The US Army Finally Gets The World's Largest Laser Weapon System (bizjournals.com) 130
It's been successfully tested on trucks, as well as UAVs and small rockets, according to a video from Lockheed Martin, which is now shipping the first 60kW-class "beam combined" fiber laser for use by the U.S. Army. An anonymous reader quotes the Puget Sound Business Journal:
Lockheed successfully developed and tested the 58 kW laser beam earlier this year, setting a world record for this type of laser. The company is now preparing to ship the laser system to the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command in Huntsville, Alabama [according to Robert Afzal, senior fellow for Lockheed's Laser and Sensor Systems in Bothell]. "We have shown that a powerful directed energy laser is now sufficiently light-weight, low volume and reliable enough to be deployed on tactical vehicles for defensive applications on land, at sea and in the air..." Laser weapons, which complement traditional kinetic weapons in the battlefield, will one day protect against threats such as "swarms of drones" or a flurry of rockets and mortars, Lockheed said.
Nukes (Score:3, Funny)
I hope a system like this will one day make nukes obsolete so that we can start having big wars again....
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In one sense, you are both right. For all the hysteria, nuclear deterrence has been instrumental in preventing major wars which were in fact quite likely given the giant political conflicts of the cold war.
On the other hand, when laser weapons get to the point where they can take out nukes on all their various delivery platforms, they will undoubtedly be more than capable of taking out artillery rounds, tank rounds, small buildings, revetments, groups of infantry, etc.
Kind of damned if you do and damned if
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I've long held that the participants in the Manhattan project deserve the Nobel peace prize. If one is alive it's still possible to pull off.
I'd hand out a second Nobel for the H bomb.
Perhaps a third for the Neutron bomb, just to stick a thumb in the peaceniks eye.
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They haven't prevented a lot of acts of aggression, small wars, etc. The threat of nuclear war keeps other countries from interfering, such as sitting back and chewing on fingernails while Russia invades Georgia and Ukraine.
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They haven't prevented a lot of acts of aggression, small wars, etc. The threat of nuclear war keeps other countries from interfering, such as sitting back and chewing on fingernails while Russia invades Georgia and Ukraine.
That is largely regarded as the point. Intervention in those smaller conflicts by other major powers could lead to World War III, which would dwarf World War II even if nukes were not used.
Conventional weapons have progressed rapidly, as has manufacturing. I'm afraid to know how a conventional modern World War would play out.
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That is really awful. Georgia, the Russian were there as UN approved peace keepers when Georgia attacked under US provocation by US lobbyists with McCain as the key go between to use it in the US election at that time. The Crimea was a part of Russia and given to the Ukraine by the so called evil Soviet Union, if the Soviet Union did it by US definition it is evil, than that act was also evil, so the Crimeans choose to return. How many countries has the US actually invaded, pushed through coups, launched te
Re: Nukes (Score:2)
lololo man, it was Russia who sent saboteurs to attack Georgians in a false flag operation. Go suck putins dick
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Re: Nukes (Score:5, Funny)
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They won't make nukes obsolete. And the reason we don't have really big wars is that no big country sees much to gain after the last big one. Russian was decimated and then lost the cold war. China was a basket case until Mao went round the bend. Japan was defanged. The U.S. never really cared much for imperial conquest after country solidified following the Civil War (and no it wasn't the fucking War Between the States).
The next nasty war will either (1) start with Pakistan losing control of the nukes and
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Re: Nukes (Score:2)
Nuclear war is fought like a duel in a Western movie - who takes out the gun first wins.
Your luck was that both sides were led by pathologic cowards during the cold war.
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No.
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Ok.
West Point Required Reading: (Score:2)
Mirrors
Ballistic Disco Balls — A Tactical Threat Model
Baker S and Modesta R; RAND Corporation
No mention of sharks? (Score:4, Funny)
"We have shown that a powerful directed energy laser is now sufficiently light-weight, low volume and reliable enough to be deployed on tactical vehicles for defensive applications on land, at sea and in the air..."
No mention of sharks.
