I must be missing something about this airborn anti-missle laser. How on earth can they generate enough energy to make the laser burn the missle? Do they have a nuclear reactor on the plane? And what’s the range on that laser? Lasers lose energy pretty quickly, so I can’t imagine that the effective range would be more than a couple of miles at the very farthest.
More importantly, I had a material science professor last year who’s worked with the Air Force on their top secret stuff, like stealth material (yes, really!) He mentioned these lasers in one of his lectures, and he hinted that they were duds. He didn’t go into details, but my impression was that they only worked in highly controlled test-scenarios, and were not practicle in real-world situations. For that matter, the same can apparently be said of stealth planes (did you know that B-2 bombers are so sensative to moisture damage that they need millions of dollars in repairs if they fly through a rain storm? The radar-scattering material is very very prone to blistering and spalling from moisture.)
Beyond the small ruby-crystal varieties, it is rather difficult to build a durable laser that can radiate enough energy to directly burn holes in stuff- say, for example, 1/4" steel. If you look around on the net, you can likely find places that do business in new and used industrial lasers.
Also the problem with building laser-guns is the exact same problem with building electric cars; there isn’t any way to easily store the huge amounts of electricity needed for the components available right now. - MC
IIRC - the Airborne laser is a chemical laser, not electrical. One would assume that the manufacture of the chemical fuel is quite endothermic. You can pack a whole lot of energy into certain chemical bonds (such as TNT, Torpex ect).
I’m still not sure I buy the whole idea. As many have pointed out, atmospheric interference would be a major problem. The other is targeting and tracking. It would be pretty difficult to point your laser at a rapidly accelerating missile hundreds of miles away from a moving platform that is, itself, subject to turbulence.
Another thing I always thought was kind of dangerous handheld laser weapons is the range. Unless you specifically design it to to difuse and scatter to a non harmful point at about a mile or so it seems to me a miss aimed shot could take out an unseen civilian having tea 10 miles away(or at least until the curve of the earth got in the way).
Well, the Air Force has been working on adaptive optics - deformable mirrors to compensate for atmospheric fluctuation. Astronomers now use it to obtain Hubble-like images from the ground (well, not quite there yet but soon), and the military had a head start and much more money, so atmospheric interference may not be a big problem. Not sure about targeting, but all you need to move is one mirror so as long as they’ve got good sensors, I don’t think it would be difficult.
What I’m curious about is, what’s preventing the enemy from covering the missile with highly reflective optical material? Reflective coatings can easily attain 98% reflection, better if you only need to reflect one specific wavelength. So only 2% of the laser energy goes into doing any damage.
Not that I think such a system should be built, but the technical challenges are very interesting.
I heard another story that I think is bunk. Maybe someone can confirm or deny it. It was that X-ray lasers were in the works. The neat thing about them was that if you focus them right, they could invisibly penetrate through a wall, then kill a person inside. Anyone else ever hear this?
I’m still not sure I buy it. The air itself scatters light energy to a considerable degree. This is a simple fact of physics that the Air Force cannot change. Remember, the airplane in all probability would be tens of miles away from the missle or more. The laser would have to retain enough energy at that distance to do enough damage to bring down the missle. And it would have to do it quickly, before the missle went down into the cloud cover. About the chemical/electrical thing: regardless of the power source, it’s still a laser, not some magical superweapon.
Absolutely nothing. The coating just has to be tough enough to withstand one missle flight.
A few years back I remember reading about a really fiendish weapon, which sounded practical to me:
it was a massive sub-sonic audio frequency generator. It was so powerfull that it would literally vibrate your guts, and cause the enemy soldiers to start vomiting, and lose all bowel control.
Think of it-winning a battle by making your enemies very sick (for a short time).
Seems like the ultimate weapon?
Why don’t we see these kind of weapons?
Laser weapons have a couple of very nice theoretical advantages - instant propagation and perfect accuracy. This makes them potentially very useful for shooting down missiles and aircraft. The navy in particular has been very interested in this application, since a sea-skimming missile coming over the horizon at mach 5 has to be taken down FAST.
