The C-130 based laser you have read about here seems to be doing quite well in testing, and although I have not yet read a document on the topic, there are at least some who would like it deployed to Iraq. The weapon is even better than I had thought it would be. No, let us be truthful. I am stunned at the capabilities they are demonstrating. According to a Wired article (hat tip to Glenn Reynolds):
According to the developers, the accuracy of this weapon is little short of supernatural. They claim that the pinpoint precision can make it lethal or non-lethal at will. For example, they say it can either destroy a vehicle completely, or just damage the tires to immobilize it. The illustration shows a theoretical 26-second engagement in which the beam deftly destroys “32 tires, 11 Antennae, 3 Missile Launchers, 11 EO devices, 4 Mortars, 5 Machine Guns” — while avoiding harming a truckload of refugees and the soldiers guarding them.
The author goes on at length about claims the weapon could be used for plausibly deniable standoff attacks. It is my belief he is being insufficiently creative when he imagines what such attacks would entail. One might take out a communications facility by targeting a turnbuckle on an antenna guy wire; or a power plant by blowing away a standoff and dropping a high voltage line onto others; or perhaps blowing a hole in an oil filled transformer. I can easily think of ways of disabling infrastructure with this device in ways that would leave enemy repair crews terribly puzzled.
You just have to think outside the box: new weapons imply new definitions of the possible.
What the article doesn’t do is provide any indication of maximum distances. Even LASER light spreads, so at what distance can it do these things?
And how fast? And at what sort of rate or switching speeds?
As to range, I wouldn’t worry about that. If they have line of sight, they are in range. Lasers are good for many hundreds of miles even with current technology.
As to speed, look at the example attack. 26 seconds to basically disarm an entire enemy convoy. TWENTY SIX SECONDS!!!
Damn, that’s cool.
All we need now is some ill tempered mutant sea bass…
Two problems.
Firstly that little word ‘theoretical’. I wonder if their theoretical model included stuff like smoke, or someone trying to lock a missile onto the C-130.
Secondly, this quote: “It is estimated that the aftermath of a sub-second engagement by PASDEW will also be an observable event leaving an impression of terrifyingly precise CF [Coalition Force] attribution in the minds of all witnesses.”
Which is more or less in direct contradition to the whole ‘deniability’ stuff. Either the weapon has a terrifying signature or it doesn’t. I’m guessing that even I can tell the difference between metal fatigue and the effects of a really really big energy beam.
Last I checked, C-130s show up on radar, so I’m guessing the combination of little round holes in your metalwork appearing at the same time as large enemy aircraft in your airspace might give it away.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of cool new weapons. Or, actually, any new weapons. But marketing crap isn’t less crap just because the military hired the marketing company.
And finally, having waded through the military’s own ghastly powerpoint sales slides for it, I have to disappoint Dale – range is 10km 🙁
http://www.ndiagulfcoast.com/events/archive/33rd_symposium/day2/05_XR%20NDIA%2010-11%20Oct%20%20Final.pdf
Oh yeah, there’s one of those big ass lasers around here somewhere for ….um…measuring high altitude cloud movement and it’s implications on weather forecasting…
One day it was apparently running low power testing in the visible range at night.
It was …impressive.
What’s this “theoretical” crap? Clearly someone has had this for a long time. We finally have the explanation for the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion!
US military technology has frequently been over-hyped by would-be suppliers (remember some of the claims being made for Star Wars technology in Reagan’s day?). Is there any solid evidence that this really is a big technical step forward?
If they have a 10km range limit, I suspect it has more to do with their targetting than with ‘spreading’. The beam will probably not spread very much at all over that short a distance.
Note the article states they can change the power on target over a wide range. So they might get spectacular effects at full power but considerably less if dialed into lower power or larger beam size. (I do not know if they can control both, that is my assumption because that is the way I’d spec it if it were my project and it seemed feasible.)
As to radar, I doubt they are going to operate these in an environment were radar is likely to be present… if there is radar they are going to have visitors and that is true whether it is full of laser or HALO jumpers.
I do not know what sort of effects there will be if the thing is targeted on something small. I doubt it is a visible light laser, not if they are talking stealth. It might have some environmental limits, but that will be a problem anyway because this looks like visual targetting. Probably a guy with goggles is putting a cross hair on a target just like they do with the other C-130 gun ships. Same idea, but a lot quieter.
