How come we seldom see these technologies in air combat?

[SamuelA]

@Declan

40 years of jet fighters and no one has come up with a rear firing missile, other than a james bond movie. So i presume we are skipping it entirely and going straight to pilots with lasers (*) on their heads , lol.

I wonder if LSLguy is correct about that. Basically, with the new fiber lasers, practical high power laser weapons that run on electricity are finally becoming available. The electricity would come from the jet engines on the aircraft turning a generator.

You would need a much bigger airframe to hold the laser beam generators and to overcome the drag caused by bulge where the laser turret is located. And only speed (so you can use this thing as an interceptor or to rapidly intrude on enemy territory) matters, not stealthiness or maneuverability. The idea is, you burn out of the sky any SAMs, anti-air missiles, any stealth aircraft that get too close and get detected, and since the beam can’t be dodged and propagates at the speed of light, nothing but another laser can really hurt you. You fly at high altitudes in a formation with other aircraft of this type so you can support each other with offensive and defensive laser fire. This also means flak won’t work (you fly too high or shoot down the shells), and mass barrages of SAMs would only work if they can overwhelm the combined defenses of all the aircraft in formation.

Sounds nifty. Wonder if this will ever be built.

[carnivorousplant]

As you say, the airframe must be large to hold the laser and generating device. I think that at the moment that rules out fighters.

[MichaelEmouse]

Could we have a model name for lasers that run on electricity, can destroy all those targets and are available?

Can coatings be used to reflect laser energy?

If an airborne laser can do that and coatings aren’t a sufficient defense then ground/surface-based lasers will have access to orders of magnitude more power against aircraft and it’s pretty much the end of tactical aircraft. Yet that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening.

[SamuelA]

@MichaelEmouse

Could we have a model name for lasers that run on electricity, can destroy all those targets and are available?

Can coatings be used to reflect laser energy?

If an airborne laser can do that and coatings aren’t a sufficient defense then ground/surface-based lasers will have access to orders of magnitude more power against aircraft and it’s pretty much the end of tactical aircraft. Yet that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening.

Coatings won’t work, of course. What you are saying should be true, though keep in mind, the ground based model :

Would need a massive power plant and would need to be enormous - the air based version might be mounted in a large airplane. The ground based model would need sensors that can’t be jammed or stealthed past - no country has solved that problem yet, though it’s probably solvable.

And you would need a lot of the ground based models, enough to cover every track an intruding aircraft might use. In effect, it would be more cost effective to own defender aircraft with the same technology to use as interceptors if you are trying to protect a country as large as the United States.

Finally, you can make the ground based models very powerful - but aircraft can move and concentrate fire at a time and place of their choosing.

Anyways, this is start of the art technology that primarily the United States has. I am not even sure other countries have working examples of this. Also, 60 kW is apparently the limit at the moment, and I’ve read elsewhere that a megawatt is what you want before it’s a really effective weapon. http://news.lockheedmartin.com/2017-03-16-Lockheed-Martin-to-Deliver-World-Record-Setting-60kW-Laser-to-U-S-Army

Though if it’s really 43 percent efficient…that’s incredible. Absolutely insane.

[Dr.Strangelove]

@MichaelEmouse

See the 2 gray bars, one on top, the other at the bottom and forward? Imagine them as phased arrays which can swivel left to right and are encased in radar transparent pods.

Those are Gigantor XL solar arrays. You can’t fool me :).

[MichaelEmouse]

@Tranquilis

Item: Each manever would disrupt airflow in the nozzle of a ram, so yes, that’s very much a factor. Second, if you’re going to make the missile MORE complex by adding additional thrust elements, you’ve made the missile heavier (thus slower) and more complex (thus more likely to fail) - not things that pilots are going to appreciate.

While basically correct - presuming you don’t need to deal whith shifting angles of attack due to continual manuever - I want to know: if you already have a booster in place, and it’s more than adequate for combat, why would you want to complicate things? Because that’s what we’ve got - A rocket motor (booster) handling combat, quite effectively.

I agree that the ram intake wouldn’t be suitable for short range missiles or missile which maneuver a lot.

I don’t believe I’ve said such a booster was more than adequate for long range combat. I’ve said it’s adequate to get the missile up to a speed where there’s enough ram effect for the ram engine to take over. In many cases, the booster alone does not seem to be more than adequate for combat, hence this list of missiles which use ramjet: Ramjet - Wikipedia R-77 - Wikipedia
Most of them have a range of more than 50km, often more than 100km, which is where I figured extracting more of the energy with a turbine and turning it into the higher mass, lower velocity airflow of a fan engine would increase the specific impulse.