OK - we’ve got laser eye surgery, laser-guided missles… in Real Genius college kids used lasers to burn a hole in a billboard!
Why doesn’t the army have laser guns?
They use too much power, and too hard to miniaturize in a portable, practical form. Those are the reasons I’ve heard in the past. I’ll leave it to the more technically-informed to elaborate.
–Calredic
I think Star Wars has taught us that professional soldiers are absolutely unable to hit anything smaller than a spaceship with a laser gun. Only untrained rebels are capable of getting any use out of them.
That’s true (about gobbling power,) and then there’s the smoke problem. The visibility in most battlefields quickly goes bad from smoke and dust, and lasers don’t travel well in that stuff.
Lasers can run off of penlight betteries. I have one around here somewhere. However, beyond looking straight at it it can’t hurt a fly (literally). Great for cats though. They’ll chase the spot till they drop.
The main problem is you can’t get any real distance out of a laser and still make it hurt something. There’s crud in the air that diffuses the light so after a short while it’s about as harmful as a flashlight. That’s why spacships in movies can use them effectively (space is a vacuum, their engines provide enough power and they don’t need to worry about ammo).
If you want it to go far in the atmosphere and still pack a punch you need LOTS of power. One of the national labratories (I forget which one) used a laser to punch a hole in a steel plate a few feet think about a mile away. The downside is I believe they had to get a nearby powerstation to devote ALL of its output to them for a short time.
You can also power a laser with an atomic bomb. As the bomb explodes it powers the laser in the few nanoseconds before the whole thing is atomized. Very powerful (theoretically) but I think you can see the downsides to this approach.
The air force is working on a LASER for use in missile defense:
http://www.de.afrl.af.mil/pa/releases/1999/99-71.html
If I remember correctly, the armed forces (forget what branch) mounted a laser in the nose of a 747 to test its effectiveness. They claimed it had the power to down other planes.
–Tim
Until they master plasticrete technology and mold it into Stormtrooper like outfits it will just clash with the camo outfits.
Laser guns and particle beam guns do require way too much power(fuel), but them again so does a flamethrower and we’ve been using them for ages. They just too exotic, delicate, and not worth the trouble when they’re just better ways to kill soldiers.
Gun powder weapons are great, they can get wet, dropped, and field serviced. Flamethrowers are a bit more delicate and dangerous but well worth the trouble for what they do. Missile technology is cheap and efficent, so there’s really no reason for beam weapons to be around especially for foot soldiers.
This thread reminds of that ‘cancer’ gun that was rumored to exist in the 60’s. One shot and it fills your victim full of radiation and sooner or later they develop lethal unoperatable cancer. Yeah its probably an UL.
Another disadvantage of lasers compared to guns .
A laser will burn a hole in you but the damage site is likely to be limited to that area and so may not be fatal/disabling.
A bullet will impart mechanical energy to anything solid it hits such as bone which can in turn cause more damage when shattering. There may well be serious hydraulic shock which can cause damage away from the immediate area by rupturing blood vessels or nearby organs.
A bullet may bounce around inside you causing a huge amount of damage.
To get a laser to produce a more widespread damage pattern would require more energy producable in a portable device.
There are lots of reasons for not using personal lasers as hand weapons, the most important of which is that lasers are intrinsically inefficient. Unless you’re using a chemical laser you inevitably lose energy in creating the population inversion that makes laser gain possible. In some color center lasers you can get 80% efficiency, but your garden-variety carbon dioxide laser has only a few percent efficiency (wall plug to laser beam). Not only does all that translate into a LOT of waste heat (wear oven mitts while operating the laser), but it means that you have to store an awful lot of electrical energy for a few shots. At that point you might as well use that big battery to charge a capacitor and toss it at the enemy. It’ll make a bigger bang.
There are lots of reasons for not using personal lasers as hand weapons, the most important of which is that lasers are intrinsically inefficient. Unless you’re using a chemical laser you inevitably lose energy in creating the population inversion that makes laser gain possible. In some color center lasers you can get 80% efficiency, but your garden-variety carbon dioxide laser has only a few percent efficiency (wall plug to laser beam). Not only does all that translate into a LOT of waste heat (wear oven mitts while operating the laser), but it means that you have to store an awful lot of electrical energy for a few shots. At that point you might as well use that big battery to charge a capacitor and toss it at the enemy. It’ll make a bigger bang.
I have stayed away for a while because I was waiting for a real science buff to come around. I could have figured that lasers need a lot of power… DUH! But it took CalMeacham to say it in a way that I had trouble understanding!
