Air Force Looks To Laser-Proof Its Weapons 347
slugo writes "This wired.com article has probably the coolest laser destruction video you have ever seen. The video shows the Israeli and US Air Force working on laser defense systems. The US Air Force is starting to look for ways to laser-proof its bombs and missiles — with spray-on coatings, no less. They think everyone is going to figure this laser thing out sometime and need a defense against what they are already very good at — shooting things out of the sky with a laser."
It's obvious, isn't it? (Score:4, Funny)
Not so obvious... (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't necessarily work as well as it does in scifi. Mirrors aren't perfect, and tend to gather things like dust, which reduce their efficiency even more. Not to mention different mirrors vary in their effectiveness with different spectrum lasers.
Shouldn't matter much, but at the high powers weaponized lasers operate at, they quickly destroy mirrors.
As for working on anti-laser stuff, well, it's best to keep three steps ahead militarily wise - tends to keep your casualties down.
Armour them and spin them. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problems with lasers is that the need to punch through the armour in the time they can stay on target.
#1. Spin them. If the laser cannot hit the same spot for X fragments of a second then it cannot burn through (unless you get a bigger laser).
#2. For when the enemy gets a bigger laser, you coat the missile in a nice insulator. Something like carbon.
So now the laser has to punch through the carbon armour before the missile rotates new armour into sight.
Re:Armour them and spin them. (Score:4, Funny)
Instead of carbon, how about that magical substance known as: Tin Foil.
If it's good enough to stop the beams entering my head, it should be good enough to stop the beams from entering missiles!
Re:Blimp (Score:4, Funny)
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The pistol shrimp has an excellent weapon that reaches the temperature of the sun. We could use bio-mimicry to create a nice weapon against missiles.
Yes, once you get the missile underwater, it'll be really easy to zap them this way. Heck, getting it underwater might be enough to neutralize it, unless you're dealing with a torpedo.
On land, this won't work for several reasons. One of them is the really slow speed of sound air. Good luck trying to hit anything moving faster than your sonic shockwave.
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Which of course explains the denial surrounding the project to raise sea levels so all warfighting has to occur underwater. Discovered by meddling climatologists, the entire plan was put into jeapordy, so a massive media campaign was mounted to discredit them.
I'm suprised you've not heard about it.
Re:Armour them and spin them. (Score:5, Informative)
It is all about how much energy you want to get on target, the nature of that energy and the affect you wish to achieve.
So, minimal amount of energy solution, target CPUs and get all the 0s to be 1s and those smart weapons go stupid and don't target targeting anything ;D.
Re:Armour them and spin them. (Score:5, Funny)
target CPUs and get all the 0s to be 1s and those smart weapons go stupid and don't target targeting anything
I see they got to yours already.
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So it all depends on the type of particle you a firing at the target, whether it passes right through the armour to target the components you a particularly after...
X-ray or gamma-ray lasers could do this, but there are some (severe) practical problems involved. An atom emitting an x-ray photon tends to recoil a bit, so the photon has only part of the energy from the transition - not enough to cause emission of another photon from the next atom, as happens in a laser. And even if you did produce an X-ray laser beam - how would you focus it? Mirrors and lenses don't work that well with x-rays.
I'd think the obvious choice would be to go with a longer wavelength, as opposed to a shorter one. If your laser has a wavelength longer than the reflective surface's thickness (say 1 cm, microwaves), it will pass right through it like it was never there.
Re:Armour them and spin them. (Score:4, Informative)
Photons don't carry a charge. You'll have better luck trying to focus them with gravitation. All you need is a black hole of the appropriate mass.
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Yes, but anything of the appropriate mass that isn't a black hole is going to be _way_ too large to focus a laser beam. It's just going to block it instead.
