Yup. The end of air dominance is nigh.


A laser that works when wet

Super-weapon has long featured in science fiction – but now it's for real


o Jon Henley
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 July 2010 20.00 BST

YouTube- U.S. Navy Laser Weapon Shoots Down Drone in Test.
When it comes to sci-fi villains, few have endured as well as the Martians, whom HG Wells depicted wielding a weapon called the Heat-Ray in The War of the Worlds, back in 1898. This was a small, box-like case emitting a "beam of light and intense heat" so powerful that "whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch".

Unsurprisingly, this super-weapon, capable of killing any human target and destroying all mechanical objects, caught the imagination of the reading (and, later, viewing) public. Ray guns (Dan Dare), deathrays, phasers (Star Trek), laser pistols (Lost in Space), plasma rifles, blasters (Star Wars): we've known and loved them all, in fiction. Only now, reader, they're for real.

At the Farnborough Airshow in Hampshire, the American firm Raytheon has unveiled its Laser Close-In Weapon System (LCIWS). This is a solid-state laser whose 50kw beam is capable – and the company has video film to prove it – of shooting down, from a couple of miles away, an unmanned aerial vehicle. In May, the system, mounted on a US warship, shot down four UAVs off the coast of California. You don't get much more real than that.

Rather more prosaically, Raytheon apparently developed the system after bolting together six bog-standard commercial lasers used in the car industry. "This was a bad day for UAVs, and a good one for laser technology," Raytheon Missile Systems' vice-president, Mike Booen, told a presumably excited audience at the show. On board a ship, he said, the laser can be mounted inside and the beam fed up through fibre cables; on land, it could be trailer-mounted and used "across the globe" to target mortars and rockets. This is, says the editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, the beginning of a new era in missile technology.

The system's sheer power helps overcome two problems that have long hindered laser weaponry: it works in wet weather (rain and damp marine air have previously absorbed much of the laser's energy), and it can destroy even targets fitted with reflective surfaces. "Set phasers," as the good Captain once said, "to 'Kill'."

A laser that works when wet | Science | The Guardian

I wonder what effect it would have on nuclear-armed ICBMs. My guess from seeing the vid is not sufficient to really reduce the deterrent effect. It could reduce the accuracy, but by the time they're within range it's too late anyway. I guess it might even lead to more uploading as you'd want as many warheads on your delivery vehicle as possible to increase your chances.

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Wish I was at Farnborough. Looks like they've got a load of cool stuff this year.

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Agree, probably wouldn't be effective against ICBM's. When a laser beam travels through air it heats up the air it passes through, which causes differentials in pressure and therefore the refraction index; this is called laser blooming. So the more air you have to go through the less focussed and accurate the beam becomes, which limits the utility of ground based lasers against superatmospheric objects.

On the other hand, if you hit an ICBM from above, from a satellite platform, it would be quite easy to make a big enough hole that the warhead would burn up or disintegrate when it re-entered the atmosphere.

See my previous objections to space weapons.

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Well indeed, although I disagree with you about that; I'm just dsescribe the functional limits and possibilities of laser type weapons.

I';m more interested in the potential change to terrestrial warfare. You'd definitely need a much more powerful system, maybe on the order of a hundred times more powerful (or more), to provide proper air cover, but this is only a matter of degree I think; there will be a point where things like Aegis destroyers become laser destroyers. Mature laser technology will make air power almost totally unusuable.

There is a rather large difference between countering a single rather wobbly, awkwardly guided nuclear weapon from somewhere like Iran or North Korea, and stopping the hail of missiles that the US, Russia, or even China and Israel, could unleash.

I am yet to be convinced that Iran would launch a weapon, given the destruction that massive retaliation would achieve. This argument is a little less convincing in the case of North Korea, as there is so little to destroy.

Quote:

There is a rather large difference between countering a single rather wobbly, awkwardly guided nuclear weapon from somewhere like Iran or North Korea, and stopping the hail of missiles that the US, Russia, or even China and Israel, could unleash.

I don't want to be boring and technical or anything, but surely the precise problem is that it's the major powers' missiles that are wobbly? Afaik neither Iran nor North Korea have the capacity to alter trajectories once launched, unlike countries with more up to date systems.

In any case, it wouldn't really matter in a context of laser-based defense systems as you'd be aiming for the re-entry vehicle. Erratic trajectories and disintegration posed a problem for the US Patriot system against Iraqi scuds in Gulf War I, but I presume that they've had time to work round that in the years since.

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Well, the only time lasers are going to be of use for that is if they are in space. And in that regard a prime virtue of lasers is that they can be cycled and fired again, unlike an ABM rocket. Plus the targets won't be moving very fast at the apogee of their trajectory. As for numbers, thats purely a volume of fire problem. Sure you'd need a lot of laser sats to provide anything approaching complete coverage, just like you'd need a lot of ABM's.

But the terrestrial situation is a bit different. A screen of laser carrying destroyers could theoretically protect a battlegroup from aircraft, cruise missiles, artillery shells etc. A laser on the top of a tank could intercept shoulder launched rockets. Laser anti-air could make the bombing of cities functionally impossible.

There are counters to everything. Laser-resistant kenetic-energy projectiles come to mind. Very hard to stop, if someone has a projector in position to fire them....

Contra is right that the better the laser technology, the more valuable space-platforms for them become....

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