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Mysterious Laser Turret Appears on US Navy Destroyer USS Dewey
- cartmanandkenny 7y agoturret yes. Laser turret? Maybe not
- jameshart 7y agoThis new US Navy acronym is going to make googling for Linux installation issues a lot more tricky: "Ruggedized High Energy Laser (RHEL)"
- raxxorrax 7y agoThat is actually a good way to hide public information. Even the best search engines might fail you here.
- rapnie 7y agoWonder if there are more examples of this hiding, intentionally or not. I recently could not find the Trinity and Beyond [0] movie on DDG, because all hits were of some family vlog (though I still find it on Google first page). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_and_Beyond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_and_Beyond
- lm28469 7y agoHappens all the time, I don't have links right now but i've seen several instances of individual or companies publishing tonnes of content right after something bad happened (crime or other) to try to push the bad news away from the front page.
- rjsw 7y agoSomebody posted a French example recently. EDIT: There have also been suggestions that the current UK Prime Minister has done this.
- lmkg 7y agoRudy Giuliani's company is named Fraud Guarantee. This was apparently chosen to push down search results about one of the co-founders' legal issues. https://www.wsj.com/articles/giuliani-associate-left-trail-of-troubled-businesses-before-ukraine-probe-push-11572527608 https://www.wsj.com/articles/giuliani-associate-left-trail-o...
- mattkrause 7y agoSeems incredibly...apt in retrospect.
- sitkack 7y agoCounter-Strike: Source
- saganus 7y agoAh, that is one hell of a documentary. I hope I still have my copy laying around because it's one of those films that I can watch every few years and be amazed again and again. Edit: I guess it will not be long before it's even harder to find, but at least the page is archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20190129000701/http://www.atomcentral.com/trinity-and-beyond.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20190129000701/http://www.atomce...
- micah94 7y agoAlso awesome is the motion picture soundtrack! Can still be found on Amazon.
- Johnny555 7y agoThe worst I've run into is back when I was still doing a lot of Cisco networking, and Apple came out with IOS, which was the same name as Cisco's IOS operating system. As I remember, Apple ended up having to license the name. Seemed like overnight it became nearly impossible to search for Cisco IOS (since many relevant posts didn't call out Cisco by name, since why would you, IOS is obviously Cisco IOS)
- parksy 7y agoDoubt it's intentional but ISIS springs to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Sensor_is_Structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Sensor_is_Structure
- rtkwe 7y agoTrue but only if you're using just RHEL. Usually adding just one word will disambiguate the multiple uses of a word or acronym. RHEL weapon vs RHEL OS for example.
- dragonwriter 7y agoFirst Google search result I get for “RHEL weapon”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Red_Hat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Red_Hat And #7: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/the-navys-newest-warship-is-powered-by-linux/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/the-n... But #2-#6 are more what you'd probably expect.
- branchan 7y agoNot anymore. Especially not if you google "RHEL laser".
- lostlogin 7y agoBoris Johnson has been accused of this. His truely bizarre bus making hobby is one example.
- mikeyouse 7y agoTo expand, Boris Johnson heavily promoted a bus manufacturer in Northern Ireland (they went so far as to call them Boris Busses). The company eventually went into administration right during the Brexit fight and were laying off 1,500 people. People speculate in an effort to "SEO" this along with some really damaging news where he was alleged to be having an affair with a model and steering contracts her way, Boris gave a completely bizarre response in an interview: > Speaking on Talk Radio on Tuesday, the frontrunner to replace Theresa May was asked by the interviewer, Ross Kempsell, what he did to relax. > Johnson replied: “I like to paint. Or I make things. I have a thing where I make models of buses. What I make is, I get old, I don’t know, wooden crates, and I paint them. It’s a box that’s been used to contain two wine bottles, right, and it will have a dividing thing. And I turn it into a bus." > “So I put passengers – I paint the passengers enjoying themselves on a wonderful bus – low carbon, of the kind that we brought to the streets of London, reducing C02, reducing nitrous oxide, reducing pollution.” A few more cases have been ID'ed by people on Twitter: https://twitter.com/genmon/status/1169719026060320768 https://twitter.com/genmon/status/1169719026060320768
- buckminster 7y agoDon't forget the other Boris bus with the claim that Brexit would save £350,000,000 per week.
- snthd 7y agohttps://mobile.twitter.com/GrantWhiteTZ/status/1144077131602960384 https://mobile.twitter.com/GrantWhiteTZ/status/1144077131602... >Boris Johnson has created the #BorisBus situation to bury the fact that three years ago he campaigned with an actual bus, promising Brexit millions for the NHS.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- adatavizguy 7y agoI share the same name as the heads of public relations for two of the largest corporations on Earth. I love the anonymity.
- nitrogen 7y agoHow many possibilities does that leave? You might have just given your real name to a sufficiently motivated researcher, assuming what you said is accurate.
