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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 m

by 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.
- toss1 4y ago
  Yes, I understand that much or all of the tracking is automated. That does not negate all countermeasures. If the laser is powerful enough to punch through a mirrored surface, then one can use a sacrificial surface, a scattering surface, heat shield, emission of a scattering fog/smoke/chaff, etc., etc., etc. I've watched the successful tests, and I'm not impressed. sure, it can shoot down a black-painted sitting duck with no countermeasures in several seconds. Merely starting to do twisting and spinning aerobatic maneuvers would have foiled it by constantly presenting new surfaces such that no tracking would work (can't make the laser point at the same spot from the other side). The point is that until lasers get to insane powers not yet available in any portable form, it is not at all a slam-dunk. This stuff was funded decades ago for the "Star Wars" anti-missile initiative. It could use all power in fixed positions on the ground, so as big, heavy, and sprawling as you want, and the target missiles couldn't significantly evade, and it was an utter failure. Sure, we've since seen orders of magnitude increases in strength, but we're still orders of magnitude away.
  - chipsa 4y ago
    Scattering surfaces aren't going to be any better against lasers, they'll heat up and become black bodies relatively quickly. Neither will emitting smoke or fog, because we're talking about airborne items, and they won't stay surrounding the aircraft very well. Sacrificial or heat shields will help, but that's extra weight that reduces your payload, and for quadcopter type drones, you can't reasonably add those to your props. SDI wasn't successful, no, because they didn't have the capability to make high power electrical lasers worth a damn back then. But the semi-operational AN/SEQ-1 was 30kW a decade ago, and technology has improved since then. Again, we're looking at an order of magnitude more power. And I don't think we need many more orders of magnitude to get down below the threshold of : can't do anything in the time you've got.

by toss1 4y ago

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.

toss1 4y ago
Yes, I understand that much or all of the tracking is automated. That does not negate all countermeasures. If the laser is powerful enough to punch through a mirrored surface, then one can use a sacrificial surface, a scattering surface, heat shield, emission of a scattering fog/smoke/chaff, etc., etc., etc. I've watched the successful tests, and I'm not impressed. sure, it can shoot down a black-painted sitting duck with no countermeasures in several seconds. Merely starting to do twisting and spinning aerobatic maneuvers would have foiled it by constantly presenting new surfaces such that no tracking would work (can't make the laser point at the same spot from the other side). The point is that until lasers get to insane powers not yet available in any portable form, it is not at all a slam-dunk. This stuff was funded decades ago for the "Star Wars" anti-missile initiative. It could use all power in fixed positions on the ground, so as big, heavy, and sprawling as you want, and the target missiles couldn't significantly evade, and it was an utter failure. Sure, we've since seen orders of magnitude increases in strength, but we're still orders of magnitude away.
- chipsa 4y ago
  Scattering surfaces aren't going to be any better against lasers, they'll heat up and become black bodies relatively quickly. Neither will emitting smoke or fog, because we're talking about airborne items, and they won't stay surrounding the aircraft very well. Sacrificial or heat shields will help, but that's extra weight that reduces your payload, and for quadcopter type drones, you can't reasonably add those to your props. SDI wasn't successful, no, because they didn't have the capability to make high power electrical lasers worth a damn back then. But the semi-operational AN/SEQ-1 was 30kW a decade ago, and technology has improved since then. Again, we're looking at an order of magnitude more power. And I don't think we need many more orders of magnitude to get down below the threshold of : can't do anything in the time you've got.