A lot of research has been done on chemical lasers for military applications - Sealite for example was supposed to be a ship-born anti-missile system using a 2.2 megawatt laser. The beam was generated by reacting streams of hydrogen and fluorine gas in a lasing cavity, and the exhaust carried the excess heat away. However, the various problems already detailed, especially poor performance in mist/rain/smoke led the project to be abandoned.
The laser in the 747 was a chemical-fueled carbon-dioxide laser. It could hit things, but wasn’t really powerful enough to hurt them. A commonly shown video of a rocket booster on the ground “exploding” when hit by this laser was in fact a dud - the empty booster was under compression from cables stretched over it and buckled when the laser weakened the side. A full booster probably would have absorbed the energy without damage.
The X-ray laser is theoretically possible, and was hot news in the height of the SDI days. The idea isn’t so much as to fire through the side of a building and kill people inside, but that such a beam would be very energetic, long range and resistant to reflective or ablative shielding. There were two designs - firstly, the self destroying X-ray laser. This would be a nuclear bomb placed in orbit. When triggered, a fraction of the energy released would be propagated as X-ray beams by “lasing rods” mounted around the bomb. The plan was to take out a few hundred ICBM’s in a single shot. I don’t think the research even got off the ground though.
The second design was to blast a lasing rod to plasma with a set of conventional lasers using a technique called “inertial confinement.” My hunch is that this design was an attempt by the pulse-fusion researchers to skim off some of the SDI money into their field - it certainly isn’t a valid weapon design with today’s technology. But then, SDI wasn’t about real weapons - it was about forcing negotiations with the USSR and in that respect it worked.
I think this is an urban legend. The way I heard it, the sonic guns were supposed to just make you sick; the loss of bowel control is a new one on me. I’ve also heard stories where this device was a “death ray” that would literally shake you until you disintegrated into a pool of goo. This latter story is just too silly to dwell on.
Seriously, though, I think there was a period in the early 1990’s where the military was really interested in non-lethal weapons. Apparently, almost any half-assed idea could get funding if they made it sound interesting enough. Then again, the whole thing could have been a cover to get funding for some top-secret project, like stealth technology. It wouldn’t be the first time. I heard that the “Deep-Sea Search and Resuce Project,” or something along those lines, was a cover for the B-2 bomber funding before the Air Force publically unveiled the plane.
Scr4’s question about reflective coatings got me thinking:
In Star Trek, Star Wars, and all of those other Sci-Fi stories, why doesn’t anyone ever wear reflective armor, or carry a reflective shield? Even if the shield melted after a few hits, it would still be incredibly valuable in a firefight.
Also, think about the safety factor in a Star Trek-type phasor: The power pack in this device carries enough energy to let you dinintegrate a person like he never existed. What if the phasor malfunctions, or the power pack is hit during a fight? All the energy would be released in one fell swoop. It would be like a bomb going off in your hand.
My guess is that there one big problem, similar to that with biological and chemical weapons. How do you deploy the weapon without injuring your own troops with it? This type of weapon would be most useful in an infantry situation, so, since the lower the frequency, the further it travels, you’d have to have your good guys quite a ways away from the bad guys. This isn’t common when fighting in the trenches. I guess you could deploy from an aircraft or the like, but again, you have to make sure your guys are away.
Also, perhaps someone can enlighten as to whether people are OK after this barrage o’ sound. If so, what’s the point? Sure, you make people hurl, but if you don’t take them out of the action for a goodly amount of time, what’s the point?
These are all great replies - y’all know way more about this stuff than I do. But, as the OP, I think I get to jump back in anyway.
I think there is a difference between lasers in our reality and the one Han Solo has strapped to his thigh. I mean, his would work in the rain, no? No wussy mirror would block his laserbolts!
So, how about those kinds of lasers? They would be cool, no?
The blasters in Star Wars aren’t lasers - remember when Han Solo fired his in the garbage compactor? You could see the projectile bouncing around - light is way too fast for that!
A better idea is that the blaster fires a chunk of plasma contained in its own magnetic field (one of the explanations proposed for ball lightning.) And that would be totally cool!
There was an article in New Scientist a few weeks ago about “light strings”, very short intense laser pulses which are self-focusing when they pass through the atmosphere and lose very little energy. Lots of nice peaceful applications were suggested, but you can bet somewhere, someone in the military is interested…