"The U.S. Army Shows Off Its New Laser Cannon" Topic

"Boeing is building a laser cannon for the U.S. Army, and the new weapon has now proved it will be as capable at sea as on land. The High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD)—basically a high-energy laser mounted on top of a big truck—was successfully used to blast some UAV drones and 60mm mortars out of the Florida sky earlier this year, Boeing announced Thursday.

This test was done in a windy and foggy environment, an essential step to proving the technology is useful for naval deployment. The HEL MD used a 10-kilowatt laser—a much less powerful version of what it will eventually fire—to "successfully engage" more than 150 targets at Eglin Air Force Base, a Department of Defense weapons testing facility on the Florida Panhandle. In other words, it disabled or destroyed them…"

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Amicalement
Armand

From 'steel rain' to 'photon phanny whammer'.

Has the age of the Ogre begun? It was the laser cannon that drove the air forces off the battlefield and the tank to rule it again…

You need some pretty serious energy density in a laser for it to be militarily useful. It's my understanding that the DoD says minimum laser power is 100kW, and they were using megawatt+ lasers in the 1980s for the Star Wars research.

My question is how long did that 10kW laser need to hit each target to kill them?

Because if you're talking multiple seconds, you just fire more rockets/mortars to overwhelm the laser.

Based on a book I read about the Star Wars research, the MIRACL laser took about 5 seconds to destroy any given object in flight. Whether it was a TOW missile or a dummy Titan ICBM stage under simulated launch stress, it took roughly 5 seconds of illumination. Since MIRACL is a 5 megawatt laser, that means it takes 25 megajoules to destroy a missile in flight.

So a laser that can just sweep across the sky and watch things blow up anime-style needs to be delivering 25 megajoules per pulse. Call it 100millisecond (1/10 second) pulse duration and your laser output needs to be 100 to 125 megawatts.