- Aperocky 7y agotbh, it will probably make searching for this laser more difficult.
- vsareto 7y agoSearch “RHEL laser” without quotes RHELinux pages are unlikely to mention lasers as well. Qualifying searches like this is pretty easy.
- yellowapple 7y agoUntil Red Hat comes out with some new enterprise software tool called "Laser".
- brian_herman__ 7y agoWhen I saw this acronym in the article I thought of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enter...
- mcguire 7y ago"High Energy Laser Counter-ASCM Program (HELCAP)" I so wanted that to be the Association for Supply Chain Management, but it's really Anti-Ship Cruise Missile.
- badrabbit 7y agoIn my experience looking for RHEL always leads to paywalled answers so I search for "centos" instead which 99% of the time applies to my RHEL question.
- dazzlerink 7y ago> The system is likely the service's new "ODIN" laser dazzler that is meant to blind enemy optics on ships, boats, aircraft, and missiles. Couldn't you now just home in on the laser? I feel like I'm missing something.
- hannasanarion 7y agoNot if your optice are totally saturated by the laser. Point a laser at a camera some time, and see if you can tell where it is in the resulting picture. The image will probably be solid red
- dazzlerink 7y agoYeah, but for this you would use a new kind of laser detector which can take it.
- Xylakant 7y agoThat’s pretty much how all of this works: one side develops better targeting, the other side a counter for that, then a counter to the counter, over and over again.
- dotancohen 7y agoLike, you mean, an arms race perhaps?
- me_me_me 7y agoAnd where exactly can i get "new kind of laser detector". It's like saying in WW1: Don't build tanks because they will invent anti-tank guns.
- serioussecurity 7y agoSweep a physical occluder across the lens, measure abatement?
- nexuist 7y agoThis is a super stupid question, but in the rendering it looks like the turret only has a ~180 degree turning range. It can't point behind the ship because there's a giant wall behind it. So as the enemy...can't I just shoot the back of the ship? Obviously the solution here is to put another turret behind the ship, but is that actually the plan or am I missing something? Do missiles always come from the front of the ship for some reason?
- ChuckMcM 7y agoNot a stupid question at all. Weapon systems all have various areas where they are optimum and where they are at their weakest. In ship to ship battles, maneuvering is slow so its difficult to line up behind a ship like it is with a plane. Even so, if this test system works I expect there would be a matching version on the stern. Frank Dunnigan's "How to Make War", which is putatively about how to develop war games, goes into some depth of comparing offensive versus defensive impact of various weapon systems. It makes for an interesting read.
- vonmoltke 7y agoEach Burke as a fore and aft mounting point for a point defense system. Flight I and Flight II ships have a 20mm Phalanx system mounted there. Flight IIA ships (which the Dewey is one of) were originally built without point defense guns because they were fitted with the Evolved Sea Sparrow point defense missile system (carried in the vertical launch cells), but the Navy later decided to retrofit a Phalanx turret onto the aft mounting point of the Flight IIA ships. I have no idea why they only felt the need to have the gun on the stern arc. Presumably if a point defense laser reaches operational status it would be fitted to both PD mounting points.
- ttraub 7y agoEventually, the Navy will be doing more than "dazzling" and "blinding" enemy optics. The Tactical High Energy Laser project[1] demonstrated that incoming mortars and Katyushas could be shot down. It seems unlikely that this technology was abandoned, albeit it's probably much bulkier and more expensive than the RHEL. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Energy_Laser https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Energy_Laser
- umvi 7y agoCouldn't you just start putting a reflective coating on your mortar rounds?
- Mvhsz 7y agoHad the same question, the answer is yes BUT you would have to accomplish the following: - reflect every part of the spectrum that the laser can produce (idk if military lasers operate in the visible part of the spectrum) - keep the coating clean enough throughout flight to maintain reflectivity - meet the same requirements as the current coating which probably includes aerodynamics, heat resistance, etc. Idk if such a material exists, but I'm sure every country building lasers is also working on the defensive side as well.
- dghughes 7y agoThe coating on it would have to reflect the entire EM spectrum. Or whatever frequency a LASER device weapon would use.
- _ph_ 7y agoIt is almost impossible to create a coating that can reflect high-power laser pulses. Even if the coating reflects 99.9% of the light, it absorbs 0.1% of the light. When we are talking about laser pulses strong enough to melt steel projectiles, the absorbed light will quickly destroy the coating and then the projectile is vulnerable again. Also, the coating has to survive the launch/firing of the projectile without getting hazed. I was using pulse lasers in the lab and traditional silver mirrors would get damaged by pulse energies over 100mJ. They would just turn black. The solution was to use interference mirrors for the exact wavelengths of the beam to reflect, which wouldn't have any absorption and such could survive large pulse energies. But those mirrors are limited to the exact wavelength at precise angles.