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Re:Armour them and spin them. (Score:5, Insightful)
yup the 81MM mortar is a smoothebore but it's round has fins at the base that are canted so the projo spins in flight. 81's are slow too, after you drop one down the tube you can look up and see the round about 100m down range and watch it going until after it's a little past it's max ordinate and it disappears. Howitzers have a rifled barrel so the round spins. All artillery rounds that I know of have a fuse that doesn't arm until the round has spun so many times, this prevents most barrel bursts. Shooting one 81 doesn't impress me, shooting 3 fired in a ripple that's getting interesting; shoot down 3 fired at the same time I'm impressed, but remember real world is going to be somebody see all the loud IR energy pointing at the laser source and they are likely to answer with 3 81mm;s in flight, backed up by three salvos of 3 60mm mortars all taking the high trajectory while 6 more 155mm howitzer rounds are coming in low and fast.
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As effective as that strategy may be, it does raise the cost of the mission quite a bit.
With any luck, it will keep the US gov't from wiping entire villages on the cheap 'just to be sure' and moving on to precision strikes.
The US has the means to fight a quick and precise war with very little collateral damage (laser/GPS guided precision weaponry).
They just prefer to use (cheap) unguided weapons, which might miss a bit but makes up for it with a bigger bang.
Re:Armour them and spin them. (Score:4, Insightful)
As effective as that strategy may be, it does raise the cost of the mission quite a bit.
With any luck, it will keep the US gov't from wiping entire villages on the cheap 'just to be sure' and moving on to precision strikes.
Are you talking about enemy forces using laser weapons against US ones? Because if so one valid solution would be saturation - you can only shoot down so many bombs/rockets/morters.
So having an effective anti-munition laser is probably going to encourage saturation attacks - with the attendant misses, whether by failed guidance, poor aim, and munitions still armed that lose guidance due to the laser.
They just prefer to use (cheap) unguided weapons, which might miss a bit but makes up for it with a bigger bang.
Uh, no. We use the guided stuff all the time, matter of fact I believe that the majority of the bombs we drop today a precision guided. The guidance system doesn't always work, but we try. Even our dumb bombs are dropped on a rather precise basis today.
As for bigger bang - even the MOAB is technically guided, the difference between a 'dumb' unguided bomb and a guided one is simply the addition of a guidance package.
And, quite frequently, the guidance package costs more than the bomb.
Laser defenses work better against opponents with relatively limited assets - palestinians, for example, can only get ahold of so many rockets. They currently choose to mostly stutter them out, producing a more or less constant presence, effect on israeli morale. The damage to life/infrastructure is actually pretty insignificant. The same deal with insurgents/terrorists in Iraq/Afghanistan.
With some laser systems, a soletary rocket becomes a non-issue, even three-six might be handled by a single laser depending on the laser's attributes. So they'd have to switch to mass attacks. Morters and rockets don't need expensive, hard to hide tubes like artillery does, so that's handlable, but having to warehouse rockets until you get enough to penetrate the laser defenses in a meaningful way hurts in a number of ways.
First would be that both Isreal and US Forces have active intel agencies - the stockpile of rockets is more likely to be found and subsequently bombed or otherwise eliminated. This results in NO rocket attacks(bad for them). Second would be that many of these rockets are built on the cheap - their stability isn't the best, so stockpiling them for an effective attack increases the chance of an accident, again costing the terrorists/insurgents casualties and supplies. Third would be that while a trickle of rockets damages morale, it doesn't generally get Isreal or US Forces on the warpath. An attack of a couple hundred after no attacks for months might. By warpath I don't mean a flyby attack with a fighter or chopper. I'm talking about ground assault, massive retaliation.
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I was referring to the US having to fire 6 mortars instead of one, just to hit the target.
Apparently, I have been out of the loop for quite a while.
Last time I spoke someone 'from the field'(former marine), the US still had the tendency to 'soften up' hard targets.
(Not quite Geneva-endorsed, remember the surfing scene from Apocalypse now?)
Also, in the news, you see attacks where the US blew up the entire village,
just to blow up someone's house.
And he wasn't even home.
Apparently, the darn things are actually
Huh, I never knew the CIA was military... (Score:3, Informative)
The 'oops' you refer to isn't a military issue - it's a CIA issue. The CIA is NOT part of the military. It was CIA intel, CIA planes, CIA operators, CIA guidance.
When I consider military - I consider organizations under the DoD, the CIA isn't.
From that oops I can see a number of problems that would of had the US Military going 'hold up'.
