Laser Cannons Coming to an F-16 Near You 757
dxprog writes "Reuters is reporting that the US Pentagon is designing a laser cannon that's small enough to fit onto a fighter jet yet powerful enough to knock out a missile. "The High Energy Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS), being designed by the Pentagon's central research and development agency, will weigh just 750 kg (1,650 lb) and measures the size of a large fridge." Now all we need to do is make fighter jets space worthy for that true Star Wars feel."
That's about blinding (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Forbidden? (Score:5, Informative)
"Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons prohibits the use of laser weapons specifically designed to cause permanent blindness to the naked eye (or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices). Countries that are party to the Convention and Protocols will not transfer such weapons to any country or other entity."
So I guess to conform to the Geneva Convention, the lasers will just require the same stickers that they put on childrens water guns: "Point Away From Face"
Re:Great... (Score:3, Informative)
Number Two: Sea Bass.
Dr. Evil: [pause] Right.
Number Two: They're mutated sea bass.
Dr. Evil: Are they ill tempered?
Number Two: Absolutely.
Dr. Evil: Oh well, that's a start.
Re:Forbidden? (Score:3, Informative)
You may be thinking about weapons in space, if I remember correctly the USA and Russia agreed not to militarise space, which essentially meant no orbitting satellites with either lasers on them or nuclear missiles. (it may have taken kinetic weapons into account too, i'm not sure on that)
Re:Forbidden? (Score:5, Informative)
source http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2585 [newscientist.com]
Link to DARPA (Score:4, Informative)
Re:HELLADS? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Missile defense (Score:4, Informative)
You ever felt how hot a mirror gets in sunlight? Well, a lot of the light that hits it is converted to heat. Even a highly mirrored surface would get incredibly hot under a 150Kw laser beam. A missle is essentially a flying tube under a lot of stress, so a small non-uniform structural weakness would have the capability to tear it apart if it was travelling at high speed....
Battery system? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I seem to recall reading (albeit in a 'Popular Mechanics' or some such light fare) about the larger all-liquid versions. These things apparently derived their power from a chemical reaction, the reactants being stored in big tanks. I believe that was a big reason for needing a 747-sized platform.
Re:Link to DARPA (Score:4, Informative)
From a DARPA PDF:
"To help arm tactical platforms, the High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS)
program is developing a new high energy laser (HEL) tactical weapon system whose unique
cooling system might allow the system to be 10 times lighter, significantly smaller, and
approximately half the cost of current developmental HEL systems.
The HELLADS design goal of less than 5 kilograms per kilowatt would enable, for the first time,
high energy lasers that could be integrated into several air and ground tactical platforms,
including unmanned combat armed rotorcraft (UCAR), UCAV, Predator B, the F/A-18, and
future ground combat systems. HELLADS could protect fixed installations or population centers
from attack, patrol a border, or patrol a demilitarized zone with the capability to react to hostile
actions and engage tactical missiles, rockets, or artillery at the speed of light."
This is from 2003, so this has been steeping for a while... is it soup yet?
Re:HELLADS? (Score:5, Informative)
"Liquid". HELLADS actually stands for "High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System", despite what Yahoo! would have you believe. Maybe Yahoo! are employing ex-Slashdot editors now; they do seem to copy everything else Google does... ;)
JSF (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Forbidden? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Power Source? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Anti-satellite? (Score:5, Informative)
The f 16 will be above of >90% of the athmosphere at the ceiling hight, so absorbtion in the atmosphere isnt that big of a problem. But divergence is.
No matter what movies will make you believe, lasers arent perfectly parallel beams of light.
Not to go too much into the details, a laser needs to have a large diameter to have a low divergence (hence the used large telecopes for the moon reflection experiments: a 5m laser diameter here will be a few km on the moon, wile a few mm here will be 100s of km there
I cant see how a jet-fighter mounted version would fullfill the requirements. The lens crossection has to be small enough not to fuck up the aerodynamics of the supersonic plane, and you cant just put a streamlines glasshood in front of hit because of the high pulse energies...
So you could get some light onto a satellite, but not enough to knock it out...
Otoh, I think it could be strong enough to permanently blind the CCDs of enemy spy-sats...
Re:Missile defense (Score:5, Informative)
Do you actually have some evidence to back that claim up? I thought not. The people who come up with ideas like military lasers are actually smart enough to have thought of things like mirrored surfaces on enemy missiles. They wouldn't have put all that time, effort, and money into the project if it could be stopped by such a simple countermeasure.
