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Science & Technology
U.S. hails airborne laser as weapons milestone
2006-10-28
The head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency on Friday hailed what he described as epochal progress toward putting a high-energy laser aboard a modified Boeing Co. 747 to zap ballistic missiles that could be fired by North Korea and Iran.

The so-called Airborne Laser has been developed at a cost so far of about $3.5 billion with the aim of destroying, at the speed of light, all classes of ballistic missiles shortly after their launch. If successful in flight testing and deployed, it would become part of an emerging U.S. anti-missile shield that also includes land- and sea-based interceptor missiles.

"You've demonstrated capability on the ground," Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering said at a ceremony at which the aircraft was rolled out of a Wichita, Kansas, hangar where it has been undergoing modifications. "Not since that time nearly twenty-two hundred years ago, when Archimedes reflected the sun's rays to set the Roman fleet on fire off Syracuse, has the world seen a weapon that puts fresh meaning into the phrase 'in real time'."
Posted by:.com

#39  It's pretty easy to guess what usually ends up in your gaping mouth, Mr. One Trick Pony.
Posted by: Zenster   2006-10-28 23:16  

#38  It's pretty easy to guess what ends up in your gaping mouth, Mr. One Trick Pony.
Posted by: Zenster   2006-10-28 23:02  

#37  
Redacted by moderator. Comments may be redacted for trolling, violation of standards of good manners, or plain stupidity. Please correct the condition that applies and try again. Contents may be viewed in the sinktrap. Further violations may result in banning.
Posted by: Zenster   2006-10-28 23:16  

#36  wow
Posted by: Darrell   2006-10-28 22:25  

#35  Darrell, your willingness to speculate openly about another person's sex life shows everyone exactly what sort of moral integrity you posses or, more likely, lack.

Either that or he's bored by your interminable posts.
Posted by: yawn   2006-10-28 22:24  

#34  It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

Old laser lab warning sign:

CAUTION - DO NOT STARE INTO LASER WITH REMAINING EYE

Hook up your laser to a computer and show me what an atom looks like, then I'll be impressed.

Individual atoms are much smaller than visible optical wavelengths, which goes a long way towards explaining why we humans cannot see them. For imaging individual atoms, the instrument of choice is the Scanning Tunneling Microscope.

You need to get laid.

Darrell, your willingness to speculate openly about another person's sex life shows everyone exactly what sort of moral integrity you posses or, more likely, lack.

IÂ’ve been laid by one honest woman more times than youÂ’ve had hot dinners.
Posted by: Zenster   2006-10-28 22:19  

#33  I'm buying stock in companies that make Coumarin.
Posted by: Jereth Shineger1757   2006-10-28 22:14  

#32  Have you ever played with a laser?

It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
Hook up your laser to a computer and show me what an atom looks like, then I'll be impressed.
Posted by: Shaviting Phinens9082   2006-10-28 21:44  

#31  "The romance ain't gone, you just have to get creative about it."
You need to get laid.
Posted by: Darrell   2006-10-28 21:35  

#30  yawn
Posted by: yawn   2006-10-28 21:31  

#29  The romance is gone.

Bah! Have you ever played with a laser? There are unlimited amounts of fun to be had toying around with one of those puppies. Several years ago a pal showed up on my doorstep with a Spectra-Physics 20mW Argon Laser. He told me that if I could fix it I could keep it. One $10.00 contacter later I had the beast up and running. Near my lab was a chap who serviced lasers for a living and he brought in SP's rep and they tweaked the critter back to spec perfection.

I built a three stage variable speed motorized rotating epicentric mirror array that produces complex Lissajou figures. Along with a crude chopper and some other cheap optics I put on some tasty home laser light shows for my guests. For extra fun, I pipe in my 5 mW HeNe laser for two colors.

I recently acquired a Stanford Research SR540 variable speed precision optical chopper for even more fun and games. This should allow me to set up beautiful rotating spoked beam projections.

Try using a laser to just barely graze the edge of an ice cube fixed in place on a mirror. Bounce the beam onto a bedsheet or projection screen and I swear you can see individual molecular layers of the crystal melting away. It looks like these gorgeous slowly shifting Gaussian field patterns.

The romance ain't gone, you just have to get creative about it.
Posted by: Zenster   2006-10-28 21:26  

#28  It was the little bits afterwards that filled in the details.

Seriously, of course we have attempted to include engineering features to minimize overshoots and misses in tactical lasers. But there ARE issues associated with directed energy weapons that go beyond the basic engineering work. Airspace management is one of them. There are other operational issues I won't go into here.