Now imagine it is a cold night and you are a bad guy watching over a fuel and ammo dump your guys are building up in preparation for crossing a border into a neighboring country. You here (maybe) a pop from outside and suddenly a fuel tank goes up… the fire is spreading, everyone is trying to do something about it but the tanks just keep going up in flames…
Much easier than sending in and extracting a special forces HALO team to do it ala Hollywood.
I like the idea of the weapon, but I’m still not buying this denyalbility thing. I mean, why not just fire a cannon from a gunship at the fuel dump? And then just deny it. No-one will have photos.
What I do like is the possibility of very exact targetting. This probably could destroy a jeep full of jihadis without killing the people walking next to it. I’m not convinced it could get the tires or the aerials, and certainly not via auto-targetting, but I’m sure it can hit the vehicle, and with no explosive projectiles involved, I can see how it would cause much less collateral damage.
Nah, it has to be visible. There’s no point in having a ray-gun that’s invisible.
And a kaboom. There’s supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom.
Seriously, if they could make it small enough to hang onto a Raptor, then sneak up on the bad guys and pop the barrels of all their tanks and artillery, that would be pretty cool.
The big issue with aiming the things is that a high intensity laser tends to heat the air it’s passing through, which causes turbulent refraction like heat shimmers on a hot road. The beam goes all over the place. You would need something like a laser guide star to get it to work at long range.
Although I suspect that heating a column of air to white hot plasma would result in a visible beam, which addresses KevinB’s concern.
“new weapons imply new definitions of the possible”
I tend to be pensive about brand-spanking new technology. The reliability of off-the-shelf technology is hampered by the fact that it’s available to our enemies. The Key is the use technology in alternative and unorthodox creative ways. About the laser, what exactly is powering this thing, or is that even an issue?
No, you do not want a bright beam of light in a straight line through the heavens that points directly at your aircraft. Nope. I really would not like that if I were the pilot.
Second, the kinds of ionization effects you are talking about might happen if a beam was powerful enough, but years ago I watched video of two Katyusha’s being shot down by the ground test unit (TRW’s?) in the desert. Nothing visible but the Katyushia’s getting taken out.
I would expect a loud bang where they hit. Things do tend to make noise when they suddenly vaporize, even if it is a tiny hole. I used to have fun in the summer in the EE lab charging up big effing IBM computer power supply capactiors and dropping little wire wrap wires across the terminals… not to mention the bang I described in the ‘near death’ experience discussion the time I had a probe tip vaporize in front of me.
My guess is the only thing you will see is a bright flash and bang at the target point. Even if it does nothing except pit the metal on a car, everyone in and around it will be reaching for the bog roll.
Most of the problems I see being tossed out are things which have been solved for a decade or longer.
The power for this thing seems to be chemical, the same as the Boeing 747 strategic laser battle station under development in the missile defense program.
As to putting it in the F-22… this type of laser is just too big. I’d give it another 15-20 years for fighter aircraft unless we get something like Bussard fusion working and can figure out how to shoe horn it into a fighter sized airframe. Of course with a weapon like that we may go back to battleships and have armoured 747’s slugging it out at 500 km’s. But that is for the 2030’s I suspect.
For now, we are looking at the first tactical laser armament (that we know of) to approach active duty status.
I’ll bet they have a hell of a time with it and that it only works half the time. But no weapon is any good until it has been forged in battle and reworked based on real combat use.
Sort of like the first aeroplanes, or the earliest blunderbusses.
Guessing here, but I imagine these things firing short pulses rather than long beams. It might be that the number of pulses you pump into a target decides whether you pop the tyres, or the whole damn truck.
Dale, if, (when), they get small fusion generators that will fit in fighter plane, (or be man portable), I vote for railguns. I’ve always had a soft spot for railguns.
Famous last words;
“Don’t Laze me, Bro!”
A while back there was talk of putting a laser on the F-35. The reason to put it on this plane is that the Marine variant has a very high power driveshaft to power the lift fans for V/STOL. The Navy and Air Force versions don’t need that extra power for short take offs. So what to do with it?
You could generate a lot of electrical power with that driveshaft. That’s how the idea of installing an onboard laser came up. I’m sure they’ll do it if they can get a solid state laser lightweight and efficient enough. A jet engine can generate a lot more power than a laser weapon needs.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most fighters 20-30 years from now have a laser turret for self-defense against missiles, if for nothing else. Probably even the crappy 3rd world fighters by then. That’s going to change aerial combat a bit.
Not to mention that the C-130 can probably be sat-linked to targeting UAVs.
I like the idea of the weapon, but I’m still not buying this denyalbility thing.
Me either.