A: Pakistani village - we're not at war with Pakistan(that I've heard), and lacking presidential authorization, we're not going to be shooting there.
B: Proportionality - I
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Re:Armour them and spin them. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's just what I was thinking. This gadget is easily defeated by simply saturating the target area with shells
Uh... If you're up against a technologically and materially superior enemy, saturating the airspace with artillery fire is not done "easily". It could be achived temporarily with good tactics, but in general just trying to do it is a very quick way to do a suicide. You see, a technologically superior enemy (ie. the one with the state-of-the-art defensive lasers) also has superior counter-artillery capability, and will wipe out your artillery as soon as it tires any kind of concentrated bombardment.
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As a guess, the artillery round was spinning as was at least one of the rockets engaged (visible in the video). Any sort of insulator means taking out either shell casing or explosive or both. Tends to make the round less lethal and may also mess with the ballistics. The other guy has to do this to all of his rounds since he doesn't know which ones will be engaged by a laser defense. So you end up making the other guy let's say 25% less effective everywhere because you have a laser defense at a few plac
Re:Not so obvious... (Score:5, Interesting)
a simple chrome coating can add a few seconds of protection for a shell, enough to prevent it from being destroyed before it reaches its target. Mirrors are vulnerable because the reflective surface is usually very thin and poorly heat-protected. Chrome a shell and the shell serves as a heat sink to dissipate most of the energy the chrome actually ends up absorbing in the first place. Chrome's a lot hardier than a few microns of silvering.
The lasers weren't blowing holes in the shells, they were cooking them. They aren't nearly as devastating as you might at first believe. Several of their demos required several seconds to detonate the incoming round. If you can buy another 3 seconds of time on a shell, that's probably enough to beat the laser. You only have to survive the heat from the time you are acquired to the time you pass out of view of the laser.
I'm more interested in how they are generating that much laser energy. Most lasers of that calibre are chemical, and I didn't see what I would expect of a chemical laser. Being able to engage several targets one after another rapidly is a big plus over traditional chemical lasers, which require large amounts of chemicals which have to be pumped in, triggered, and vented to be replaced with more chemicals to fire again. The large flying laser beds work this way and I don't even know if they can fire more than once without landing and refueling with more chemicals. (though they are certainly more powerful than the one demo'd here)
They also demo this in the desert every time I see it. No clouds, low humidity, line of sight. Guess what laser weapons don't do well in?
Re:Not so obvious... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Not so obvious... (Score:5, Informative)
Last time I saw a specification for the laser mounted in a modified 747, it had 30 seconds of firing capacity, and was capable of being turned on and off at will.
That 30 seconds was considered sufficient to engage something like 5-15 targets.
Environmental Impact (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Environmental Impact (Score:4, Insightful)
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In other words, only use it where you shit but not where you eat.
Re:Environmental Impact (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, only use it where you shit but not where you eat.
Do any American troops ever consider the fact that people might be LIVING in that regions after the war ends?
(That is what you are fighting for, isn't it, the right to live?)
This is one of the reasons the US is not welcomed with open arms when they're coming to liberate a country.
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Imagine this: You have a culture. Let's say, a western culture. You grew up with that culture and for some odd reason, you think it's good. Sure, it ain't perfect, but hey, what is? You have your believes, which may or may not include some sort of God, you have your financial and commercial system which you consider ok, if not good, and you have your country which you consider the best on this planet by default.
Now someone comes in and says that everything you do is wrong. You're forced to work for The Man
Re:Not so obvious... (Score:4, Informative)
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Stealthy weapons (actually stealthy weapons) shouldn't be tracked in the first place.
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Re:Not so obvious... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, our DOD ppl just can not think for themselves. Thank God we have you to point out the screw ups that we make. Or, you can think that perhaps not all is a fake:
Very quickly, deuterium was dropped in favor of hydrogen, since it is far less costly and more readily available. However, later it was realized that HF produces infrared radiation in the 2.6 to 3.1 m waveband, a region of the spectrum absorbed by water vapor in the atmosphere. Interest was renewed in DF, which produces radiation in the 3.7 to 4.2 m band, which passes easily through the atmosphere. [wikipedia.org]
THough to be fair, we still need a line of sight. Of course, that could be bounced off a sat.
