the honesty, China as a nation resembles USSR a lot. It has a major nationality (han), and a boatload of "little brother" nationalities, all spread across largely autonomous regions.
So yes, it's a nation, but definitely not like most western nations such as Germany, UK, France et al. Those are ethnically very solid, with vast majority of population being of same or very similar ethnicity.
This is more of a show that if US shows up to defend Taiwan, the China can cripple US military without resorting to nuclear weapons.
Essentially this means that they're putting themselves into a better position when it comes to diplomacy over Taiwan. It's pretty unlikely that China or US want a hot war in there in any case. But when pressing for diplomatic gains, having this kind of military technology allows China to take a significantly tougher stance.
They're not threatening the GPS constellation which is known to be disruptable through jamming as much as the real spy satellites - ones that take images, help aiming and guiding missiles (beyond GPS) and so on. US will lose most of its air force potential and cruise missile strike potential if it looses the intel and high accuracy guidance for its weapons - inertial guidance is shit, and not knowing what's at the target site you need to hit makes all the difference between a successful strike and a total clusterfuck with near 100% casualties.
Remember that earth is a sphere, and the moment you're out of direct line of sight due to horizon, the only meaningful way of communication is via the communication satellites.
Actually US is. They made a launch of similar weapon a couple of years ago off a ship. Essentially that was a starting shot for anti-orbital missile warfare tests.
It's quite possible that this isn't as much about hardware as about buying out a major competitor, taking their contacts and deals and dumping the IP and hardware to anyone interested, or just keeping it, seeing what they can integrate into their tech and tossing out the rest.
Essentially at start this seemed brilliant - Nokia's cellular networking + Siemens' more of the same. Standard fusion, same amount of function but less people due to axing redundancies (this is the company that makes cellular towers and such, typically entire networking solutions that it sells to operators as a package).
Problem was, Siemens' part of the deal was poisonous. Almost instantly after the merger, it came out that Siemens bosses had taken part in some nasty bribery in the recent past before the merger, and the new fused company was forced to take the blame for the entire thing. They lost quite a lot of reputation, had to pay fines, and cut people even more then expected.
They seem to have recovered now though, and have a very solid part of infrastructure market now. Iirc their main competitors were motorola's networking division and sony eriksson's networking division, one of which they're now buying, in addition to many smaller makers (and I think I'm missing at least one major asian one whos name eludes me).
It's worth noting that htc, apple, rim, et al and in fact most mobile phone makers have no part in this particular business - this is strictly network-side stuff.
Indeed. I wonder if it's actually illegal to get this game off piratebay, it being freeware and all?
StarCraft (1) had a battle.net "replacement" for pirated games and those banned on battle.net. It essentially run battle.net-like server called fsgs that required you to replace a single file in your starcraft directory to connect to. After replacement, clicking battle.net in game took you to fsgs lobby.
And it was pretty active community until blizzard shut it down (iirc) a few years ago. I would be very surprised if someone won't make a similar service for SC2, especially in light of how quickly world of warcraft server software leaks and is used on private servers after every patch.
There are quite a lot of schools outside US in EU that also allow various TI calculators for standardised tests. I did my finals in 2000, and one of the worst things from schools perspective even back then was customised software. They required us to give the calculators away a week before the test so that faculty could check for software changes and reset the calculators to factory settings.
Apparently I misread the OP. Thanks for clarifying.
Ebola or AIDS. Choices!
Well, it still won't work on IE installation without it, so you would probably want to test it on IE without the library rather then with it.
And for proper testing, there are much better alternatives then IE. IMHO.
Actually, there was a VERY good suggestion early on in several countries that have police force equipped with tasers, but that was shot down by the corporate lobbyists because it would reduce sales:
Every time police fires a taser, they would have to account for it in the EXACTLY SAME WAY AS IF THEY FIRED A FIREARM. Essentially making taser a proper "use only when there are no means other then firearm to diffuse the situation" kind of a tool, as it was marketed to the public, rather then the current "tase just because you're too damn lazy to even try other methods" situation.
Question would be "why". Being essentially an add-on, this really won't solve anything for those that IE as a browser is designed for - the average mom and pop crowd that won't even know what CSS stands for.
This sounds like a technical solution to a social problem of people generally not understanding the tools they're using and not caring about them.
The argument here is similar to that of taser - that you would injure more people by not having this tool and having to disperse crowd in other ways (i.e. tear gas, water cannons, possible gunfire).
Of course, the problem is that it ends up being used to solve problems it wasn't initially designed for, such as torturing without leaving marks, just like taser did.