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Uh...Army? If it was the Navy, that might make sense.
I'd imagine the Army would mount it on a Horse or a Mule.
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Uh...Army? If it was the Navy, [sharks] might make sense.
I'd imagine the Army would mount it on a Horse or a Mule.
You either need a sarcasm tag, or you need to catch up on your 20-year old memes.
Reflection (Score:3)
Reflective coatings tend to not be efficient enough; they ablate and/or lose reflectivity when heated, and then the laser is into the target's vitals. Also, thick armor is heavy; that makes it impractical for missiles. The corresponding truth is that missile skins are very thin.
Also, given a reflective "enough" coating, now the target is easily visible on the battlefield. That tends to work out poorly for the target.
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Nothing is 100% reflective; some energy will be absorbed, the object and it's coating will heat, start to char and the reflective properties will be lost.
The issue is holding the beam on the target long enough so that the absorbed energy will start to damage the coating and what's underneath. The time required drops as the energy level increases.
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Nothing is 100% reflective
Right - even if you start with a space-telescope mirror quality finish, by time a bunch of GI's handle it and you fly it through the atmosphere you won't, with current materials.
And in the process of making the missile all shiny you've given up any effort at stealth.
Re:Chrome (Score:4, Informative)
The best reflectivity is fragile. A 10 W laser can burn a crater in a beautiful lab-grade mirror. (Flaw in the coating? minuscule deterioration? speck of dust?)
This can be translated into time instead. So if the laser damages the target in a microsecond, no coating will help. But if the beam has to be held on target for tens of seconds, some reflectivity will turn this into minutes and may make a difference.
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Re: Chrome (Score:2, Informative)
You could get a cat and mouse game, buy it would not last long as it is much easier to get an order of magnitude more laser power than to get an order of magnitude reduction in absorbed energy in the real world. I've used expensive mirrors in the lab that would never be practice outside of a clean room, and they still get their reflective coating stripped off by an off the shelf laser from time to time if you go slightly too high in power density. When reflective surfaces fail, they become no reflective in
What is the energy efficiency? (Score:3)
How much energy goes into the laser to get the 58kW out? 58kW is just over 78 horsepower, so it's not a huge amount of energy coming out and, at 100% efficiency, it could be driven by a fairly small power source.
Are we talking efficiency on the order of 10%, 1%, 0.1% less?
The question comes down to, can the beam be powered by a couple of car batteries or do we need a nuclear power plant?
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Well, the obvious answer to this question is to ask how much horsepower a shark can develop.
At least for one of these bad boys [newatlas.com] the answer is about 300, so there might some headroom for a laser or two.
I can't wait.
Re: What is the energy efficiency? (Score:1)
Solid state lasers with some sort of flashlamp pumps tend to be 1 percent efficient. You can get that up to 10% efficient with smartly designed fiber lasers using led pumps, but it adds a zero or two to the price (in this case 600 kW of led pumps would be millions of dollars while 6MW of arclamps would be more like tens of thousands).
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Where did you get that number? I don't see it in the linked articles.
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Sounds unbelievably high. Citation?
Re: What is the energy efficiency? (Score:2)
If the laser does its damage in a fraction of a second, 58kW is within the capability of about 30-50 car batteries. If it needs up to 5 seconds, about 100 (200, if you don't want to destroy the batteries after one or two uses. 10-20 seconds is within the capabilities of a small generator with lots of big supercapacitors in parallel (but you might need 30-90+ seconds between shots). Assuming 58kW is the INPUT power, and not the OUTPUT power.
For comparison, a good car stereo draws 500-1000 watts (RMS), which
Real Genius (Score:1)
But can it make popcorn?
Once there was the Cold War... (Score:2)
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200 drone can't carry much payload. And not very far.
I'd be very wary about saying what can or cannot be done with $200 worth of equipment. After all, cheap IEDs kill people, too. And modern SBCs give you a lot of computation for just a few bucks for guidance and control.