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Bounced off a sat? How would you do that? You can't reflect this laser because it melts your mirror and it would be even worse if you could (just put the same material on the projectile).
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phenolic resins are pretty heat resistant or maybe something that breaks down endothermicly when irradiated with IR.
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As someone else mentioned, it's a deuterium fluoride chemical laser. It's the Tactical High Energy Laser [wikipedia.org] demo system from 2000 mounted on three semitrailer-sized trucks. It isn't a fieldable system; it's just a semi-mobile demo unit.
Israel has considerable interest in this thing, because they have fixed locations to defend against hostile neighbors who use unguided rockets, and they're in a desert with clear air. So they have the special case where this is a useful technology. The US military isn't that
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a simple chrome coating can add a few seconds of protection for a shell, enough to prevent it from being destroyed before it reaches its target.
Any chrome or metal coating added to a missile or shell that is designed to increase reflectivity, will (very likely) increase the radar reflectivity of the object. That may have the unintended consequence of making the object more susceptible to standard intercept missiles which use radar guidance. It will be difficult to defend against both defensive possibilities
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Guess what laser weapons don't do well in?
Outer Space? [wikipedia.org]
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Keep in mind that, as you makr your weapons more reflective, they are also more likely to show up on radar/lidar systems, making them easier to track.
Maybe they should consider making the rounds harder to track in the first place?
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That's why you need the friggin' sharks! (Score:5, Funny)
That's why you need sharks to go with your lasers. You think you can defend yourself with mirrors, do you? Don't you know that sharks like to eat shiny things?
Re:It's obvious, isn't it? (Score:4, Funny)
Cover everything in mirrors.
... preferably shaped like a disco ball, and also incorporating a loudspeaker system that plays a continuous loop of The Trampps "Burn baby burn, disco inferno"
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Why mirrors. Why not something that's retroreflective? I mean, if you can put 1% of your energy back on laser, and it looks like the laser and the sensor are part of the same piece, you could saturate the detector.
Your first missile, whatever, might end up destroyed, but you might succeed in blowing the CCD chips in the sensors.
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Sparkles man, just sprinkle with sparkles and faerie dust.
Don't tell me that they've finally. . . (Score:2)
Simple business plan. (Score:5, Funny)
1. Buy all the Krylon 'Chrome' spray paint.
2. Relabel it and sell it to the government as 'Anti-Laser Shielding'.
3. Profit!
Ha ha h- wait... there's a step #2. There's never a step #2. wtf
well that was a waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:well that was a waste of money (Score:4, Funny)
One of these days, Slashdot will post a story with the word 'laser' in the summary and people won't tag it "sharks"...
(probably because Slashdotters will all be too busy playing DNF to comment)
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Um. when did they get good at this? (Score:2)
Because, last I checked, they could only shoot things out of the sky with a laser when the trajectory, speed, etc was known. Otherwise, it was impossible to get the laser aligned to hit the very fast moving object quick enough.
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From the video in the article, it seems that the laser was acquiring targets all on its own. It could have been clever editing, but the thing looked like it was working quite well.
I'm not all that surprised, either; it's been quite a while since laser defense was in the public's attention. Plenty of time for technology to advance.
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sharks with frik'n lazer beams on their heads (Score:2)
It seems to slow for mortars. (Score:4, Informative)
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Counter
Battery
Fire
Re:It seems to slow for mortars. (Score:5, Interesting)
Three words: Counter Battery Fire :)
Heh. Reminds me of a story about a sort of makeshift counterbattery fire someone once told me. Small Lebanese army military camp in Lebanon during the civil war, and every afternoon they'd go outside and play volleyball. Local shia militia jerks noticed the pattern and started dropping mortar rounds in the middle of their volleyball game every day. Immediate patrols trying to find them turned up nothing, as the shia militia jerks simply drop a few rounds, picked up the mortar tube, kicked sand over the base plate, and ran. Tiring of this, the Lebanese army guys measured the angle of the holes at the bottom of the impact craters made by the fuse assemblies being blown into the ground and used trigonometry to figure out where the rounds probably came from--- about a quarter mile away. Based on the size of the rounds, they knew the shias weren't taking the heavy base plate with them when they ran. They went out there in the middle of the night and, sure enough, right where they calculated, they found the mortar base plate. They picked it up, buried a big antitank mine underneath, and carefully concealed the plate just as they found it. Next day, they went out to play volleyball. Five minutes into the game, they head a loud explosion from the direction where the plate was. No mortar rounds ever interrupted their game after that.