If people known to be hostile to the US suddenly begin spontaneously combusting at about the same time as a USAF aircraft is known to be within ~10 km, the reaction is going to be “the Americans martyred abdullah the fearless”, not “we don’t know who did it”.
Not that this would be an entirely bad thing, of course. I want my country’s enemies to scatter like roaches when they hear an airplane in the distance.
What I want to know is why nobody’s talking about air defense applications. Zapping a pilot sitting in a cockpit sounds very possible (which might explain why the USAF is so interested in drones lately).
What is the diameter of the beam? Does it pulse or fire as a beam? What is the pulse rate? How much energy is delivered per unit time/pulse? How long does it have to sit on the one spot before it bursts a tyre? A jerrycan of petrol? Can a quick slash be used to slice or can it realistically only puncture?
So many questions.
Just in time for Georgia, Iran and possibly for Pakis (and neo-Soviets – who knows?). And for Chi-Coms. Then we’ll see Chavez, Gaddafi, Assad, Bashir, Turabi, Correra, Castros scattering like cocroaches spraid with Mortein. That is something that is appearing in my dreams when I desperately try to help our friend Saakashwili…. Unfortunately, EUNUCHALIA is sliding down the gutter…
I have only one thing to say: “Gort”.
Cats,
I could answer your questions but I would then have to kill you. That shit’s gotta be more classified than Laura Bush’s bra-size.
Just Sayin,
Yes, and the F-35A & C (USAF, USN versions) have the space occupied by the lift-fan spare.
Yeah, the laser, missile defence idea is almost certain to come to pass. It will be brilliant for ships, especially nuclear-powered ships as a (fairly) close-in self-defence system.
But there’s more… Dale mentioned targeting antennae. Yup, good idea but there’s also an alternative way of doing that. You use the laser to ionise the air on a path to the target and use that path to send an EM pulse and you have C21st SEAD. Take down the bugger’s sensors and you can send in Sopwith Camels to mop up the rest.
And that is important because the big problem with a C-130 mounted laser is that a C-130 is a lumbering heffalump of a plane and very shoot-downable. It’s also gotta have a RCS like a barn door.
Remember when the antics in the ‘stan kicked off? Remember the bearded loons massing in the “tribal areas” of NW Frontier Province. I saw one deranged bastard wielding a fucking hatchet saying he was gonna kill infidels with it. Problem was most of the infidels were 30,000ft out of chopper range. Lase (yes, that is the verb) the buggers as though it was the wrath of Allah himself. They won’t stand a chance.
Imagine swarms of UCAVs with lasers…
Photonic Death From Above! Bring it on.
Personally, I’m more into rail-guns but I like big bangs and for me there is too much finesse to this laser-lark. I fear for the death of strafing… I have had such fun virtually strafing. You, know walking those little puffs of dirt and dust onto a column of trucks…
Might we be expecting some compensating improvements in mirrors?
Best regards
Nick brings up a few points I was alluding to in my earlier comment and have mentioned a couple times over the years in articles. Once you can stuff these weapons into an aeroplane, once you have them in anti-aircraft defense… the role of the fighter plane changes. What I have long been wondering is exactly where is the cost trade off point that tips us towards ground fortresses and aerial battleships. The point at which it is no longer how fast and maneuverable you are, but how much armour you can carry and whether you can absorb more punishment? Alternative strategies are those of sheer numbers (perhaps clouds of thousands of UAV’s which you launch in expectation of losing them) or stealth (invisibility is life).
We might also developed shields. Wild ideas that come to mind are things like superconducting mirrors and plasma barriers. Something in that realm is probably closer to 22nd century than 21st through.
So are we going to have an aerial reprise of the 18th century? It is a question I have been puzzling and pondering over for years.
btw, one of the ‘weapons’ I see in my minds eye is the aerial battle-city. If you build a large enough hollow structure and the rooms on the walls all dump their waste heat into the interior, you have a gigantic hot air balloon. If it can defend itself from matter based weapons then all it has to do is accept punishment from lasers and such. They do not cause the kind of damage that a large shell or missile does so you could perhaps slug it out with a ground fortress all day long. After you take out the ground lasers, or weaken them sufficiently you can overwhelm them with missiles and then bring in the fighters…
In case you are not visualizing this properly, think of something with a kilometer sized void in the middle and a balloon ‘skin’ that is the habitation area. If you wonder why it works, note that volume goes up as n^3 which implies lift also goes up as n^3, where as the mass of the ‘skin’ approximates a surface and goes up roughly as n^2. A cube beats a square any time!
