Battlefield Lasers

KeyShark writes: "An article on FoxNews describes how front-line troops soon will be protected by battlefield lasers designed to shoot down rockets, artillery shells and even mortars."

Not too hard.

[man_ls]

Sounds like they put a fire-finder radar tracking station onto a laser. They've had the ability to plot trajectory and such of incoming shells for quite a while, but now they'll be able to do something about it other than leave.

Unfortunately, I have suspicions if this will ever make it to deployment. The U.S. also has an anti-satellite laser weapon that has been tested and confirmed to work by overloading the circuits -- and it was nixed because of the poltical tension it would create.

are artillery shells that delicate?

[rebelcool]

I know the airborne laser (uses the same chemical type laser) was capable of shooting down rockets by weakening the metal skins, which the forces of flight would thus rupture and cause the thing to fly apart, but are artillery shells really that delicate?

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[pryan]

For artillery shells without an explosive payload, I would imagine if you could melt the tip, it would throw off the aerodynamics to throw the shell off course. That is assuming, of course, that you didn't vaporize it.

And for ones with an explosive payload, the obvious would happen in flight. :)

This raises some frightening questions

[joshjs]

What's to stop them from using these things on people? They have amazingly accurate targeting systems and they're cheap to fire (article says 25 cents (maybe dollars, I forget...) per shot.

So what's to keep the defense dept. from using these things for assassinations, or ground warfare?

Would that be cruel and unusual?

Here's a question: is there a "right of the people" to keep and bear these? The idea doesn't sound assuring, I must say: what kind of signature would it leave. Bullets can be tracked, but this -- would there even be a body left?

I'm not trying to complain or predict horrors, because I'm all about the advance of tech. I just want to know a little more about this kind of thing.

Also: it's eerie that the article only mentions uses of these for defense, and not for attack, covert (which I think is a promising potential use for this technology) or otherwise. Just considering it's a time of "war" and all.

Re:Not too hard.

[Lobsang]

Not too hard?

I think it may be impossible. You're forgetting:

1) Decoys
2) More decoys
3) Even more decoys
4) Foliage
5) Line of sight
6) Rain
7) Fog
8) Snow

Am i forgetting something here?

Re:Bad timing

[dumpster_d]

The technology to shoot down aircraft was developed and during the 1970's--no big deal. I remember seeing great footage of the engine compartment being nicely sliced out of a flying drone.

Problem is: the dispersion/diffraction of a high-powered LASER being used outdoors has the side effect of permanently blinding most of the people in line-of-sight to the aircraft [which can be a lot and, of course, include one's own troops].

Question is: why not just attach a whatever-KV potential to a spark-plug in a mini-dish and knock out the target's electronics instead? Should be easier--of course, that'd have little effect upon an incoming shell/bomb once the fuse has been armed.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[linzeal]

What is more cruel a bullet in the stomach which can take days to die from or you are missing your head and on the way to the ground your body is sawed in half? I mean if people want to kill people this is a damn efficient way to go about it.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[Anonymous DWord]

Here's a six year old report [hrw.org] on blinding weapons of the US military.

Re:This just in!

[bloggins02]

This would be true if it weren't for the fact that in what we sane people call "the real world", peace doesn't come from asking the enemy nicely. I'm sure in whatever world you live in all problems can be resolved by saying "Hey, if we talked about it we could live in peace and understanding." I'd love to live in that place, but that pesky little thing called reality doesn't seem to want me there.

When diplomacy fits, use it, but do I have to rape your wife and murder your your children before you decide maybe it would be a good idea to fight back?

More handy links

[mbessey]

Most of these haven't been updated in a while, though...

The US Army's HEL sites:

http://www.smdc.army.mil/FactSheets/THEL.html [army.mil]

http://www.smdc.army.mil/FactSheets/HELSTF.html [army.mil]
TRW's contribution:

http://www.trw.com/thel [trw.com]

-Mark

Get real

[writertype]

I can buy an automated projectile system to shoot down guided missiles, but a laser? To shoot down artillery shells? Can you imagine the engineering required to lock onto said shell and the laser power to detonate it? What about smoke or other haze?

And let's not even consider making this a "personal" means of defense.

Sounds like the old warbirds over at Fox are lobbying for a larger military budget.

Throw ball bearings very, very fast

[leonbrooks]

A standard truck-mounted generator with a couple of little railguns on the roof would do the same job (by flinging a bucketful of ballbearings at the target in a second or so) for a lot less $$$ and would also make a really neat ripping noise when it fired.

