Nope, not buying it. Personally, I’d be FAR less afraid of a laser light show than I would a .50 calibre machine gun chattering away at me. What possible inducement is there for me to leave an area if someone is buzzing through an area with a laser? Even if it could instantly blind anyone who looked right into it, the laser itself would cover a vanishingly small area, and you still have to hit the guys in the eyes. With multiple targets rushing at you in combat conditions that is basically impossible.
Tear gas, although it does indeed eventually disperse, will effectively incapacitate any individual without a gasmask for up to a half hour. Very nasty, very effective stuff. A machine gun kills everything and it’s loud, which has a psychological impact
Heck, I’m just waiting for the laser that can be tuned to only affect people who have a certain range of skin colour.
Actually, that’s what I thought the thread was about, just from reading the title. Such (fictional) lasers were referenced in the British sci-fi series Starcops, as being the latest thing, circa 2017.
Stupid choice? Aren’t we arguing whether a blinding laser is more vile than conventional weapons? so we should compare the effecrts of lasers vs conventional weapons, shouldn’t we? On a battlefield you are not given the option of “I’ll just go home safely please.”
So if you are blinded on a battlefield, you can’t defend yourself and can’t find your way home.
Well, umm, if you have your head shot off with a rifle, you also can’t defend yourself or find your way home.
So where is the vileness? Are you concerned that it could affect more people more easily? More easily than an artillery strike? When a 155 mm howitzer shell hits, you don’t have to be looking at it to get killed.
The govt and Boeing indicate that this is only for theater missile defense. It is certainly not intended for use in blinding enemy combatants. It is imaginable however that an unscrupulous individual or organization with a big 747-mounted laser weapon could imagine up unintended uses against ground or airborne targets.
As I recall, the ABL is a small (but still expensive) part of the current administration’s proposed integrated missile defense system. It’s not powerful enough to blow anything up per se, just to weaken a missile’s external structure enough during its boost phase that it disintegrates. To account for the effects of atmospheric abberation, it uses (tah dah) a laser for targeting. It takes a great deal of electricity and has a limited number of “shots” per sortie. I believe Aviation Week has reported that another proposed application of some of this technology is to replace a lift fan on the F-35 with another generator to power a laser weapon.
Regarding the use of lasers for blinding, I’m trying to find the article about a NATO helicopter crew who was exposed to surface-based laser energy several years ago and as I recall the effects were more long-term; eyesight problems and headaches. I think it might have been an Aviation Week article, but I don’t have a subscription any more. On preview, here’s the best I could do.
If you google something like “Laser Eye Protection” the results include some of the devices aircrew are or may eventually be issued to protect against this threat. Some of the newer ones look like fashion sunglasses popular in the early '90s.
The govt and Boeing indicate that this is only for theater missile defense. It is certainly not intended for use in blinding enemy combatants. It is imaginable however that an unscrupulous individual or organization with a big 747-mounted laser weapon could imagine up unintended uses against ground or airborne targets.
As I recall, the ABL is a small (but still expensive) part of the current administration’s proposed integrated missile defense system. It’s not powerful enough to blow anything up per se, just to weaken a missile’s external structure enough during its boost phase that it disintegrates. To account for the effects of atmospheric abberation, it uses (tah dah) a laser for targeting. It takes a great deal of electricity and has a limited number of “shots” per sortie. I believe Aviation Week has reported that another proposed application of some of this technology is to replace a lift fan on the F-35 with another generator to power a laser weapon.
QUOTE]
Yep, the ABL is a chemical laser… the laser they’re looking into for the JSF is a solid state in the range of 100+kilowatts. The stumbling block there had been heat dispersal, to get 100 kilowatt laser you have to pump in about 1 megawatt of power, which produces of course 900 kilowatts of heat. They figured out the best place to put that heat was the fuel :> that much energy distributed might raise the internal temperature of the fuel by a degree… and it’ll get burned up anway, pretty ingenious.
And elsewhere in the world of directed energy weapons, look for our new DX class frigates to have the our first generation rail guns. :>
As a bit of an aside, check out this site on the basics of rail guns. Very nice, and easy to digest because it’s mostly high school physics. The rest is engineering and materials science issues, which the site deals with less, and which I care about less as well, as luck would have it. Looks as if rail guns, while a great idea, have a lot of practical issues to overcome, with a current top muzzle velocity of about 4km/s.
Lasers and particle beams…the wave [cough] of the future…
I find it difficult to believe that any army which would seriously contemplate neutralizing enemy combatants with lasers would then fail to follow up with the rockets, bombs and bayonets of conventional warfare. It’s not that I believe being blind is somehow “vile,” but I doubt, I very much doubt that lasers would end the battle. It would only be beginning.
While we wish battle could be waged without one single person ever being injured, the fact is that war is intentional cruelty, and little else. It also is sometimes essential, if you don’t want to kowtow to the oppression under which some other group has decided it wants you to live (or die).
Someone toward the top mentioned that he found himself in a meeting with “tech types and military types” where the assumption was we (the US) were going to use this laser blinding weapon. We’d need more specific data before we could reliably assess the credibility/threat level based on that assertion, but let’s assume it’s accurate. It having been established that in general it’s better and more humane to blind someone than to kill them, if we have weapons so unbelievably horrific and vile that the belief we would use them strikes abject terror into the hearts of the other side, then they will be more reluctant to fight and FEWER people will have to be hurt. That would be a good thing, which a compassionate and freedom-loving people would want. This is in line with the principle of overwhelming superiority of weaponry. It works.