4 ms·

Not my field, but I'll play with some numbers on a Friday afternoon. From some googling, I'm getting an estimate of about -1dB attenuation for the fiber optic a

Not my field, but I'll play with some numbers on a Friday afternoon. From some googling, I'm getting an estimate of about -1dB attenuation for the fiber optic and end connectors for a meter long fiber in the near IR. Which would give about 20% losses. The linked-to gun said it did a 1MW pulse, so to match that with 20% losses you need to start with 1.25MW, giving you 0.25MW loss. But the video doesn't state a pulse time. You can use (http://www.mhi-inc.com/Converter/watt_calculator.htm http://www.mhi-inc.com/Converter/watt_calculator.htm) to play around with times... assuming it fires for 0.001s (I would guess it is shorter than that) and all that loss shows up as heat, it would be less than a BTU, so easily cool-able. Assuming your backpack could carry enough energy to have it fire at that power level for a full second, that conversion page says the waste heat from the fiber would melt a 1.6 pound block of ice. Such a backpack would do well to have a top-loading ice reservoir. However that loss percentage is probably for reasonably unbent fibers, and the whole point of the backpack-to-gun fiber is to allow bending quite a bit. For a higher power system, I'd think it better to skip the fiber optics and instead have something like the laser turrets they put on the front of planes (http://www.mda.mil/system/altb.html http://www.mda.mil/system/altb.html). Have a small version of that come up over the wearer's shoulder, with the turret sitting in front of the user so they can aim anywhere in front of them. Even with 8 mirrors in the path to get the business end somewhere comfortable, 98% efficient mirrors would have 15% losses. I also happened upon this much lower powered backpack laser http://www.cleanlaser.de/wEnglish/produkte/backpack.php http://www.cleanlaser.de/wEnglish/produkte/backpack.php, and its bigger cousin, http://www.cleanlaser.de/wEnglish/produkte/high-power-cl-1000.php http://www.cleanlaser.de/wEnglish/produkte/high-power-cl-100....

phlux 16y ago
So in thinking about this more - it seems that using a fiber relay system is less than ideal - and instead what we may want is a series of tubes with mirrors. Tubes and mirrors with joints that allow articulation of the tube system. Further, based on the description of the plane-mounted anti-missle laser system, which uses a telescoping system to focus the beam - it would seem that we could incorporate the telescoping functions into our articulated tube, It should be a trivial exercise to combine multiple beams via prisms and mirrors, at east a solveable problem. So - we will need the exoskeleton I mentioned in my other post as we will need the rigidity of the system to mount our series of tubes to. Interestingly, the .mil article refers to KW class lasers - rather than MW class. I think some testing needs to be done with shooting this DIY laser through a telescope as well.

phlux 16y ago

So in thinking about this more - it seems that using a fiber relay system is less than ideal - and instead what we may want is a series of tubes with mirrors. Tubes and mirrors with joints that allow articulation of the tube system. Further, based on the description of the plane-mounted anti-missle laser system, which uses a telescoping system to focus the beam - it would seem that we could incorporate the telescoping functions into our articulated tube, It should be a trivial exercise to combine multiple beams via prisms and mirrors, at east a solveable problem. So - we will need the exoskeleton I mentioned in my other post as we will need the rigidity of the system to mount our series of tubes to. Interestingly, the .mil article refers to KW class lasers - rather than MW class. I think some testing needs to be done with shooting this DIY laser through a telescope as well.