Not as easy to steer as a laser but extremely difficult to defend against. Good for anti-aircraft as well, since colanders have poor aerodynamics. Anything not detonated by ball bearings doing many kilometers a second would be thrown well off course. Not that this is not necessarily an advantage, since certain nations are reknowned for just carpeting the target area with ordinance and knocking something off course might make it more accurate.

futurism

[xah]

The article focuses to its detriment on lasers as a defensive armament. They are more likely to be used offensively, if history is any judge.

If the article is right, and the energy supply for these lasers continue to be expensive, bulky chemicals, we may see a return to the battlefields of the 19th century, when artillery, and not air power, was most critical to warfare. Supply lines would become more important than they are today. Battlefield tactics would have to change.

Why wouldn't they mount lasers on aircraft? Maybe the chemicals are too heavy?

Re:Also under development:

[Nindalf]

Mirror coating, etc. doesn't make a difference.

To be blunt, this is wrong. I do agree, however, that just polishing up a stainless steel shell until you can shave in front of it probably won't make enough difference. Most mirrors don't reflect nearly enough light.

On the other hand, such powerful lasers are hard to make and very expensive. It would be tempting to make them just barely strong enough to work against existing designs which have no defense against such countermeasures. If a spinning (or randomly tumbling), mirrored shell, can cut down the rate of heating by something like 30%, and there's some extra heat-shielding inside, it might be enough to survive.

All kidding aside, you also can't rule out, as I said, revolutionary new developments in mirrored armor. I mean, if there was no way to deflect the beam, there would be no way to generate or aim it!

BTW, Tom Clancy is a novelist, not a physicist. His entire livelihood is sounding plausible about things he doesn't really understand.

Besides, in the battle between bigger armor and bigger guns, the guns always win eventually.

Ah, but which is which? This is an odd historical precedent to apply in favor of a defense mechanism.

Sorry, it's patented

[hmckee]

The use of a laser to get a cat to move. [legamedia.net] is already patented. You may have to come up with a new idea.

-harry

Is anyone else wondering.....?

[moonboy]

Is anyone else wondering why we are spending so much money on the missile defense system? This seems to have solved the problem of missile defense much more elegantly (and more cost effectively?) Maybe I'm missing something.

Re:This raises some frightening questions

[cancrman]

Yea, seriously. At least if you get shot with a .50cal you're pretty much dead and not in a lot of pain. Instead of, say, getting shot in the stomach with a 9mm. That would hurt like a bitch.

Yes, the are that delicate - to a laser

[Un1v4c]

As an ex artillery guy, I can speak from experience.
A standard 155mm HE round weighs in at 103lbs. The shell itself is nothing but steel with a grid-like pattern etched on the inside (for shrapnel).
The thickness varies from about 1/2" to 3/4" thick (at the bottom next to the propellant). Other than that, they're just filled with gunpowder.
At the tip is a fuse (there are too many types to list), and just below that is a small bag of quick burning powder to kick things off.
If this laser is heating things up as hot as they say, that baby is going to blow pretty quick no matter where it's hit.

I have collection of shrapnel I picked up at the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, that's where I got a look at the innards.

As a side note, by themselves they're not all that fragile. I dropped one on my foot (almost everyone does at some point), and apart from the two seconds of deafening silence following, we loaded it up and it was 12 miles away in a few seconds. Then I proceeded to scream like a bitch. Big toe was smashed something awful.

Basis for Future Weapons...

[masteroveride]

Just a quick question... how much interference does our atmosphere create for these lasers? Now the reason I ask is that everyone is talking about how this is the basis of the starwars project and all. But what would the difference in intensity of the beam would a laser at sea level and a laser at geosynchronous orbit? eh, food for though...

Treaties

[Convergence]

Weapons treaties are there to be ignored by a the parties signing them.

THink of it, you sign a treat to (say) not research biological weapons for offensive purposes, say, like Russia did. Then, you secretly violate the treaty, and now you have weapon the other side doesn't have. Its happened in the past, it'll happen in the future.

Weapons treaties only penalize the honest countries. Dishonest countries won't care. At least we actually do (for the most part) obey our treaties.

Re:are artillery shells that delicate?

[haggar]

Delicate or not, this system is in use right now as we blabber on /.

I have actually read, about a year ago, an article about THAL and how it's used on the border with Lebanon, to defend against katyusha shells and other missiles. I saw pictures of the laser turrets. Pretty neat stuff, actually.

There's LOTS of stuff you can burn...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

"These lasers also have a drawback--their energy comes from large tanks of industrial chemicals, which have to be mixed until they glow, like an outsize high-school science project. And they are so bulky that one weapon fills a large aircraft, or a small building. "

Does this jive with the fox news article?

Yes. But it doesn't tell the whole story.

The lasers they're talking about are spinoffs of the Star Wars missile defense system. They had to get a LOT of energy into a beam quickly, to shoot down missiles while still in space, or to bounce off a mirror in space to get them on their way up. One shot, one dead nuke, so cost wasn't much of an object.