Common mirrors are not 100% efficient; they absorb some fraction of the light rather than reflecting it. The actual reflecting layer is also quite thin. The small amount of absorbance is enough that a high energy laser will destroy an ordinary mirror very quickly, at which point the remaining energy is absorbed efficiently. The kind of extremely efficient mirrors needed for ultra-high power lasers are fantastically expensive and fragile enough that it's hopelessly impractical to try putting one on military gear.
747 ABL (Score:2, Informative)
Latest article I could dig up:
http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/business/industri
Website about the ABL:
http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/abl/ [airforce-technology.com]
Re:Missile defense (Score:5, Informative)
The reason for using very high-power lasers is the same they prefer to use hyper-kinetic missiles: at some energy density, no plausible molecular material has sufficient bond strength to withstand it, effectively obsoleting armor.
Re:Nice, (Score:3, Informative)
Depending on its uses and where it's aimed, there's a good chance that the beam will simply fire off hamrlessly into space, presuming that enough of it makes it through the atmosphere to be able to do damage. If it misses and hits the ground or sea... Well, that could be problematic, depending on what it hits. Flash fires, steam explosions, and serious sunburns are just a few things that I can think of.
Re:Forbidden? (Score:5, Informative)
The M2 is a retired weapon, and pretty much has been since the 60s. The AR15/M16 was adopted to replace it then. It wasn't really accepted until the 80s, however.
The 5.56mm NATO round is also used by the Steyr AUG, FN FNC, British L85, FAMAS F1, HK23/53, the Israeli SAW and TAR21, several Berettas, and the standard police rifle (Remington 7615). There are quite a few more than those, though, these are just popular.
The older 7.62mm NATO round was used in a lot of weapons, including the M14, M60, Kar-98k, and the Winchester model 70. It was very popular, as well.
The M16 isn't designed to maim, but they are easy to do this with. They are rather accurate, have a good range, and don't do full auto. One of the major design goals of the platform was penetration of combat helmets at range. It was designed to kill, like most other modern firearms. The general exception to that rule is for things like PDWs, where the goal is defense of wielder. They will still kill very effectively, but you're aiming a lot less.
"M16s are not designed to kill"... (Score:2, Informative)
The typical claim is that SS109 bullets are dynamically unstable in flesh, though they are stable in flight, so they begin to tumble upon entry, doing lots of damage along the way.
Personally, I find this claim doubtful, though I have no hard evidence one way or the other.
Re:what if it misses its target? (Score:3, Informative)
Nice armchair logic. So when is a plasma torch no longer a plasma torch? When it no longer has the characteristics of a plasma torch. If you divide the energy output by the distance it covers while going mach 2 you get a really small amount of energy per square inch that doesn't last hardly any time at all for any given patch. Could you construct something that would still cause damage? Sure, but that would be orders of magnitude greater than the jet mounted laser described here.
This is the same reason you can whisk your fingers over an open flame and not feel anything but slight warmth. Hold it there for a second though and your skin will start to blister and burn.
But of course your suggested speed of mach2 is only if it happens to be shooting straight down, any angle and the speed of the laser on whatever it hits will be much slower, although the increased distance mitigates the slower speed for the most part.
Re:HELLADS? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Forbidden? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:liquid vs. chemical vs. solid state. (Score:2, Informative)
Solid state lasers are the one with heat problems. I.e. with supplied electricity at 10% efficiency, (like wall power), that's 90% heat that has to be put somewhere. So for a 150 kW laser, that amounts to 1350 kW of heat. That is a lot of heat to deal with on a fighter plane.
I would also like to know what they mean by a "liquid" laser. I used to work in the laser weapon industry, and I have never heard of such a thing.
These Aren't Laser Cannons (Score:5, Informative)
Lasers were covered and I had a brief chat with the Air Force representative after the briefing.
The USAF is sticking lasers in 747's and the army is testing ground-based systems.
The aircraft-based lasers cannot inflict any physical damage. They are powerful enough to scramble electronics. The goal is to target a missile shortly after it is launched so that its guidance systems fail and the missile lands in the enemy's territory, never reaching its target (us). Their goal is to use this as a powerful deterrent by making it very risky to launch missiles.
