Boeing 12,000lb Chemical Laser Set to Fry Targets

coondoggie writes "Boeing this week completed work on and installed a 12,000-pound chemical laser in a C-130H aircraft. Boeing's Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) which is being developed for the Department of Defense, will destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage, supporting missions on the battlefield and in urban operations."

Re:Passive Defence

[jettoblack]

No mirror reflects 100% of what hits it. Even if it only absorbs 0.1% of the beam, with this much energy the mirror will quickly deform or burn and its reflectivity will drop.

Re:Questions

[Ihlosi]

1) How do they solve the problem with Bremsstrahlung?

What problem ?

Bremsstrahlung occurrs when electrons are decelerated. Does this laser use some kind of electron accelerator ?

Re:Passive Defence

[Arabani]

Furthermore, the output beam is infrared, which your average mirror or shiny metal isn't going to reflect. The other problem with shiny surfaces: how do you keep them shiny for long periods of time?

Re:Delivery vehicles

[Hal_Porter]

"Bomber" Harris in WW2 tried to destroy Nazi Germany by air bombing of cities.

Actually, in his autobiography, Albert Speer said of a raid on Hamburg that destroyed most of Germany's ball bearing factories "if they had kept bombing for another two days, the war would have been over". The problem with Harris is that he was trying to destroy german civillian morale which is both morally wrong and non workable. If the Allies had been targetting choke points in the German war economy it could have caused a very quick collapse. Ball bearings are a special case. The factories take a long time but are very easy to destroy because they apparently used flammable oil baths. And armoured vehicles need regular spare parts that need ball bearings. All of this information was available to the Allies, it's almost common sense.

Personally I would have threatened to bomb Swedish ball bearing factories too, if they continued to sell to the Nazis.

And it's very noticable that bombing gradually crippled the german war economy despite the targetting being wrong. When you read about the development of V2s for example, it's quite clear that the German economy at the end of the war was chronically short of everything, mainly because of bombed out factories and railways. Same with all of the Nazi weapons work near the end of the war.

Re:Passive Defence

[physicsphairy]

Actually, mirrors *can* reflect 100%... of a particular wavelength. And it just so happens that lasers are monochromatic in nature.

However, between two lasers of discrepant frequencies, you could pretty much guarantee that one of them would be effective. So defense is possible in the theoretical sense, but not the practical sense.

Re:Questions

[trip11]

1) How do they solve the problem with Bremsstrahlung?

What problem ?

Bremsstrahlung occurrs when electrons are decelerated. Does this laser use some kind of electron accelerator ?

But if a photon has more than a few MeV of energy it can split to an electron-positron pair which can brem, throwing off more photons which will split etc etc. Until the individual bits run out of the energy needed to form more particles. In other words, EM showering. However this requires VERY high energy photons (gamma rays). My understanding was that a laser like this achieves it's power by using lots of photons (in the IR range), so it won't have a problem with Bremsstrahlung at all. Thermal blooming on the other hand is probably a bigger issue. As the laser heats the air, it causes the water vapor to convect which acts as a lens and defocuses the beam.

Re:Cool but...

[Hal_Porter]

No. It wouldn't. All of those countries live right next door to their enemies. An ICBM would hardly be necessary to inflict devastating damage upon any of them.

Yeah but if you're China, North Korea or Iran then your best idea is to get the US to abandon your chosen victim. And the best way to do that is to threaten the US directly. My argument is that if the US wants to have a moral foreign policy of protecting small democracies from large dictatorships they need to neutralise China's nukes.

China has a big enough army to march over Taiwan and Japan simultaneously, and would very likely win by sheer numbers alone without much of a fight.

Well if the US wasn't protecting Taiwan they would likely have tried. In fact Clinton had to send aircraft carriers to show that they US was still protecting Taiwan. But numbers aren't everything - big dictatorships frequently lose wars against small democracies due to overconfidence and bad planning.