Boys! Boys! Boys!
Please get with the program. All we need is love. And once Obama is at the helm, the only thing the US is going to be carpet-bombing the bad guys with is valentines.
Seriously, don’t you realize that the only reason other people are accused of being “bad” is because they are reacting (appropriately) to US aggressive impulses — like building shiny new weapons.
Check your politically-correct history book — before Chimpy McBushitler and Darth Cheney, the world had been at peace for ever, or at least since way before global warming started.
@Dale
Finally a use for the Strategic Helium Reserve? On second thoughts assuming that this monster is going to have a fusion reactor as a power source then why not fill it with the hydrogen since I has to store it’s fuel somewhere. Just don’t paint it with Thermite.
It doesn’t need Helium nor Hydrogen. All that is required is a temperature differential between outside and inside air. If all you do is dump your waste heat internally, that will be more than enough. Probably too much even. It’s just a hot air balloon writ very, very large. I am not sure, but the idea might have been invented by Buckminster Fuller. It has been around for ages. You can do it entirely with passive structures… the only reason it has not been done is that it would be so huge and consequently expensive that no one has thought of a way to make money off it. You could have built this thing 100 years ago if you had a few GNP’s to apply to the construction costs.
[Editor: deleted. Bye bye, don’t let the door hit you on the way out]
Phase conjugate mirror.
It’s not really a mirror at all. its a way of tuning the laser’s emitting plasma chamber so that it turns into its own targeting system.
Using a phase conjugate system the laser pulse is initiated by reflected laser light from an external targeting laser. The incoming light pulse initiates a photonic cascade in the active plasma in the aircraft’s main optical plasma chamber. This causes a greatly amplified return pulse to be sent back down the exact path of the incoming light beam.
Targeting is automatic because the high power return pulse is a time reversed replica of the incoming pulse , 5,4,3,2 1, energy profile instead of 1,2,3,4,5, that travels the exact same path through the atmosphere that the reflected targeting pulse did. The main laser pulse is acted on by same atmospheric conditions that the targeting pulse encountered but because the main pulse is a time reversed replica and is traveling in the reverse direction, the main pulse automatically focused on the target by atmospheric distortions instead of being dispersed.
Because the attack pulse follows the reflected light from the target the only important thing is the line of sight between the targeting laser spot on the target and the main laser emmiter, the targeting laser can be any size and mounted anywhere, including a pedator drone or a Special Operations trooper.
otpu
I had assumed the targeting laser was on the C-130. Thanks for the exposition!
There probably is a targeting laser on the plane but that’s not the only way the beam can pointed.
Also the mirrors and optics in the aircraft that enable the target spot to be sensed, acquired, and channeled into the main laser chamber are treated the same way as atmospheric distortions by the time reversed return beam and any distortions they may introduce are also canceled out.
otpu
Yeah, I had assumed that because outwardly the systems look very similar to the 747, and I know the laser itself is basically the same type, so I figured this was just a scaled down version with the same basic capabilities.
It stands to reason that if you can put a spot on an ICBM 500-1000 km away, you can knock a fly off a windshield of a 4×4 racing across rough ground 🙂
This is fairly similar technology to that used for ‘artificial guide stars’ except the return beam in those is used to control the primary telescope mirror actuators instead of being fed to a laser. It’s one of the defense spin-offs to science research.
Time to break into the strategic mirror reserve. BTW, is it known at what wavelength this thing operates at ?
I think swarms of UCAVs will be the way forward and not aerial battleships. I heard an idea a while back of building insect sized ones that carried a few ccs of something bangy to be dispereserd across the battlefield and in their net-centric way would take out the bad guys one by one by literally putting an (exploding) flea in their ear.
Alice is though of course right and the zionist shall lie down with the jihadi under the benign rule of the Obamessiah.
Which is precisely why I own a small action figure of Teddy Roosevelt who is appropriately equipped with a big stick.
Nick, that would be effective in a ‘police action’ but not in a war against a ‘near peer’. Then you would see clouds of exploding mini-UAV’s as the two sides did combat.
A serious fight is always going to be combined arms used in a interlocking offense/defense. If the enemy has a laser fortress covering the area of interest, you may need a similar counterforce to take that leg out of their interlocking defense so that you can exploit the hole.
I don’t have resources to war game such things, but I suspect a full up center with command and control churning out defensive ‘bugs’ is going to have to be taken out before your ‘bugs’ can do anything but engage theirs. A few will get through of course, they always do, but that just means you are in attritive warfare instead of maneuver war. Attrition is costly in lives and material.