- baybal2 7y agohttps://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/images/aquilon-1986-image01.jpg https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/images/... That one is stationed in my hometown
- Havoc 7y agoNot sure i see the point. Surely gyros can just keep it on track for last known good reading?
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoHow good was that heading? Good enough that the missile can hit the ship with no further adjustments for the rest of the flight? Probably not. (This is less important if the missile has a nuclear warhead...)
- Havoc 7y agoGiven how fast missiles are and how slow ships move I can't imagine it being hard. Between a good gyro, some satelitte positioning I can see it getting a good hit rate even if blind. And even if you miss just triggering an explosion in roughly the right area will do a fair bit of damage to ship antennae etc The whole thing strikes me as a bad stopgap till lasers are powerful enough to take down missiles
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoWhen I was a kid, we drove up I15 in southern Idaho. There was one place where we topped over this rise, and the road was straight for miles. Way down there in the distance there was an overpass across the interstate. I remember wondering how my dad could aim the car precisely enough to go under that overpass way out there. Now, as an adult, I understand. He didn't aim it that precisely. He steered along the way. But if you don't steer along the way, and you're off half a degree, say, and you go blind 10 miles out, you miss by 10 miles times sin(1/2 degree), which is 0.09 miles, which is 460 feet. I don't know what the effective radius of an anti-ship missile is, but 460 feet seems to me to be a rather long distance. That's assuming you just have to worry about aiming accuracy. You could also have things like wind gusts. And the ship could be not just moving, but maneuvering.
- icegreentea2 7y agoSuppose a Mach 2.5 (850 m/s) missile aiming at you. You blind it 4km out (about the same distance as Phalanx can engage) (suppose its sea-skimming so coming right onto your side). It takes 4.7 seconds to impact you. A DDG-51 is 150 meters long. If it was aiming center of mass, you need to induce a 75 m change in relative position in 4.7 seconds to cause a miss. This can be accomplished by like 6.8m/s^2 acceleration. Ok, so thats like 0.7G, super won't work. But say its subsonic (mach 0.9... so like 300 m/s). Now your talking like 13.3 seconds to impact, and now need like 0.85 m/s^2 acceleration to induce a clean miss. Ok cool, that has some utility. Oh, and totally, its a stop gap. But it's still useful to learn things like... how do gimballed laser systems behave on a ship? What type of maintenance is required? What unexpected interference is induced?
- chiefalchemist 7y agoPardon my non-HN tone but...remind me again how this would have prevented 9/11; is useful against cyber-warfare; or can prevent the public's beliefs and decision-making from being influenced by a fistful of dollars and some well-placed digital ads. We keep spending more and more, and are being outsmarted with less and less. Three-quarters of a trillion dollar (i.e., the USA's DOD budget) is a significant amount of money.
- angry_octet 7y agoThat's a valid criticism of budget allocation favouring existing modes of conflict. However, things like jamming maximize the technical advantage the US has against adversaries seeking to develop asymmetric threats -- it is possible to make all the (cheaper) missiles miss. One school of thought is that cyber/IO is like the air force -- it prepares the environment for ground action but doesn't hold territory. So once the West is weakened and divided enough, kinetic operations (Taiwan, Ukraine, Georgia, Syria/Iraq) become possible. So it is still very valuable to have a kinetic defence.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoValuable? In the sense that we keep getting beat with less and less? Where does value end and Military Industrial Complex begin? The USA out spends the next 10 or so nations __combined__. Most of those are allies.
- angry_octet 7y agoMuch of the spending is pork. Existing programs that are hard to cut. The US has very expensive tastes when it comes to capability. However, modern EW techniques are far more bang for buck than most programs. The US doesn't get beat in the fight, they get beat by the strategy the US govt chooses. They keep wanting what is almost impossible (like a peaceful, democratic and tolerant Afghanistan that does grow opium) and half committing to do it.
- PostOnce 7y agoCan thedrive.com/the-war-zone please stop calling stuff "mysterious", "shadowy", and "secretive"? 80% of everything on their site is one of the three. "New laser turret" doesn't have the same cachet as "mysterious laser turret" I guess.
- SkyMarshal 7y agoAlso it's not really "mysterious" if we know what it is.
- 4rt 7y agoTitle: Royal Navy deployed laser weapons during the Falklands War https://newatlas.com/falklands-laser/28574/ https://newatlas.com/falklands-laser/28574/
- elkos 7y agoCan't that baby burn retinas? If that's the case isn't a violation of the Geneva Convention to use that?
- waste_monk 7y agoAFAIK it's a war crime to deliberately blind people. Incidental blinding is acceptable, as long as the intent is to cleanly kill whatever's being lased. Similar to how shooting to kill is ok, but shooting to maim is not.