"US Navy has deployable AA Laser" Topic

Star Wars has arrived …

link

handy against compliant, non manoeuvring targets. Something useful against more capable targets is still a little way off.

I for one am glad it is only AA.

Any other battery may have blown the budget.

When I hear "laser" I have a mental image of some beam slicing an aircraft in half. The magnifying glass "hold-it-on-a-spot-until-it-catches-fire" effect is underwhelming – from a gratification standpoint.

Still waiting for sharks with laser beams

It DID look like it had to stay on target for quite a while to cause any significant effect. Maybe swap the AA for a 9V and it'll do better.

Doug

"I for one am glad it is only AA.

Any other battery may have blown the budget."

Good one, troopwo :D

They still have to paint the targets the right colour first? :-)

"….can be affected by rain or fog".

Damn it, not likely to be picked up by the Royal Navy for defence of our shores. I am pleased that there isn't an HMS Ponce though.

Cheers! TC.

It's the navies new long range telescope…

Its still pretty cool. I wonder what the fastest moving target is that it can paint (ie cruise or icbm missiles?).

Who needs to cut anything? Hit the pilot's eyes, end of threat.

I bet the Navy wishes it kept a couple of the nuke cruisers around . Would have been nice to have all that power generating capability for this

Good to see this'll be able to counter those Iranian stealth fighters.

No Gatling version??

Strap it to an enlarged version of one of those Phlanx-type turrets, and see if it can keep up with course corrections of an actual maneuvering target…

It DID look like it had to stay on target for quite a while to cause any significant effect.

Actually, flames seemed to appear almost immediately. It's hard to really determine from the video how long the laser needed to paint the target to have a significant damaging effect, as you can't judge whether the initial flames were essentially "mortal wounds" to the target or not— a plane can keep flying while on fire… but that doesn't mean it can keep fighting, or that it's not done for. Was the camera just watching the target to show the eventual results of an immediate laser hit, or was the camera on target to show the gradual destruction of a prolonged, sustained laser contact? And if the latter, would the initial contact have been fatal anyway? Without more knowledge of how the weapon works, you can't make a judgement based on the video.

Secondly, a pilot *knows* when he's being shot at by missiles and bullets. How's he going to know a laser is cooking the underside of his wing until he smells the burning metal? No radar contact, no rocket contrail, no noise, no impact, no flak, and not even a visible light beam— just "hey— is it hot in here?" And at that point it's too late.

Rumor has it that in the initial testing, the fire control system it was paired with was awfully twitchy. Fried every sea gull that approached within 10 miles. The deckswabbers enjoyed quite a few days of easy work free from avian bombing runs…. ;-)

> How's he going to know a laser is cooking the underside of his wing

Although not visible lasers of all types are a beam that can be "seen" with the right equipment. If this becomes standard then detectors will too.

In addition to how long it takes to cook a target there is also ROF to worry about. If it can only blast one missile a minute that is still not very helpful.

This seems most viable as an anti-missile weapon. How vulnerable is a typical sea-skimming anti-ship missile going to be to something like this? I would think that many would be extremely vulnerable, while others might not be. And how easy would it be to harden a missile to a laser?

Interesting stuff.

Perhaps we'll be seeing some mirror-surfaced missles in the future.