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Thanks for giving me a great way of explaining how trigonometry could be useful to people in high school.
In case you ever want to find out where that stray mortar fire is coming from, trust your friend trigonometry!
That would make a good episode of CSI (Score:3, Funny)
But for the whole implausibility factor. I mean, I can only suspend my disbelief so far:
"the Lebanese army guys measured the angle of the holes at the bottom of the impact craters made by the fuse assemblies being blown into the ground"
Yeah. Granted if your calculations are thrown off my five degrees by something irregular -- say, I don't know, an explosion -- you get garbage data which broadens your "X marks the spot" to a few square miles, which is about what you could have guessed given that the shells
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Also, multiple lasers are a given I think.
Re:It seems to slow for mortars. (Score:5, Interesting)
We already have this. It's called the Phalanx sometimes, or just CIWS (close in weapons system). It features a 20 mm vulcan cannon, multiple radars, autonomous operation, and on top of that it can track multiple (dozens) incoming targets as well as its own outgoing projectiles. They can also network together to form a basewide protective shield. They are loaded with a tracer every 20 or 30 rounds and at night the bullet stream looks like the world's most powerful and accurate garden hose- one continuous stream of projectiles. The sound and feeling even from 200 yards is something you'll never forget, especially after you clean your pants the first time they fire without warning. Watching 5 of them fire in synch during a test is awe-inspiring (in good and bad ways, I guess).
Yeah, lasers, great... But in a deployed area, the CIWS provides early warning and interception of incoming mortars and missiles and doesn't require anything more than a generator and a full magazine. Someday lasers might provide an even better shield but until then we could use a few more CIWS in the field.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgpQBZF2sZQ [youtube.com]
You should watch that video- dove or hawk, any geek has to admit that the phalanx is one bad ass mutha.
-b
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I can see one huge advantage however to a laser based system:
1) It can be deployed in heavily populated areas without fear of killing an entire village down range.
If that minigun drops below 45* wouldn't it become a lethal weapon to all parties who happen to be down wind? Those .50 caliber rounds aren't light.
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Eh, if you can turn 15 mortars into 5, if have done yourself pretty good. On top of that, realize that the longer you fire mortars (especially against Americans or Israelis), the far more likely an artillery shell is going to come your way. Every time you toss up a mortar, a radar station is tracking it. The Israelis have gotten so good at it, that they can practically return fire before the rocket/mortar has hit the ground. These days, the only way Hamas and the like can take a pop shot across the bor
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The enemy has to get many shots in the air at once (nearly), they can't just stay in one spot and keep pounding away - someone will be blasting at them soon.
Unless they also have one of these devices AND they've managed to get it to not shoot outgoing mortars, whilst shooting the incoming ones. Then it could get interesting - if your laser leaves, your artillery gets hit, but if the laser doesn't leave, eventually there may be too many mortars heading for the laser and it gets hit. So it's
Re:It seems to slow for mortars. (Score:4, Informative)
Artillery have been hip-shooting for decades, i was doing it since before GPS so with GPS it's got to be almost as accurate as set, surveyed shoots. As soon as you shoot you scoot because you just automatically assume somebody is going to drop a big steel present on your former position and it'll be there in about a minute.
The answer is mirv (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The answer is mirv (Score:5, Insightful)
perhaps that money would be better spent on a plan to grow some crops to eat.
We already grow enough crops. Hunger is a politically created distribution problem, not a problem of lack of food.
Yawn (Score:3, Insightful)
Every time this comes up someone trots out "it's a distribution problem, not a production problem" line.
Here's a clue for you, while better distribution might be one part of the solution, so is more production, ie production where food is needed.
