4 ms·

Russia said they're shooting down drones with laser weapons, which sounds kinda reasonable. Probably fairly quick to aim, and definitely very quick to deliver.

by tazjin 4y ago

Russia said they're shooting down drones with laser weapons, which sounds kinda reasonable. Probably fairly quick to aim, and definitely very quick to deliver. Colourless, instant laser is the Star Wars we deserve, not the Star Wars we wanted, though ;)

javajosh 4y ago
>Russia said they're shooting down drones with laser weapons I tend not to believe this. In part because Russia is very comfortable with shameless lying, and in part because it's really hard to deliver enough energy with a laser to a moving target. That said, non-moving (hovering) drones would be very reasonable targets as you can illuminate for as long as it takes for an important part to melt. BTW my favorite anti-drone tech are trained hunting hawks. Hawks are a weapon for a more...civilized time.
- the_snooze 4y ago
  >it's really hard to deliver enough energy with a laser to a moving target. Israel demonstrated that capability earlier this year. https://news.yahoo.com/video-shows-israel-testing-iron-130044341.html https://news.yahoo.com/video-shows-israel-testing-iron-13004...
- dTal 4y ago
  Sounds like a fantastic way to rapidly maim a hawk.
  - doodlebugging 4y ago
    I think the goal with this method could be to train the hawk to carry an object such as a net or dangling string that the hawk would drop into the propellers of the drone, thus disabling it. One could also use a hawk as a platform to carry electronic means of disabling drones. The problem with hawks and drones becomes one of teaching the hawk to recognize enemy drones since it is likely in future wars that all sides will use drones and that it may be difficult to identify who controls a particular drone without monitoring that drone to map its communication path. It's cool to use a bird that instinctively hunts other birds but we need to understand that hawks are not hard to see and to eliminate so their utility on a battlefield is limited.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    I upvoted you because you may be right. I don't really know if people are IRL training hawks for this purpose, but if they did maybe they could give them protection of some kind, like articulated metal "shoes". It's also possible that smaller drones' propellers just don't have the kinetic energy to damage a bird in any meaningful way. It's all speculation, but I still think it would be very cool.
- trasz 4y ago
  Weaponised hawks have many interesting properties. They don't emit radio waves, and not much infrared either, so are hard to locate and shoot down. They can loiter forever (well, limited by hawk's lifetime, whatever it is), are self-refueling, and, to some extent, also self-repairing and self-replicating.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    Hawks also can't be suborned.
toss1 4y ago
The problem with laser weapons so far is that they have insufficient power and are fighting the inverse square law. Heating to create sufficient damage takes multiple seconds in good conditions. They work great in field tests where the operator can keep the target aligned exactly for a while and the target operator isn't evading. Add mirror finishes, thermal shielding, automated detection and evasion, much of which is cheap, and that'll stay a demonstrator weapon for a long time. I don't think anyone is worried about the claimed Russian lasers against drones (particularly since Russia tends to tout a lot of vaporware), but I'd be worried that since Russia is already happy to systematically commit and even advertise their war crimes, that they'd start using the lasers as blinding weapons despite the fact that it is also a war crime.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Mostly the use of laser blinders is uncommon because a laser which can blind a person will also happily do that to you from a reflective surface or down a military sighting optic.
  - toss1 4y ago
    Good point - tho if you are wearing protective optical gear and you can expect the enemy is not wearing it...
- tomatotomato37 4y ago
  Lasers also suffer from easily deployed countermeasures. Anyone who has been passed by some truck rolling coal can attest to how trivial it is for anything running a combustion engine to be modified to foul the air around it to the point of zero visibility. In addition, flying projectiles like missiles, mortars, or ICBMs can simply spin such that the laser has to heat the whole circumference of the body rather than a single point in order to be effective, which they may be doing anyway for stabilization
- chipsa 4y ago
  Laser weapons of this sort aren't manually operated. They automatically track the target while they are firing, and they are normally pulsed to allow higher instantaneous powers, which make mirror finishes useless (the pulsed power is high enough that the amount of power that isn't reflected is enough to heat the surface of the mirror finish enough to make it non-reflective). The target also becomes very bright while it's being engaged, making it much easier for electro-optical systems to track. The multiple seconds to kill is dependent on the laser power, the higher the power, the longer it takes to kill. The LaWS tested by the USN was 30kW or so, but they're looking at lasers with 10x the power for operational use. So the 2 seconds to down a UAV turns into 2/10s of a second, which is probably beyond reaction time, even for automated detection and evasion.