Neither was portability: You had either a fortified underground bunker as big as you wanted, or a satellite in zero-G.

So they did something very strong, effective, big, and expensive.

But lasers are EASY. Excluding superradiants (which are easier, if you've got the materials) all you need is a couple of well-alligned mirrors, one of 'em slightly leaky, with an "inverted population amplification light amplification medium" between them.

For "inverted population light amplification medium" read "smoke from a fire".

The medium must have the following characteristics:

It has a state transistion (an "excited state", a "ground state" or less-excited state, and an allowed transition between them) with an energy difference corresponding to a usefully energetic photon.

It must have significantly more of its atoms or molecules in the more-excited state than in the less-excited state. (This is the "inverted population" part.)

It must have ENOUGH of a surplus of more-excited particles to produce a usable amount of power if you extracted the energy difference by de-exciting enough that you're down to 50/50 (or de-exciting them all if there's a further transition that drains the less-excited state).

It must be transparent and reasonably uniform (i.e. non-distorting) at the light frequency corresponding to the state transition.

When you burn darn near ANYTHING the resulting molecules start out excited. If they meet the other criteria you've got a suitable medium for a chemically-pumped laser.

Burn a suitable fuel in a long, thin, rocket flame and run the exhaust at right angles between the pair of mirrors. You'll have a laser beam coming out as long as the flame lasts. Chose the right material and a large fraction of what would have been the heat of combustion ends up in the laser beam.

Now there are some fancy and deadly fuels (fluorine comes to mind) that make an exhaust where the bulk of the energy can be extracted by a single transition. This is nice and efficient. And you don't want to be ANYWHERE NEAR them when in use, due to the toxic nature of the exhaust. So if you're going to be shooting down a nuke from a fort in the desert they're fine.

But there are LOTS of others that are simpler, and might be more suitable for a battlefield.

I expect that eventually we'll see a chemically-pumped laser rifle or pistol, about the same size as a normal rifle or pistol, with an optical cavity where the barrel would be, powered by cartridges of solid fuel that are fed by a mechanism similar to the one that feeds cartridges consisting of case/primer/powder/bullet.

Math makes this hard against artillery

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say you're shooting a battalion 3 round mission, or 18 howitzers x three rounds each, on a time-on-target mission. The first 18 rounds are coming in all at once, from different locations. The next 24 rounds come in as fast as the gun bunnies make them go, and should be off in a minute. That's a lot of shooting.

Now, let's say it's not anything fancy, but straight HE/Quick. These things detonate when they impact, and there's not a lot to destroy or mess up on them. If it's a VT fuze, it has a cool radar in it (they detonate 7 meters above the dirt), so it has some electronics. But who thinks you are going to keep the laser on the tip of the round long enough to damage that?

Oh, and since it's light, unless you throw in some sort of Star Trek phase modulation, the enemy will develop a filter so it can see the beams shooting up. A little triangulation, and you'll see a couple batteries of MLRS rockets coming in fast. Very expensive rubble.

Re:Uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

What you didnt see in Fox (or any US news)
was how easy it was to fool the technology when the US decided to test their toys and bomb Yugoslavia for 3 straight months.

The funniest thing I ever saw was when it was all over. They had BBC there when the Yugoslavian MIGs where taken out of ground and that one scene with the mountain side opening up and dozens of planes flying out was priceless.

The graphite bombs were rendered almost useless by applying hair spray on wires. Microwaves in old tanks were used as decoys....it was getting funnier by the minute (well, except for the civilians they were trying to kill but those only matter when its US civilians)

Sorry Sergeant, your platoon cant go out, we have to get the latest security patch first...

yeah....that inspires confidence.

Like that German UN relief guy said on Swiss TV, "The only people who believe in the accuracy of smart bombs adn such technological wizardry are being fed the clips straight from the Pentagon. Once you've been on the ground for a few of these things (bombings), you realize how totally imprecise they are. Unless, of course, they aimed there in the first place!"

Keep watching Fox or better yet, CNN....
best fiction on TV.

Re:They already had a design like this

[markmoss]

It was an automated system that aimed for the eyes, but got cancelled due to bad press. Oh my. That would certainly upset those people that imagine war can be made more humane... But the reality is, to fight a war you either kill people or wound them. Wounding is more effective, because then their buddies have to stop fighting and take care of them. A laser in the eyes would be very, very effective in this way. I think, unlike most non-fatal gunfire wounds, laser blindness would be quite permanent. If we deployed this system, the next country to get crossways of us would wind up with their streets full of blind beggars afterwards -- a hell of a drag on a third world economy, and assurance that what happens when you p*ss off America would be remembered for a century, at least. Is that good or bad???