Any solution based on distribution is inevitably reliant on political goodwill. Production can empower people so that they aren't so dependant on ongoi
And again (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not a crop growing problem. The problem isn't that crops can't be grown in Africa, for example. The problem is that the governments there are unwilling to do so. A good example is Zimbabwe. It used to be the bread basket of Africa. It was like the farm states in the US. However, Mugabe has put a stop to that. Now they are a net food importer and their production is next to nothing.
Food shortage these days really isn't a problem of production. We have the technology and the land to handle it. It is a problem of distribution. The places with large starving populations have governments that are not interested in allowing the problem to be solved, or sometimes have no real government at all and are anarchys more or less.
This isn't an easy "just throw money at it" kind of problem.
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Probably because it's the truth.
True, but the problem still isn't that the technology or capability to grow that food isn't there.
Once it discovers it, security becomes an issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully the guy making the decisions weighed espionage. You can really shoot yourself in the foot if you find a counter to your own missle defense and then someone publishes the counter. Do you really need an anti missle defense technology so bad that it is worth endangering your own missle defense?
Dragged along for the ride (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another defense industry scam, and all of us are dragged along for the ride.
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Also, WarGames [imdb.com] was being shown on the big screen for it's 25th anniversary here recently, which reminded me that "close" only counts in horseshoes, hand g
EESTOR (Score:3, Interesting)
Best Offense Is a Good Defense (Score:2, Informative)
No, the Pentagon still sucks at shooting things out of the sky with a laser. They are excellent at spending $BILLIONS on trying, over and again, for decades.
Maybe they're laser-proofing everything because they're so bad at lasering stuff that they're afraid they'll laser our own stuff. At the very least, it's innovation in spending $BILLIONS on lasers.
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You start off accusing me (falsely) of a straw man, then end off lecturing me in some straw man about my business with classified laser testing literature.
What a bunch of "malarkey".
The Star Wars tests for 25 years have consistently failed to shoot down anything except the most carefully controlled test targets. The tests are usually faked, propaganda to keep spending those $BILLIONS on a de
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So pathetic, it *hurts*! This is what the internet is truly for!
Use an optical cloaking device (Score:2, Interesting)
The resulting dispersal of the laser energy would prevent the missile from being seriously damaged.
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Or perhaps just use transparent materials. World War III will be fought with Molotov cocktails.
Re:Use an optical cloaking device (Score:4, Informative)
"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
-- Albert Einstein
The Scots had anti-laser defences centuries ago (Score:3, Funny)
In battle, they would don a full-length ball gown covered in sequins. The idea was to blind your opponent with luxury.
A more modern tack might simply be to let Frank Ghery design the bomb casing. The high-strength reflective materials would avert damage, while the deconstructionist curved form would, with luck, send the beam back to the attackers, using their own laser against them like in a cliched Star Trek episode.
How to beat it? (Score:2)
Stay by the phone (Score:3, Funny)
With amazing insights like those I'm sure you'll have a lucrative defence job offer very shortly.
So what happens when... (Score:2)
...everyone has laser-proof missiles?
As a former artilleryman... (Score:5, Informative)
I say, good luck!.
Even a modest artillery battery, on a bad day, with the hot, dusty wind in their face and half their crew asleep, can manage to put 18 rounds downrange, per minute. With a 30 second flight time (hey, it varies with range), you've got less than two seconds per projectile if you're going to destroy them all. And the laser takes several seconds per round to destroy it. And that's without the coating.
So here's what you do: you fire a 'smurf' round - that is, a hollow steel round as your first projectile. Because it doesn't have any explosive, the laser will track it and burn it until it hits the ground, paving the way for the remaining rounds to come through without any problem.
Granted, I think lasers are cool and all, but we already have anti-rocket systems like the Navy's phalanx which seem to be much more effective. The problem is that something like a 3000 rpm chain gun can put more energy on the target than most tactical lasers. Even more embarassing, a .50 cal round can pierce 2 inches of solid steel at ranges greater than 3 kilometers. A single .50 cal round impacting nose of an artillery shell would detonate it instantly. Why not use those precision servos to direct a weapon with real takedown power? Ballistic flight trajectories aren't that hard to calculate.
