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Lockheed Martin completes new battle laser for U.S. military
- Allower 10y agoYOU EVIL FUCKING ASSHOLES
- splitrocket 10y agoI wonder if it complies with the treaty banning blinding laser weapons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Wea...
- mmjaa 10y agoI think this is more in the "puts a neat hole in your head" category of weapons.
- M_Grey 10y agoMore like, "Boils the contents of your skull, which then bursts like a microwaved egg."
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Maken 10y agoSo, you can build laser guns as long as you make sure they are lethal? Sounds like a regulation against low-quality laser guns.
- edaemon 10y agoThe protocol only prohibits the use of weapons whose intended purpose is to blind people. If a laser is meant to be lethal and happens to blind you, that wouldn't violate the protocol.
- woliveirajr 10y ago> Article 3: Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol. [0] Don't know how effective it would be, since it's not the primary goal of such system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Wea...
- sakopov 10y ago> A Patriot missile, usually priced at about $3 million was recently used to shoot down a $200 quadcopter drone, according to a US general. I thought they were at most $50k a piece. This is unbelievable.
- blackguardx 10y agoOne of the simplest missiles of all, the TOW [1] costs almost $20k. A friend who is a former Marine says it was common to fire half a dozen in practice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-71_TOW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-71_TOW
- Gravityloss 10y agoI've heard from people who work for military contractors that development is very expensive because everything is very inflexible and clamped down and there is so much paperwork.
- quantumhobbit 10y agoI wonder if that price is due to low production and that the price would come down with mass production in war. Maybe not the case here but I always assume this is the case with expensive new weapons that are likely mostly r&d costs being spread across relatively few orders in peacetime.
- cstross 10y agoPartly, but mass production in time of war simply isn't a thing in this day and age — hot wars between roughly-comparable adversaries (as opposed to the asymmetric conflicts such as counter-insurgency campaigns) are generally over in double-to-triple-digit hours, a couple of weeks at most. So the policy of most developed nations' militaries is "come with whatever you've got" and don't plan on building more kit until it's over.
- PJDK 10y agoAdd to that statement a "probably...". For example WWII started with months of "phoney war" where both sides moved onto a war footing, followed by a short violent blitzkrieg. WWII is also shows powers capable of exercising restraint, even Hitler, conducting a war he was obviously losing, opted to not use chemical weapons. WWIII could be fought in a couple of hours or it could go on for years with neither side willing to press the biggest button.
- turtleofdeath 10y agoHas nobody seen Real Genius? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoT-h0S1gkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoT-h0S1gkE
- graedus 10y agoOr Short Circuit? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkzxP-Wt9oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkzxP-Wt9oo
- nananonymous 10y agoSo you think it'll go air-to-surface soon, too? /s The difference here is Lockheed knows why they're developing this technology, in Real Genius they were being tricked.
- kfrenzy 10y agopew pew pew
- ufmace 10y agoIt'll be an interesting development if somebody manages to put a real laser weapon like this in the field and it ends up being effective against vehicles and aircraft. Missiles are expensive and relatively slow; a laser weapon could potentially shoot down missiles and aircraft so fast as to be a game-changer. There's been a lot of noise about whether aircraft carriers and other capital ships are viable at all in the face of high-speed anti-ship missiles. Intercepting them with CIWS and counter-missiles is dicey, but a good laser system could make anti-ship missiles useless. On the other hand, you have to wonder if operating aircraft at all might become non-viable if your enemy has weapons like that. Speed might become much less important and stealth much more important.
- M_Grey 10y agoIt might just be a battle of the algorithms then... is your radar + laser interceptor better than their missiles' agility and countermeasures?
- SomeStupidPoint 10y agoIt's also a question of volume: if you can shoot down 15 missiles, then can I get 20 in flight? There are also things like rail guns, which might be harder to intercept with a laser.
- M_Grey 10y agoYeah... that's a lot of momentum to deal with, in a rail gun. Deflecting it would be hard, and disrupting it would tend to turn the slug into a co-moving cloud of superheated particles/plasma. I'm not sure that's hugely desirable either!
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoWell, that superheated cloud would probably disperse some, making it more susceptible to air resistance than the slug is. On the other hand, if you only liquefy it, and so you get hit with the same mass of liquid metal...
- mozumder 10y agoSo, is now when everyone starts to put mirrors on their missiles, tanks, and aircraft?
- throwanem 10y agoNo, because the beam concentrates enough kinetic energy to go straight through whatever reflective material you have in mind.
- arethuza 10y agoI wonder what a 60kW laser would do to a tank? Not very much I'd have thought.
- Maken 10y agoCould it make the reactive armour explode?
- throwanem 10y agoYou'd be right. It would need to dwell for considerable time on the same part of the tank's armor to have any meaningful effect, and even that would rely on slow, inefficient heating as a mechanism. (Assuming a rather improbable 100% kinetic energy transfer from a 60kW beam, that equates to about three .50 BMG rounds per second from contact range. That's a big round, but not big enough to have a significant effect on tank armor.) To address another commenter's point, it would not set off explosive reactive armor (ERA). While I don't have detailed information on the ERA compositions in common use, the constraints at hand effectively necessitate the use of relatively insensitive plastic explosives, broadly similar in characteristics to the well-understood C4. Such explosives require a shock wave, provided by a special device or (in the case of ERA) by the impact of a shaped charge, to detonate; heat and fire will not set them off. (Vietnam-era American soldiers burned pieces of C4 from Claymore mine charges as cooking fuel. The smoke was toxic, but that was the only danger.) You need a composition like this for ERA because it is not an actively controlled system. It's not as though there is a computer in the tank which detects an impact and detonates the corresponding ERA segments; the physical processes of such impacts play out far too quickly for such active control to work. ERA therefore has to work on a purely physical basis if it's going to work at all, and that means you need to use an explosive susceptible to detonation on impact. But you don't want an explosive that's very sensitive to impact, or to heat or fire, because you don't want to waste ERA or unnecessarily endanger infantry operating near the tank. (ERA's dangerous enough already that way without giving it a hair trigger!) So it's already not all that plausible that a beam like this might transfer enough energy, even on direct impact with a mass of such explosive, to set it off. But the impact won't be direct, because ERA isn't constructed of bare explosive blocks; there's always going to be a layer of metal, not armor but still relatively thick, between the explosive and the outside environment. This structure would intervene between the explosive and the beam, and would dissipate the transfer energy as heat. That might eventually set the underlying explosive on fire, but, for the reasons we've already covered, it would not cause a detonation.