In the lasik commercials, the laser looks to be about the size of the suction/drilling machine that sits next to my chair at the dentist’s office. That’s not that big, and I assume that that laser could hurt someone.
I assume that the military has more $$$ than Dr. Lasik - why aren’t they building blasters?
Even when it becomes technically possible to build a handgun-sized or rifle-sized laser of lethal power, I imagine the armed forces will take their sweet time adopting it.
The absolute top priority in a personal sidearm type weapon is reliability. After all, a weapon that fails its user at a critical moment is worse than useless. It’s better to use an obsolete but well-understood tool to use something cutting edge but unpredictable.
Partly as a consequence, the rate of advance in the field of personal weapons appears to be positively glacial when compared with just about anything else. New models of guns tend to be based squarely on mechanical principles proven by earlier models, and a popular model may stay in production virtually unchanged for decades. There is still a market for revolvers, after all, a design that is, arguably, at least 100 years out of date.
The Colt .45 1911 automatic pistol was so named (IIRC) because it was designed and developed in the year 1911. Yet it was the US Army’s standard sidearm until just a few years ago. So maybe 80 years after laser sidearms are finally possible, we can expect to see the military getting interested.
While the comments above about power problems are all correct, they don’t apply to the simplest use of lasers on the battlefield: blinding soldiers or sensors. That takes much less power than actually inflicting bodily harm. There’s some evidence Iraq used lasers to blind Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq War.
The reason that development of lasers as personal weapons hasn’t gone further is that it’s been banned by an international convention since the summer of 1998. The thought of a weapon that intentionally blinded its target was evidently so horrifying, more horrifying than weapons that simply kill, that a convention was created to forbid the use of blinding weapons.
Interestingly, it’s much the same principle as the bans on the use of poison gas after World War I. During World War I, poison gas was relatively humane in the very limited sense that it disabled many more than it killed. Not surprisingly, that wasn’t a very comforting thought, and international agreements prohibited the use of chemical weapons.
Last I saw, the United States has signed but not yet ratified the convention banning blinding weapons. I might have missed the ratification, though.
I’ve heard vague things about laser weapons being used to blind, not kill, opponents in battle. I’ve also heard that U.S. troops have been issued laser-resistant goggles. But I’ve never had any concrete information on laser weaponry. Lots of targeting and rangefinding is done with laser, and maybe those can be used to blind? Does anyone know anything about this?
As far as purely laser weapons, I guess simple bullets work well enough, and have a bigger congressional lobby. Unless you’re Goldfinger, you’d be going to a lot of trouble to kill someone with a laser.
Everything people have said about power consumption, unreliability, and limited damage is true. In addition, the lasers used to guide bombs aren’t all that great themselves. They worked well in Iraq because the skys were usually clear. But in Kosovo, which gets lots of bad weather around the time NATO attacked, the cloud cover often scattered the lasers, making the laser guided missles and bombs essentially unguided. This limitation is why the USAF developed satellite-guided bombs for use with the B-2 bomber. Water is deadly to lasers. And since the atmosphere has plenty of water vapor in it, air is a particularly bad medium to try to shoot lasers through.
Yes this can be done. I have a friend that is a now a Tank Commander in Twentynine Palms. When he used to be a gunner he would use the laser range finder to “lase” things that showed up on his infra-red screen. Lets just say that the Laser Ranger finder on a M1A Abrahms tank does funny things to your average JackRabbit.
Thank you, Sdimbert. We aim to confuse.
If you want a good book on lasers as weapons, hav a look at Jeff Hecht’s “Beam Weapons”. It’s over ten years old, but the laws of physics haven’t changed.
As far as I now, there are still people working on laser blinding weapons. I find the prospect disgusting, but that doesn’t stop some people. Proponents argue that if you blind someone, you aren’t hurting them as badly as if you shoot them. This requires a brand of logic that I don’t subscribe to. I keep thinking about those WWI pictures of lines of soldiers blinded by gas, leading each other through the battlefield.
Amen to that, Cal. That sounds like something a land mine manufacturer would say to justify millions of people who are missing limbs. “Blowing off his legs and making him wheelchair-bound for life isn’t being quite as cruel as just killing him.”
As Johnny L.A. said, the Air Force has already developed a laser weapon. They are planning an Airborne Laser System, a Boeing 747 equipped with a laser powerful enough to disable missiles in boost phase. They’ve already started building one such plane.
I also read an article on a laser system for cutting through shields in decommissioned nuclear power plants. The system is housed on two trailers, which I think qualifies as portable.