Japan is a tougher target than most people realise. They have 40-100 tonnes of plutonium and a vast industial base. If the US abandoned them, they could build enough nukes to level China quite quickly.

Re:I'm guessing you're American

[Hal_Porter]

Why don't you go there and find out then? I have been there and I say most people in Taiwan and Israel. Japanese people tend to see US protection as a necessary evil, since it allows them to have a pacifist foreign policy.

All of them have tried to get nukes in case they US ceases to support them. Taiwan was prevented by the US (so I was told when I was there), Japan has renounced nukes but built up a huge stockpile of plutonium and Israel is an undeclared nuclear power.

Taiwanese people talked fondly of the days when US troops were stationed there 'to protect Taiwan'.

Re:I'm guessing you're American

[Antity-H]

Some of them at least believe in peace and are trying to make it happen. Try this :
http://www.israelipalestinianproject.com/ [israelipal...roject.com]

Optimism is good for morale, cheer up!

Re:I'm guessing you're American

[dotancohen]

I'm secured by the fact that we have a tough allay in America. Although, I do believe that much of the hostility towards Israel today (not 50 years ago) is because of our close ties to the US. Were those ties to be severed, we would be more vulnerable, but we would be less threatened. Real, God-fearing Muslims (not extremists) are opposed, more than anything else, to the invasion of American culture. Israel is a vehicle for that invasion. Real, God-fearing Muslims (not extremists) want to protect their children from exposure to drugs, prostitutes, and all else that is hallmark of American media. And believe it or not, most of Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt is of the real, God-fearing Muslims that I describe. Syria and the Muslim Lebanese are a different story, however.

Re:Cool but...

[Alioth]

No. Systems like this target the weapon in its boost phase. Hopefully, the wreckage of the missile + warheads simply falls back onto the territory of whoever tried to launch them too.

you want a real korean input?

[ByKai]

I don't know about the japanese or the taiwanese, but from a south korean point of view, the ability to shoot down ICBMs is not worth a single penny to spend on. Currently, there are about 11 thousand cannons (yes cannons, not missiles) pointed at Seoul, the Capital city of Korea. In case of a war breakout, these cannons will completely wipe out Seoul within 15 minutes. Unlike missiles, the cannons can't be stopped. It takes 5 minutes to wipe out the korean army guarding the border, and it will take us 15 minutes to send out bombers to target the cannon sites. So, shooting down ICBMs come into play after my capital's covered in fire, and my people are killed. Only the americans would be excited to have an excuse to attack north korea and use my country as their battle ground. Shooting down ICBMs is really the least of concern. But, I sure do hope you americans have something to shoot down ICBMs with nuclear warheads. Because if those things get launched, they are not landing on us. They are landing on you.

Wrong

[spun]

My mom works for one of the divisions of Boeing that makes lasers like this. I don't know if they make this one, because she can't really talk about it. But I do know a little about the capabilities and accuracy of some of the systems, you know, "hypothetically, if they had something like that, what could it do?" Let's just say that one of the test systems was a servo that could keep a laser spot painted on a ping pong ball while people were playing.

Re:Cool but...

[mikeee]

There's a minor technical problem with marching that army from China to Taiwan or Japan...

China's navy is probably a match for Taiwan's; Japan's is clearly superior, and the US Navy is on a whole other scale.

Re:No collateral damage? Umm ..

[darkmeridian]

The AC-130U Spectre (code-named "Spooky") has been a very accurate weapon of war. It flies really slowly, which increases its accuracy when firing on ground targets. It can loiter over its target for hours. The latest versions of the aircraft have gyro-stabilized mounts for its weapons, and advanced night optics that can see through smoke grenades. Its radar can track the 40mm and 105mm shells it shoots and feedback the information to the aircraft to adjust the aim of later rounds. The aircraft can accurately attack two targets up to a kilometer away at the same time. Accurately aiming a weapon fired from a AC-130U at a ground target has been a problem that has been adequately addressed for some time already.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/ac-130.htm [fas.org]