My main reason for bringing this up is to manage expectations. Lasers are "Star War" things to many people. They have great promise, but there are many open questions about their use, just as there are issues WRT UAVs on our border, co-mingling with commercial and general aviation.
Posted by: lotp   2006-10-28 21:13  

#27  You got all that from a classical education? Damn.
Posted by: Shaviting Phinens9082   2006-10-28 21:11  

#26  And need I also add that I'm familiar with the various models of groundbased THEL, both the chemically and the wired ones? And their effective ranges? And the atomospheric modelling associated with evaluating both laser designs and simulating operational scenarios? And .....

etc.
Posted by: lotp   2006-10-28 21:06  

#25  Zenster, I'm familiar with the DEW setup.

I'm ALSO familiar with the simulations DOD has run, having run some of my own using the same simulation platform.

Rules of airspace management are a BIG deal with regard to deployment of mobile lasers, in particular. Or at least the joint program office developing them thinks so.
Posted by: lotp   2006-10-28 21:05  

#24  Pure stone...

"I tried him with mild jokes—then with severe ones; I dosed him with bad jokes, and riddled him with good ones; I fired old, stale jokes on him, and peppered him fore and aft with red-hot new ones. I warmed up to my work, and assaulted him on the right and left, in front and behind; I fumed, and charged, and ranted, till I was hoarse and sick, and frantic and furious; but I never moved him once—I never started a smile or a tear! Never a ghost of a smile, and never a suspicion of moisture!"

--Twain, A Deception

Pfeh.
Posted by: .com   2006-10-28 20:48  

#23  The romance is gone.

"I shot an arrow into the air..."

Longfellow weeps... Willian Tell commiserates. Walter Tell, his son, breathes heavy sigh of relief. So does the apple.
Posted by: .com   2006-10-28 20:44  

#22  the beams don't just die away if they miss - they continue to travel for potentially a VERY long distance. Issues of airspace management become very important in any engagement using them to down airborne threats.

At any major high-power laser installation you will find that there is a much lower power "pilot laser" piped into the beamline for orientation, alignment and other maintenance tasks. This allows personnel to perform setup and modification of beamline experiments without risking injury by having the high-power beam present.

So it is with DEW lasers. They all have much lower power coaxial targeting beams that perform ranging and target acquisition. Only when the targeting beam has successfully painted and begun tracking a potential hostile vehicle is the main beam brought online. This assures reduced consumption of expensive reactants (in the case of chemical lasers), prolongs overall emission lifetime and helps to prevent any beam overshoot that might cause unintended strikes.
Posted by: Zenster   2006-10-28 20:28  

#21  Just one caution re: expectations for directed energy weapons.

Altitude, humidity and some forms of weather can interfere with the beam, an effect that DOD has spent a considerable amount of time and money measuring and modeling. Sea level in many places, jungles etc. are poorer places to deploy them than deserts and higher altitudes.

Given the low humidity at White Sands, that means that you cannot extrapolate distances & energy transfer achieved in tests there to just any place around the world. At altitude, however, plane to plane or plane to missile use will not face the same degradation.

The flip side of that is that unlike a kinetic weapon (gun, artillery etc.) the beams don't just die away if they miss - they continue to travel for potentially a VERY long distance. Issues of airspace management become very important in any engagement using them to down airborne threats.
Posted by: lotp   2006-10-28 19:18  

#20  This laser has been around for a while and many ground shots made at White Sands. Believe me (I saw the videos only), this thing does ablate and melt metal rapidly. On a stationary target, (admittedly not off axis, moving, etc) it melts and vaporizes 3 inches of block aluminum in about 10 seconds. I forgot target distance for shot, but in the multiple kilometer range.
Posted by: SpecOp35   2006-10-28 18:23  

#19  Neutrino rifle, .com, LMAO!!!!
Posted by: Alaska Paul   2006-10-28 17:55  

#18  Kinda like having the machine gun fire between the propeller blades.

No, don't thank me, it's what I live for, lol.

;-)
Posted by: .com   2006-10-28 14:05  

#17  Its the impact of the photon's and not the heat that kills the missile.

Yup. The photonic wavefront of a multi-megawatt laser beam literally slams into re-entry vehicles or airbore targets like a head on collision with a truck. Target death is achieved through fragmentation. None of this melting or vaporizing stuff and polished nickel-steel nosecones do exactly squat to reflect it.

Fundamental research into laser drilling discovered that a CW (Constant Wattage) beam rapidly lost power in the bore due to off-axis scattering by exiting chips.

They quickly learned to pulse laser drills so that kerf material was ejected from the bore by air pressure shock waves from the detonation of each successive arriving photon packet, thus leaving a clear beam path.
Posted by: Zenster   2006-10-28 14:00  

#16  It sucks to type with the wife asking a bunch of other questions - sorry for the large number of typos in my last response.
Posted by: 3dc   2006-10-28 12:53  

#15  I have a souvenir neutrino rifle left over from earlier efforts, but it doesn't have any discernable effect, damnit. Gotta use a larger calibre. There's no elegance in using those big ugly photon slugs, but the guys in the crew cuts say ya gotta go with results. grumble-grumble...