And unlike the laser, artillery can hit things beyond visual range, in places obstructed from direct line of sight. Put yourself in a valley, and your laser defense system might not even track the round until its already too late. I think it's a step in the right direction, but they clearly need much more powerful lasers to be practical.
Now the enemy has lasers? (Score:2)
I wasn't aware that there was any other unfriendly nation with any type of offensive or defensive laser. Seems like more military spending on something that we'll never use because some jackass in the government got freaked about about "terrorists with lasers".
VINDICATION AT LAST!..... (Score:2, Funny)
I finally have a reason to justify my owning a pair of those polarized, reflective shades from the 1980's!
Slap a pair of those rad-fashion babies on a missile and will not only be laser proof, but it'll look *cool* at the same time!
To quote The Great M.C. Hammer: "Can't touch this!"
Plywood- no I'm not joking (Score:4, Informative)
My brother, a University professor, who had a big laser laboratory, covered all the walls with plywood. What happens is that when a strong laser beam hits the wood, the glue vaporizes and spreads out the beam so its rendered much less concentrated. The cheapest laser defense in the world.
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I question your mastery of the English language. The article is not about how to defend against missiles with lasers, but how to defend missiles against lasers -- specifically lasers which are aimed at a missile to poke a hole in it and/or destroy sensitive electronics.
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I may be misinterpreting your post - Forgive me if that's the case.
The defensive lasers that are aimed at targeting systems are pretty simple. Assuming you have a heat-seeker, you aim an infrared laser slightly off-axis at the missile. It chases the phantom heat signature instead of you. Not nearly a trivial engineering feat, but much easier than blasting the thing out of the air.
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Not nearly a trivial engineering feat, but much easier than blasting the thing out of the air.
A missile blasted out of the air doesn't require any more attention and you're ready to deal with any additional missiles.
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Sorry for the self-reply, but my brain's still spinning. White Sands missile range had some success shooting down artillery shells, but it had a hell of a time with it. Basically they just spin to damned fast to heat up any single point enough to cause the device to fail.
I am not an aeronautic engineer, but would spinning a bomb be efficient/effective? What about missiles?
Probably more difficult than a reflective spray, but spinning could be predicted and could still have a competent guidance system with
spinning ballistic missiles? (Score:2)
I'm no rocket scientist but...
Spinning something as large as a ballistic missile, in the boost phase which is when these lasers are useful as well as when the rocket is full of fuel and rather heavy, might conceivably produce gyroscopic effects which could increase trajectory calculation complexity quite a bit?
Just throwing that out as a possibility.
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The lasers you refer to are lasers for guiding weapons.
The laser in this article defends a target by BLOWING UP incoming waeponry.
(It's more powerful than your average pocket laser)
Re:Laser-proof first post (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Has gotten so far in that last 12 years of focused development that it has finished "target illumination" testing.
2) Has 40 shot maximum payload (according to the entirely optimistic marketers of this project). They admit that it is only really specced for 20 shots now, though.
3) Does NOT have any variety shark attached to it.
I think Northrop Grumman, Boeing and all the other defense contractors had the following plan when they met with Reagan:
1)Convince The Gipper that Green lasers is just what's needed to kill the Red Communists. ("It'd be just like that recent film by that young George Lucas, and we know how much you love movies, Mr. President."
2) (optional) ???
3) Profit!!!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And that was just the soviet union in 1984.
Pentagon confirms Beijing's anti-satellite laser [theregister.co.uk]
This was in china in 20
Well played, sir... (Score:3, Informative)
From the Terra-3 [astronautix.com] page of your "Encyclopedia Astronautica":
The first applications would have to be limited to anti-satellite, and then primarily to blind optical sensors --Hmmmm...a high-powered flashlight...
Remember: from your own quote it was not "discomf
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Yes of course, there's no evidence that we have more lasers so the obvious conclusion is that we have a lot more useful lasers that the government is hiding from us because they're classified.
You know, we also have no evidence that the military has gundam warriors... they must obviously have a huge fleet of them... they're just classified, that's why you haven't seen them.