The ground-based systems can inflict physical damage, but are nowhere close to being airborne (they're much too massive). They are, as I was told in July, still "in the lab." (I later saw a full-page ad in "The Hill," a capitol hill newspaper, promoting Lockheed Martin's ground-based laser systems as though they were about ready. I'll trust the USAF officer's discussion more than the corporate advertisement.)
A key misunderstanding of lasers is in the kind of damage they inflict. Lasers will poke holes through objects but do not cause a target's destruction or explosion -- however, shooting through or over-heating a target's fuel tank will cause an explosion. And of course, to re-emphasize my major point, we don't have airborne laser cannons --- their goal is basically to inflict a kind of EMP-like damage to missiles. I asked about getting these things into UAV's and was told they'd love to do it, but don't expect anything for another 50 years.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Forbidden? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Forbidden? (Score:3, Informative)
At that kind of range, the only way to hit a small, say 6-12 inch target, is to be in the prone position, with proper hand position, proper eye relief to the scope/sight, and shooting between breaths AND heartbeats.
I was a Marine designated marksman and even after sniper school the biggest factor was still the shooter and not the accuracy of the weapon. There are VERY few people who possess the skill to shoot to the accuracy of a good "civilian" rifle.
JSF (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Power Source? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I hope not. Here is why. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Great... (Score:1, Informative)
Right. Photons have momentum, specifically E/c (the energy of the photon divided by c, everyone's favorite constant). I'm too lazy to calculate how much momentum would be carried by a 150KW pulse, but it should be a pretty hefty kick in the teeth.
Amusingly enough, the people arguing for highly-polished mirrored surfaces on the incoming missiles are actually making it worse for the missile: reflecting the incoming pulse can up to double the shock, because the missile has to supply the momentum of the outgoing photons.
Re:Nice, (Score:3, Informative)
Incidentally, the ancient Romans did the same thing. The heads of their pilae were made of soft iron so they would bend when the hit anything hard. That way the enemy couldn't pick them up and throw them back if they missed.
Re:Forbidden? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Power Source? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Power Source? (Score:2, Informative)
Okay......your math here sounds good, but I think that you overlook a few points.
Your formula uses an arbitrary value of 400mph to get the horsepower from. The top speed of an F-16 is mach 2, or about 1524mph at sea level. Less at high altitudes. Using this speed we would get almost four times the power output.
However, given the nature of a jet engine, its thrust will decrease as airspeed increases, since it's thrust is based on throwing air out a nozzle. So we can assume that the engine will not be putting out maximum thrust at maximum speed.
From the Pratt and Whitney site [pratt-whitney.com], the thrust range of an F100-PW-220 engine is 23,770 - 29,160 lbs of force. Assuming (and this is a big assumption) that at top speed the engine is putting out minimum thrust, then solving the equation we get:
(23,770 x 1524)/550 x 1.47 = 96,821
So we get 96,821 HP at top speed. I do find it hard to believe that this much power is needed to overcome drag on an f-16 at mach 2, but who knows.....
-zRe:4 out of 5 swinging dicks recommend... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Forbidden? (Score:4, Informative)
When "Star Wars" was heavily funded in the '80s, the Russians did a little bit of investigation into what it would take to thwart both kinetic vehicles and energy weapons. The actually deployed the Topol-M [armscontrol.org], which has a lower arc and "jinks" in-flight, makeing it almost impossible to hit with another missile. It takes so long for your interceptor to get to the intercept point that a really tiny course deflection on the part of the target means you'll miss by a hundred miles.
On the energy side they came up with ablatives (which could be refitted to existing missiles) with, literally, a twist.
Since you have to hold the laser on a specific spot for some length of time (governed by the power of the laser, atmospherics, etc), you could significantly enhance the survivability of the missile by having it slowly rotate during the launch phase. We're talkin' about a reasonably simple software change that makes it 10x harder to shoot down with a laser.
Re:OTOH (Score:3, Informative)
Ah! Now I understand why the US is trying to force it's RI/MPAA and copyright/patent laws on Europe!
"europe used to be as bad as the middle east."
True...but that was in the 18th century...about when you had some unrest too.
"a powerfull laser could also make air warfare obsolete."
Yup...just like missiles made dogfighting obsolete.
"[x] is actualy saving lives because it is incredibly more accurate then technology used 60 years ago."
