I mean a real one that works for more than popping balloons.
“Klunder said the laser performed so well that the commander of the Ponce is now authorized to use it in defense of the vessel, according to a report from the U.S. Naval Institute.”
I believe this was the 30kw prototype and they’re looking at producing 100kw versions for future deployment. Wouldn’t be surprised to see megawatt ship mounted lasers in a decade. Turbines on an Arleigh Burke can produce 88mw. Could punch a hole in a star destroyer and still keep the lights on.
And only about $1 a shot. Ok, if you want to get into technical accounting mumbo jumbo, you could factor in billions in development costs, but how else do you think science advances?
Under what weather conditions? Maybe during the summer in the Persian Gulf when the weather is perfect against pipsqueak boats. But I doubt it very much in the North Atlantic any time of the year.
It’s hard to picture using this kind of device to attack targets over the horizon (unless you like salty steam). So there will be actual missiles on ships for some years to come.
Also, this troubling quote: “(…) this will more effectively manage resources to ensure our sailors and Marines are never in a fair fight” . I understand the message, but I would have formulated it differently.
A fair fight is one where the other guys have as much chance of winning as you do. It’s the job of any competent military commander to avoid that kind of situation.
Only suckers & athletes enter fair fights. Something one of my air combat instructors always said: “Win if you can. Lose if you must. ALWAYS cheat.” Words to live by when the “game” isn’t a game.
The immediate value of laser weapons is for close-in defense, where the zero time of flight and deep magazine really helps. Right now the best offensive tactic against modern ships is the swarm / overwhelm. i.e. send lots of attacking missiles or boats to arrive all at once. The target ship *could *kill them all, but not in the time available before somebody gets through.
A few years farther into the future Lasers will be the go-to weapon for anything within the line of sight. Heck, we might even see the return of tall towers like the gun director towers on 1900-1940 battleships. The difference in the future is the towers will have the offensive beam director at the top, not just a lookout.
And yes, poor visibility will once again become a larger tactical factor than it is today.
I’m kind of sceptical. Even very fast boats don’t move that fast, I don’t think time-of-flight would really be an issue in shooting them, even if you had to target a bunch of them consecutively .
Hyper-sonic missiles make a little more sense. But even there, while it might take essentially zero time for the laser to hit the missile, it presumably has to track it for however many miliseconds it takes to heat the thing up to high enough temperatures to destroy it (in the video it takes almost a second for even the flimsy drone to get knocked out). And someone who can build and fire a swarm of hypersonic missiles can probably also give them a good polish, which would substantially increase the amount of time you’d have to track one to knock it out.
The system is certainly cool. But in all the reporting I’ve read on it over the years, the actual use cases suggested for it always seem pretty strained.
Grin! But the dire fact is that lasers cut right through mirrors with relatively little loss of power transmission. No mirror is perfect, and even a little leakage will lead to an exponential failure of reflectivity.
Ablative armor is better, such as substances that would “foam up” massively when struck by lasers. The laser’s energy is wasted in vaporizing this junk, so that less gets through to the real target.
(We old Traveller fans will also remember prismatic sand…)
I was half-joking (I like the image of an enemy reflecting our billion dollar super-weapon back at us with a ten dollar mirror). Mirrors would suck for this since, as you say, they’re really thin and so loose their reflectivity fast.
But only half-joking, since I think one of the big problems is that the weapon is pretty dependent on the material you’re shooting it at. In the video they use what looks like black plastic, which is sort of a best case scenario. But a shiny piece of metal will both conduct heat away from the target point, and reflect part of it. To actually do damage, you’d need to keep the laser on it for a long period of time.
And even with perfect localized absorption the energy involved is pretty meh. 30kw is the equivalent of a single machine gun bullet, delivered over the relatively long time period of one second. Even scaled up to 100kw, it’d only be good for knocking out pretty flimsy targets, and would still have to track them for relatively long amounts of time.
You wouldn’t. Because a laser is a “line of sight” weapon and by definition the horizon represents the limit of line of sight due to the curvature of the earth.
And there are still limits to what a laser can do, compared to a Tomahawk cruise missile or 5 inch naval gun (at least before they are replaced by electromagnetic rail guns). I would imagine that the laser would ultimately replace the Phalanx CIWS as a defense against missiles and aircraft.
I don’t see why. This isn’t Call of Duty with some 13 year old griefing our enemies with the “laser hack”.
Fair enough. In a way, a mirrored surface could become the ablative armor I mentioned. If it was made to “foam” up, or burst into a gas, or whatnot, it could absorb energy from the beam. And, you’re quite right, a mirror would reflect some of the energy, if not all of it.
(Sort of like Imperial Stormtroopers, with white armor, vs. Darth Vader, with black armor. The white armor is going to reflect at least a little of the light-based energy striking it, while the black armor will absorb nearly all of it.)
(But, damn, think of a night-time engagement! The Stormtroopers stand out like highway flares, but Vader becomes the night!)
Cool, now if they can just boost it into the 40 watt range, introduce plasma phasing and modify it into rifle form we could be onto something. I really need something ideal for home defence