/feynman
Posted by: .com   2006-10-28 12:45  

#14  Sucks to be in the fallout range.
Posted by: anonymous2u   2006-10-28 12:37  

#13  A shiny missile doesn't ward off the laser. Why? Because a plused laser is still a shockwave impact weapon. Its the impact of the photon's and not the heat that kills the missile.
Is a dx/dt thingy... A strong very narrow pulse that sets up a shockwave.
You want a decent set of gaps between the pulses as a heat, vaporization and ionization will degraged and deflect the pulses.
Think of a successful laser ABM system as a rapid fire hammer not a burning ray.
Posted by: 3dc   2006-10-28 12:31  

#12  Great news.

However that's not the solution to the Iranian, Syrian, Saudi, and Pakistani problems.
Posted by: Kalle (kafir forever)   2006-10-28 11:53  

#11  go deer hunting with a ... M1-Abrams.

It would be overkill. Why not mosquitoes, while you're at it?
Posted by: anonymous5089   2006-10-28 11:42  

#10  go deer hunting with a ... M1-Abrams.

My guard unit does that occasionaly. If a deer hops out onto the range during table VII, its "gunner, target troops, co-ax!"

We could have used a ground mount laser in the 100 kilowatt range last year. Or one mounted on a UAV to hunt for IED planting teams.
Posted by: N guard   2006-10-28 11:24  

#9  That pic is of of the Archimedes death ray.

Long digression into the Ancients knew everything (as the zeitgeist of Western thought for 2,000 years) avoided, but despite modern failures to replicate what the pic shows, it intrigues me the Greeks understood the possibility, which suggests they had experienced the actuality of a 'death ray'.
Posted by: phil_b   2006-10-28 08:33  

#8  Can we set the thing on "wide beam" and take out all of Syria with it? I know it wouldn't be as powerfull that way, but with prolonged exposure....
Posted by: bigjim-ky   2006-10-28 08:09  

#7  "Blinding terrorists or lopping off an arm would be a real good solution for the problem they pose"

Plus, once you have been blinded by a stoneburner you have to wander alone into the desert and return your tainted water to Shai Hulud.
Posted by: Flea   2006-10-28 07:56  

#6  They'll only add such a device to the restricted Geneva Conventions protocols of warfare.
Posted by: smn   2006-10-28 04:28  

#5  Heh heh! I'll bet it would be! It would sort of take the fun out of the 30-06, though!

But no, I meant the firearms version, not the airplane!
Posted by: gorb   2006-10-28 04:24  

#4  Any word on using that laser firearm to blind or ventilate terrorists on the ground?

It's pretty safe to say that the laser in question approaches the megawatt or multi-megawatt range. You might as well go deer hunting with a Howitzer or M1-Abrams. Not that it wouldn't be fun, mind you.
Posted by: Zenster   2006-10-28 04:03  

#3  Ahmanutjob better start staying indoor more or he may well develop a bad sunburn one of these days! And Tater. And his stoopid tots.

Any word on using that laser firearm to blind or ventilate terrorists on the ground? Blinding terrorists or lopping off an arm would be a real good solution for the problem they pose, even if "human rights" groups say it's inhumane [nevermind the terrorists' victims human rights, of course]. It would make sniper-equivalents out of many, and no sound to give them away. You'd have to think ten times before you'd choose to go up against this kind of weapon. And you certainly wouldn't want to leave these laying around.
Posted by: gorb   2006-10-28 03:08  

#2  Article: Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester under former President Bill Clinton and now at the private Center for Defense Information, said in an e-mail reply to Reuters that its real effectiveness appeared doubtful.

I've heard many variations of the word "liberal" - "progressive", "moderate", etc. This is the first time I've heard it rendered as "private".
Posted by: Zhang Fei   2006-10-28 01:10  

#1  Engineers are to start installing a high-energy chemical oxygen iodine laser on the modified jumbo jet next year

Sunlight may be the best disinfectant but I'm more than happy to rely upon oxygen and iodine for a little "antibacterial" action.

From their start, I have always maintained that the SDI-Star Wars programs were a near-equivalent to the Apollo program in terms of both short-term benefits and long range technology spin-offs.

Despite all of the naysaying by critics or anti-military types and regardless of current technological expertise, DEWs (Directed Energy Weapons) will become the de facto standard in military hardware. Witness parallel efforts to develop a small laser firearm for ground-based troops.

As with every single other advance that has rendered America this world's sole undisputed (unless you actually believe China's propaganda) superpower, I welcome this new addition to liberty's arsenal.
Posted by: Zenster   2006-10-28 00:58  

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