Laser Cannons --> Military --> Spam

[Thermodyne]

US and Israel already have a laser cannon

A joint U.S.-Israeli laser cannon can already knock down rockets in flight, but it will not be ready for battlefield use until at least 2007, an official with the American company developing the weapon said Wednesday. The system, called Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL), uses an advanced radar to spot and track incoming rockets and then fires a laser beam to destroy them. (AP 292353 Oct 03)

[ November 08, 2003, 16:34: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Puke]

so do the Russians and the Chinese. in fact, the Chinese mount them on tanks, and have been known to shoot at our helecopters with them (with the goal of blinding the pilot - not shooting anything down, which to my knowlege has never actually worked)

a web search should turn up some news articles for you.

[Cyrien]

Actually the US laser system if I remember correctly has a higher success rate than current missile to missile systems such as Patriot and quite impressively destroys the targeted missiles. They have tested it a bit out at some of the military areas around here. Seen some footage of one in action was quite impressive. Also one of the test sites is White Sands which is just next door of where I currently live. Of course I am quite biased. I like the idea of laser weapons.

There are also a few companies in the process of designing laser cannons for fighter use to replace current vulcan cannons, heavy machine guns etc that get mounted on the aircraft. Though those are for abit farther in the future. One even has submitted a proposal for a rifle sized laser that could possibly be ready by 2050(if you read the companies proposal however there are alot of ifs for that).

Quite simply with successful miniaturization and cost reduction the laser is the weapon of the future. 400 pulses per second urning through an inch of steel in 2 seconds... hard to beat if you can scale it down...

Also the Chinese and other laser weapons are not upto par with the current US research. Blinding is one thing burning through steel something else. In addition there have been the occassional reports of Israel leaking US Laser Weapons technology to China.

A few links
News articlehttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/...in578998.shtml
Another One
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/laser-03k.html
CNN on possible use on aircraft within just a few years.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science.../laser.weapon/

Submission of the TIS-1 Laser Rifle Idea
http://www.defensereview.com/352003/TIS1.pdf

[Puke]

Originally posted by Cyrien:
One even has submitted a proposal for a rifle sized laser that could possibly be ready by 2050(if you read the companies proposal however there are alot of ifs for that).

That thing is so cool. I think we had a thread on it, a while back. regardless of if the other hurtles can be overcome (finding a way to recompress the gas, mitigating the recoil (which i dont fully understand, since it should be an internal force) and developing a light enough, strong enough casing) EVERYTHING should run on a polonium 210 powersource in the future. thats just sooo cool. the idea sort of reminds me of the things the female cyborg ran on, in T3 (yeah, the movie sucked..)

The idea of packing around a small power source, for a rifle, that can power a small town - or melt metal if unshielded - why doesn't my motorcycle run on a couple of those? talk about fully viable electric engines. unless your worried about, you know, safety. or radiation.

what was the line from ghost busters?

"each of us is wearing a nuclear accelerator on our backs..."

"Right. Switch me on."

**Phtweeeeeeeeeee**

[TerranC]

When I read that news article on CNN yesterday, I started to think of this almost immedeatly:

Airborne Laser Program for the USAF

[Puke]

this is what i was thinking of before - N. Korea shooting at our choppers with Chinese lasers:

http://www.defensereview.com/modules...rticle&sid=325

neat, but fairly ineffectual. im sure theyre good for crowd control, or keeping the neighbor kids away.

[Cyrien]

This is the major problem with Polonium as a power source assuming you can mass produce it.

Weight for weight it is about 2.5 x 10^11 times as toxic as hydrocyanic acid.

Hope your battery pack doesn't leak. And talk about disposal problems.

Edit: And while recoil is an internal force it will act on the casing that holds it and that will be transferred to the person using it. In a handheld firearm any internal force will likely be transferred to an external one due to the size of the weapon and its limited mass.

[ October 30, 2003, 22:06: Message edited by: Cyrien ]

[Puke]

theres quite a few more problems with Polonium than that, but you basically summed it up. its still a darn neat prospect.

Anyhow, I'm not sure your on top of the whole internal force / external force thing.

in a conventional firearm, force is exerted on a projectile. a bullet and gasses exit the weapon, exerting an equal an oposite force on the weapon and wielder.

in this hypothetical laser, the force exerted by the light leaving the weapon is negligable, and thus the equal and oposite newtonian force resulting from the projected beam of light is also negligible. the gasses, while moving at high pressure and velocity within the weapon, never leave it. therefore, force should not be exerted on anything outside the weapon.

Granted, you will need sturdy components inside the weapon to contain those gasses and to channel them around, but there should be no felt force by the operator.

the best practical example that i can come up with, is a solonoid. if a solonoid is sitting on a table, and is repeatedly activated, the coil and the cylinder will both experience force from each other, but the net motion of the entire object should be zero.

but i could be easily be missing something obvious.

edit: dont you wish you had some? http://pearl1.lanl.gov/periodic/elements/84.html odds are, you do! I just saw an article indicating that commercially grown tobacco contains the stuff!

[ October 30, 2003, 22:35: Message edited by: Puke ]

[narf poit chez BOOM]

why would a laser have recoil?

for some reason, the picture on CBS looks cg.

the smallest to date is the size of a commercial jetliner.

and the one in the picture looks smaller. so, if it's cg, they should say so in the picture's caption. i just think all cg images in the news should be labelled as such.

any place i can see a video of it in action?

[Suicide Junkie]

why would a laser have recoil?

Because photons have momentum, and momentum is conserved. All the momemtum in photons going forward has to be matched by the momentum of everything else going backwards.