Well ok, Han Solo was not flying the Millennium Falcon when he crashed yesterday, more like the Millennium Budgerigar, but I wonder if this was what brought him down?
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Could this be why Han Solo crashed yesterday?March 6th, 2015 |
 19 comments to Could this be why Han Solo crashed yesterday? |
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So, we finally have a Death Ray!
Apparently during WW2, members of the public used to write in to the Royal Navy’s bright ideas department with suggestions of how to win the war, basically consisting of mounting a Death Ray on some sort of aircraft.
The Navy boffins’ usual response was “Well, the aircraft design is OK, but tell us more about the Death Ray”.
“Oh, any Death Ray will do, you must have lots of designs lying about
When did the character become German?
Spurious S lasered.
Harrison Ford was in a two seater. I’m glad he’s alright but a vintage aircaft was smashed and that makes me sad*. Anyway, two seater. He didn’t have Chewwy with him – simples. Mwaaahh!
*At least he wasn’t trashing Nimrud and that airfield has a bad rep for crosswinds.
Nick – he crashed because he didn’t have an R2 unit on hand for some mid-air duct taping….
Vintage aircraft? It wasn’t even designed when Captain Eric Brown RN had his first flight. He’s had more ‘plane crashes, and tangled with more Baddies, than all Harrison Ford’s characters put together.
An interesting weapon – if development goes well (a big “if”) the applications in missile defence might be important.
Oh, they’ll fix that, good as new. I was at Shuttleworth a couple of months ago, watching them rebuild some 1913 relic from two tire prints and an oil stain. For one with Mr Ford’s resources, no problem.
Take a look at Google Earth to appreciate just how much of Santa Monica he had to miss to put it down where he did. Good job.
llater,
llamas
The Force was with him.
How do we know Lockheed Martin didn’t just Sellotape 10 or 12 laser pointers together and cause that hole?
Unfortunately the power required for a laser to even begin to be useful for missile defense is 100 Kw. The laser that Lockmart tested is reportedly around 30Kw. Nice to have for some applications, but we’re still a long ways from being able to destroy an ICBM warhead traveling at Mach.25.
Still I’m grateful for any progress at all.
Given there is a truck in the pictures, I’m going out on a limb and guess ICBMs are not the intended target for this particular weapons projects 😉
That said, there are many other ways to rearrange a truck that are probably less technically challenging than a laser.
Oh, I dunno. Get a portable thorium salt reactor and you got power for a laser. As to the speed of the ICBM – well, they are fast but nothing close to the speed of light. So that is irrelevant as far as I can see. The real advantage though of a laser is cost per shot. An SDB II costs a fortune. And yes, a thorium salt reactor could in principle be airborne. Now imagine an AC-130 type thing with one… We could destroy ISIS one garden-centre at a time.
Unless we’re talking about a super dooper incredible laser, to destroy a target moving at Mach 25 the laser still has to remain on target for a few seconds.
This is not easy.
You may want to check out the problems the USAF had with their airborne laser.
I like the idea of a thorium salt reactor, but power is not really the problem with laser weapons.
Taylor
March 7, 2015 at 2:41 pm
A year ago the lasers were at 15KW. This year 30KW. Assuming progress can continue on that line for 5 years and what do you get?
32 * 30KW = about 1,000 KW or 1 MW. Now if 100 KW takes 3 seconds to damage the missile what about .3 seconds?
Suppose you need 1MW for 1 second to get your 1 MW .3 second shot. A 1 MW diesel generator (DG) set is not very big. Nor is the fuel supply required to support it. You go to mass production and the DG costs $1 million per. Not a significant cost.
My guess? In about 10 years ICBMs will be ineffective against US ground targets. That still leaves EMP bursts. But who knows?
Taylor
March 8, 2015 at 2:36 pm
The early versions will be ground based.
What about fog? And 1MW is a million Joules per second. The thermal efficiency of going from generator to laser is going to require factoring in.
Here in the UK, I suspect that the forthcoming Labour/SNP/Green coalition will scrap Trident and settle, with chutzpah, on a Reagan-style ’Star Wars’ SDI with lasers to deter Mr Putin et al., but with lasers powered by wind and tide farms.
In 1987, the Labour Party scrapped very late before launch, a plan at the General Election to scrap US Pershing missiles but in their place to deter the Soviets by digging a huge trench across West Germany and filling it with explosive slurry, after much mirth on the part of commentators after it was leaked.
Mr Ed
March 8, 2015 at 6:43 pm
Fog? Yes. That will take some working out. Might require another doubling of power.
Thermal efficiency is not too serious a problem if conversion can be done at 30% or better efficiency. Boil water. It takes about 2.5 Mj to boil 1Kg of 20degC water at 1 atm pressure. Cooling will not be a problem.
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110315071128AAynL0r
“It takes about 2.5 Mj to boil 1Kg of 20degC water at 1 atm pressure. Cooling will not be a problem.”
Sort of. Heat exchangers don’t like to transfer heat superfast, and heat engines don’t like their heat sink to be hot, and there are other engineering constraints in play like wanting to operate with a highly pressurized fluid (making it harder to make a marvellous nanotechnological fractal capillary heat exchanger system, e.g.). So cooling a really high density power system (nuke reactor or whatever) may not be an absolutely fundamentally impossible showstopper kind of problem, but that doesn’t mean it will not be a major headache sort of problem.
I’m not sure where the perceived need for exotic high density power systems comes from, though. Is it easy to make a 1-ton laser that eats more power than a 1-ton gas turbine can generate? Even an old 500lb helicopter engine like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_T700 seems to make on the order of 1MW of mechanical power for hours per aircraft flight and thousands of hours per engine lifetime, and I’d expect that optimizing it for modern materials and 3 hours of lifetime service in 10 minute bursts would allow a significant multiple of that.