Hoo-boy, do you have an awfully simplistic and very much incorrect view of the world. History has taught us that technology makes for BLOODIER wars instead of les bloody wars. Look at what happened when the (cross)bow was introduced...or gunpowder, or cannon, or the machinegun. Bodycounts went up, as did civilian casualties.
And since you mention the last sixty years (conveniently discounting Hiroshima et al), what happened in Korea? Or Vietnam? Or the Balkan? HUGE civilian losses. Now tell me that "A lot of money spent on 'destrustion' is actualy saving lives because it is incredibly more accurate then technology used 60 years ago.".
That's just bullshit; have the balls to just tell it like it is: a lot of money spent on 'destruction' is actually spent on making technology more accurate so we can kill more people in a shorter span of time.
Re:let's just get this out of the way: (Score:2, Informative)
Some people used to think that making ICBM's reflective, or twirl in flight, would solve things...but it's kind of like pirouetting in front of a 50 caliber rifle.
Did you lift that analogy from Tom Clancy's book Cardinal of the Kremlin? Or did he lift it from the same source you did?
Re:Forbidden? (Score:3, Informative)
That's not entirely accurate. A dum dum bullet to my heart would kill me as easily as a FMJ bullet. It just so happens that unless you kill, you're likely to leave a maimed person. Same with lasers, it doesn't matter if the laser is strong enough to kill, if it means someone who managed to duck for cover, or everyone that was around and looked at its reflection go blind. While obviously an ideal that can never be met, the general idea is that weapons do one of two:
a) Kill, and you are dead
b) Injure, and you can be healed
not
c) Injure, and you are horribly maimed for life
Maiming weapons are those that do a lot of c), regardless of their purpose or capabilities otherwise. Dumdums are designed to kill, but maim horribly and are thus a maiming weapon. Something designed to fry electronics systems, but collaterally maim people (e.g. give them cancer or something of no military value in combat) is a maiming weapon.
Kjella
Re:I hope not. Here is why. (Score:2, Informative)
Note that a similar level of dehumanisation was often applied to peasants (or other cheap, expendable, troops) by their officers' training for a similar reason - they needed to be able to sacrifice large numbers of soldiers to carry the day. This is far less common now, since soldiers are expensive, both economically (it costs a lot to train them) and politically (the civilians seeing the body bags coming home was a major factor in America losing Vietnam).
[1] I don't know enough about modern methods to comment.
Re:Forbidden? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:let's just get this out of the way: (Score:3, Informative)
The laser is ultraviolet, thus it would allow an F22 to loiter in an area and attack ground targetes (Geneva conventions state that we can't attack people with lasers) However, we can cut the truck they're driving in half and thus detonating the fuel tank...
Not the F-22, or the F-16 (Score:5, Informative)
It is the F-35 or the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) that has a laser on the drawing boards.
The thing about a laser system like this is that it need a lot of electricity to run, and the vast majority of fighter aircraft do not produce the kind of juice needed to run one of these. The thing that makes the JSF capable of handling a system like this, is the way the VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) version of the aircraft was designed. Unlike previous VTOL fighters (AV-8 - Harrier and the Boeing consept for JSF) which use a series of nozels to redirect thrust the engine was already making to get vertical thrust, the Lockheed JSF (the one that was selected) has a secondary fan, driven by a shaft from the main engine and door that open above and below the fan.
Using the lift fan in the VTOL plane means that the engine in the CTOL (Conventional Take Off and Landing) and CV (Carrier Varient) has the capacity built in to drive a shaft, and the aircraft themselves have a lot of room right in front of the engine/behind the cockpit. This shaft can then drive a large generator to fire the laser.
I used to be an analyst at the company that builds the engines for the F-22 and the JSF. I worked on both programs.
The laser is ultraviolet, thus it would allow an F22 to loiter in an area and attack ground targetes (Geneva conventions state that we can't attack people with lasers) However, we can cut the truck they're driving in half and thus detonating the fuel tank...
Conventional fuels (gas/diesel) do not detonate unless they are vaporized, or atomised. They will burn pretty fast though.
Re:Forbidden? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know why the M2 is coming up in this thread about rifles, since it is a
See http://world.guns.ru/machine/mg04-e.htm [world.guns.ru] for details.
Re:I hope not. Here is why. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I hope not. Here is why. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:let's just get this out of the way: (Score:2, Informative)