Why fly the laser? If the beam can be reflected by some sort of mirror, and if it can reach for some kilometers, just fly mirrors, on UAVs. They could reflect the beam from a faraway ground station that can be as big and as heavy and as well-defended as necessary.
The main benefit of these lasers would seem to be the avoidance of troop casualties. Who needs deniability? US forces could completely control a place like South Ossetia without putting a single soldier in there on the ground. They’d all be sitting in front of monitors in Kansas, directing beams from bases in Kurdistan or ships in the Black Sea to targets in S.O. Friendlies would have some mark by which they could avoid vaporization, like the blood on the doorbeams that told the Angel of Death to pass over the Jews’ houses and target the Egyptians’ first born sons.
Robert,
One word, “complexity”. There are others of course.
Dale,
I worry that on the basis of the sandpit and the ‘stan we are totally re-jigging our military for a COIN mission. Against a peer we’re talking drone on drone.
And we’re talking flexibility and dispersion and flying fortresses just aren’t that. One missile in the right place and it’s game over.
There is a part of me that believes that only a ubiquity of violence will defeat jihadists. We will win when their skies are darkened with micro UAVs and they just know that Urania is bitch-slapping Allah.
Because as the surviving citizens of Hiroshima quasi-religious know fervour is no match for science.
(put that right)
Absolutely. When the missile gets through it is, by definition, end game.
What I do not think we know yet is whether there is a certain point on the lethality curve for lasers at which they, in conjunction with their other resources, can act as an area denial weapon that requires another fortress to tilt the balance against it. If you plonk a mirrored, heavily armored fortress with a bunch of Bussard Fusion power sources or NotYetInvented PowerSystems ™ and a lot of very fast lasers and targetting systems in the middle of a whole defense in depth network of UAV’s, microbugs, and you name it, can you overcome it without having a similar level of firepower to neutralize that chess board piece? I do not know the answer and I think it is not even knowable yet. The technologies will evolve and we will find out as they do so.
Just for fun, here is a scenario I am imagining. The fortress is using something like RepRap to build microbugs and is releasing these disposable munitions as needed. During battle we have a glittering cloud of small explosions at some distance in a 3D defense ‘perimeter’ around the fort. Anything that gets through that layer is taken care of by small lasers that can engage and destroy such small attackers at rates of one every few milliseconds.
Larger lasers are available to take on missiles, aircraft and shells
Really big lasers are available for fortress to fortress slugfests.
Lasers win the cost battle over missiles, aircraft and shells. Unless you are supremely wealthy compared to your opponent, you cannot afford to get into an attritive battle where the cost ratio of offensive to defensive weapon is wildly disproportionate. So before you can use those weapons in a cost effective manner, you have to neutralize the defense lasers. Once you do, it is game over.
But if you are using swarms of cheap UAV’s and microbugs against him, your supply line is longer. He with the shortest supply chain wins. Score one for the defense.
So this brings us back to the old battleship war. Battleships slug it out until one side weakens the other enough that the destroyers can go in for the kill.
Not saying this *is* the way things will go, only that it is a way things *could* go.
A couple commenters mentioned the limitations of the current device: range, pointing speed, mass, beam power, etc… returned from a mission at where his team was overflying tests of a new weapon. He could hardly stop laughing about it. “The damn thing can’t even fly a simple constant-altitude racetrack pattern reliably. And this is supposed to find its own way over enemy ground and hit a target? What a joke.” years later and we all confidently expect that same weapon to fly from X ship to Y city, down the double-yellow line of Main Street, turn right at Saddam Avenue, and enter the third-from the left window on the 10th floor. (Oh, and explode there. Sorry.)
Here’s a little anecdote in case anyone here is unclear on the concept of technical progress. One day back in the last century, my
It’s now
Patience, gents.
Hmm… The comment tool seems to have deleted all my clever “classified” text bits. Oh, well, I’m sure you can figure them out. PIMF
What the man in the street wants to know is- when will we be able to buy personal lasers as weapons of self-defence? I can’t wait to own my own blaster or ray-gun!
Actually, Nick, what I want is a lightsaber. Are we getting any closer to those?
Get a grip on reality, Laird! Lasers are real- we can make them now, but they are too weak for weapon purposes! Lightsabres seem to employ totally unknown properties- are they red-hot magnetic particles that radiate, but are held in flux? Terran scientists have been seeking the solution for decades, ever since these documentaries about an alien civilisation fell to Earth!
Thank you very much for the great information.
Thanks