by tazjin 4y ago

javajosh 4y ago

>Russia said they're shooting down drones with laser weapons I tend not to believe this. In part because Russia is very comfortable with shameless lying, and in part because it's really hard to deliver enough energy with a laser to a moving target. That said, non-moving (hovering) drones would be very reasonable targets as you can illuminate for as long as it takes for an important part to melt. BTW my favorite anti-drone tech are trained hunting hawks. Hawks are a weapon for a more...civilized time.

the_snooze 4y ago
>it's really hard to deliver enough energy with a laser to a moving target. Israel demonstrated that capability earlier this year. https://news.yahoo.com/video-shows-israel-testing-iron-130044341.html https://news.yahoo.com/video-shows-israel-testing-iron-13004...
dTal 4y ago
Sounds like a fantastic way to rapidly maim a hawk.
- doodlebugging 4y ago
  I think the goal with this method could be to train the hawk to carry an object such as a net or dangling string that the hawk would drop into the propellers of the drone, thus disabling it. One could also use a hawk as a platform to carry electronic means of disabling drones. The problem with hawks and drones becomes one of teaching the hawk to recognize enemy drones since it is likely in future wars that all sides will use drones and that it may be difficult to identify who controls a particular drone without monitoring that drone to map its communication path. It's cool to use a bird that instinctively hunts other birds but we need to understand that hawks are not hard to see and to eliminate so their utility on a battlefield is limited.
- javajosh 4y ago
  I upvoted you because you may be right. I don't really know if people are IRL training hawks for this purpose, but if they did maybe they could give them protection of some kind, like articulated metal "shoes". It's also possible that smaller drones' propellers just don't have the kinetic energy to damage a bird in any meaningful way. It's all speculation, but I still think it would be very cool.
trasz 4y ago
Weaponised hawks have many interesting properties. They don't emit radio waves, and not much infrared either, so are hard to locate and shoot down. They can loiter forever (well, limited by hawk's lifetime, whatever it is), are self-refueling, and, to some extent, also self-repairing and self-replicating.
- javajosh 4y ago
  Hawks also can't be suborned.

toss1 4y ago

The problem with laser weapons so far is that they have insufficient power and are fighting the inverse square law. Heating to create sufficient damage takes multiple seconds in good conditions. They work great in field tests where the operator can keep the target aligned exactly for a while and the target operator isn't evading. Add mirror finishes, thermal shielding, automated detection and evasion, much of which is cheap, and that'll stay a demonstrator weapon for a long time. I don't think anyone is worried about the claimed Russian lasers against drones (particularly since Russia tends to tout a lot of vaporware), but I'd be worried that since Russia is already happy to systematically commit and even advertise their war crimes, that they'd start using the lasers as blinding weapons despite the fact that it is also a war crime.

XorNot 4y ago
Mostly the use of laser blinders is uncommon because a laser which can blind a person will also happily do that to you from a reflective surface or down a military sighting optic.
- toss1 4y ago
  Good point - tho if you are wearing protective optical gear and you can expect the enemy is not wearing it...
tomatotomato37 4y ago
Lasers also suffer from easily deployed countermeasures. Anyone who has been passed by some truck rolling coal can attest to how trivial it is for anything running a combustion engine to be modified to foul the air around it to the point of zero visibility. In addition, flying projectiles like missiles, mortars, or ICBMs can simply spin such that the laser has to heat the whole circumference of the body rather than a single point in order to be effective, which they may be doing anyway for stabilization
chipsa 4y ago
Laser weapons of this sort aren't manually operated. They automatically track the target while they are firing, and they are normally pulsed to allow higher instantaneous powers, which make mirror finishes useless (the pulsed power is high enough that the amount of power that isn't reflected is enough to heat the surface of the mirror finish enough to make it non-reflective). The target also becomes very bright while it's being engaged, making it much easier for electro-optical systems to track. The multiple seconds to kill is dependent on the laser power, the higher the power, the longer it takes to kill. The LaWS tested by the USN was 30kW or so, but they're looking at lasers with 10x the power for operational use. So the 2 seconds to down a UAV turns into 2/10s of a second, which is probably beyond reaction time, even for automated detection and evasion.