Just two (of many) problems ... (Score:1)
Laser weapons, which complement traditional kinetic weapons in the battlefield, will one day protect against threats such as "swarms of drones" or a flurry of rockets and mortars, Lockheed said.
1. Given the boondoggle that is te F35, why believe anything they say?
2. "Batteries not included."
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The issues with the F-35 were caused by the Pentagon. They decided to cram it full of everything they could think of. The Marines just had to have a plane that went up and down instead of being satisfied with one that goes forward. And if they really need a ground attack plane, they should take control of the Air Force's A-10 and restart the production lines for it.
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You think the A-10 is viable against modern handheld SAMS? They even have them in Syria.
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The "problem" with the Eurofighter is that it was designed as an interceptor, and when it first came into service the argument was there was no need for an interceptor anymore because the cold war was over.
Thing is that Eurofighters are now being scrambled on a regular basis (well I was more aware exactly how often till they moved them out of Leuchars because you bloody well know when they take off on scramble) to intercept Russian planes flying around the coast of the UK.
So while it looked like an unneeded
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Nevertheless the Eurofighter is the only plane on the planet that is in service, excels at multiple roles, and even can be fitted to fulfill more than one role in a single mission, aka an anti tank run with an air to air intercept on the way home. The only other planes that are close to its performance are the Saab fighters and the brand new Su-47 (not so brand new anymore ofc.)
The Eurofighter does not VTOL, though.
Trucks With Laserbeams (Score:1)
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It's like a dream... (Score:2)
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They forgot to add this... (Score:2)
Laser weapons, which complement traditional kinetic weapons in the battlefield, will one day protect against threats such as "swarms of drones" or a flurry of rockets and mortars...
That is if their path can be correctly predicted. Some of these missiles/projectiles, especially from Russia, have random flight paths & no one is immune to them I am afraid.
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Shut up, Russia. :P
Anything with mass can't magically change direction at infinite acceleration. A laser moves at the speed of light (O RLY?), and likewise, so does vision, so the only thing that has to keep up with the gigantic, multi-thousand pound rocket trying to change direction rapidly is the processing stage. We've had cameras that can auto-follow a target for decades. What's the difference between that and firing a big-ass laser at the focus point?
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"The new Canon 9D continuous auto-focus, capable to track up to 40 moving targets traveling at a speed of mach 20" ;D
Going from Kilowatt to Killerwhat (Score:2)
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We could already do that. We needed the increased wattage so we can oppress lighter-skinned people, too.
So this laser thing is really about diversity. I guess that's simply a natural progression of repealing "Do ask, don't tell"
i wonder if this is that difficult to do (Score:1)
I'm wondering if this actually can be done with parts that are not particularly advanced technologically.
For example let's for the sake of argument assume that they are simply combining hundreds of semiconductor lasers.
I would think that somebody without the budget and resources of the US military could also do this.
Don't know, I'm just wondering exactly how high the barrier to entry is.
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I'll bet that you could pop a whole house full... (Score:2)
Of popcorn with that sucker.
Props if you know where that idea came from.
A sufficient number of refractory projectiles .. (Score:1)
.. will overwhelm the power output of a single truck-mounted laser, even under ideal conditions.
For example, a 300 gram tungsten projectile will require a full second at 58 KW to be melted, assuming no reflection. An alumina projectile of 42 grams will require the same full second at that power.
Oh, so it talks, right? (Score:2)
Re: Oh, so it talks, right? (Score:2)
Commies had 3MW oxygen laser in sixties, 5MW in seventies (the one used in "shuttle zapping",) and 8 gas dynamic laser in eighties. By late eighties, they had 12MW+ gdl in plans
First target: (Score:2)
So are they mounted on Friggin Sharks ?? (Score:2)
Or Hungry Mutant Sea Bass, Hmm I guess that would have be the 'Navy' .... So Angry Mutant Moose would be what the Army would mount them on ..
BTW I want 1 Million Dollars ..................
Real Genius (Score:3)
You're kidding (Score:2)
58KW?
Anything faster than sound will cool faster than this idiotic "weapon" will heat!!