- Mtinie 10y agoThe rendering of the mounted laser system firing a massive, fuzzy red beam at an unspecified target is exactly how I remember it looked when I last saw it demonstrated...some thirty years ago. http://www.3djoes.com/cobra-maggot.html http://www.3djoes.com/cobra-maggot.html
- cstross 10y agoHow does this perform in adverse weather conditions? I'm thinking dust storms, rain, and fog — anything that puts droplets/dirt in the beam path is going to scatter/absorb energy. Which brings us back to the old staple of warfare, the smokescreen.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoFrom what I've read about these high intensity lasers in rain and fog they just 'burns a hole' though to the target. That absorbs energy but only for the initial start up. In a monsoon situation I would expect it to be useless though. I wondered if they might make for a sort of 'fog plow' which would burn away the fog but the volume of air you would need to heat to keep a road cleared is rather huge. Dust, and in particular volcanic ash (which is basically glass shards) are more of an issue. It raises the question of whether a missile could eject a powder to mitigate laser power landing on the missile.
- nkrisc 10y agoEven in a monsoon I imagine a powerful enough laser should have no problem, no? Relative to the light of the laser, the rain drops are stationary. But maybe the power required to 'burn' through all that rain is higher than the discussed class of laser weapons.
- jboggan 10y agoFirst missile lays down a volcanic ash screen, second missile flies through it to the target.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoInterestingly flying through volcanic ash, even in small amounts, is exceptionally hard on aircraft. So hard in fact that in one of the DARPA call for wild ideas rounds I suggested a "puffer ball" defense system consisting of a steam or air pressured dispenser on ship that could fire a 'plume' of volcanic ash to a height of up to 1000 meters. If any aircraft 'buzz' your ship with that plume up they are going to lose their engines. It could also make for a shore based cruise missile defense where you puff it infront of the missile and hope that the missile's radar can't see enough of it to jog left or right. It is remarkable stuff[1] [1] http://www3.alpa.org/portals/alpa/volcanicash/03_NASADC8AshDamage.pdf http://www3.alpa.org/portals/alpa/volcanicash/03_NASADC8AshD...
- harveywi 10y agoAre there any physicists here who might be able to explain whether or not laser weapons would be effective underwater, e.g., mounted on a submarine for point defense against torpedos? What about from LEO or from space? Would the atmospheric layers or other factors affect the operation of a laser weapon possibly fired from space to Earth? (Most of us are curious about the possibility of sharks with lasers on their heads, but would be strongly discouraged from asking directly.)
- RickSahchez 10y agoYou'll have to pay up to get that answer, bitch. https://www.paypal.com/donate/?token=M3PrHdnj1UclPkUsMMZgfvHdX1-ssTZ991RLMQX7DHf2mbKJwbh_G9Gi9Qagv3jMZdmAIm https://www.paypal.com/donate/?token=M3PrHdnj1UclPkUsMMZgfvH...
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Are there any physicists here who might be able to explain whether or not laser weapons would be effective underwater, e.g., mounted on a submarine for point defense against torpedos? Not a physicist, but as I understand the optimal wavelengths for underwater use would be substantially different than for use it atmosphere, and with similar output effective ranges will be much shorter, but there is no fundamental reason why you can't have underwater laser weapons.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago> there is no fundamental reason why you can't have underwater laser weapons Even at optimal wavelenghts and clean water, seawater absorbs/scatters light so much more strongly than air that underwater laser weapons are pretty much infeasible. The best wavelength is blue-green-ish, but even there you lose 5% intensity per meter (the loss is exponential in distance).
- emiliobumachar 10y agoWater is also pretty good at muffling explosions. If you can take out torpedoes at 30 meters (80% of energy wasted, needs 5x more power), it might still be worth it as a point defence.
- madengr 10y ago"Conversely, in 2015 the Navy estimated that a solid-state laser can be fired for less than one dollar per shot" Amortized over a few million shots.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoNo, not amortized. That's the variable cost only; it's not amortizing the fixed cost at all. Think about a plane that fires missiles, for example. This would be saying that the missile costs $1 million. That's per missile. It's not saying that, after enough missiles, we also have paid for the plane.
- Animats 10y agoMilitary lasers are getting close. The consensus has been that around 100KW, they start being effective weapons. This one is 60KW. The ship-mounted XN-1 LaWS, from 2014, is 30KW. The US had a 2.2MW continuous laser, the MIRACL, in the 1980s, but it was a chemical laser that used large quantities of deuterium fluoride, was building-sized, and broke down frequently. The newer lasers are solid-state devices.
- shubb 10y agoOkay,so outside battle, what useful things could we do with this? For instance, stick it on a drone and use it to weed a field from 1000 ft?
- robotresearcher 10y agoIt just about fits in a large truck.
- oliv__ 10y agoSharks