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67-Kilowatt Laser Unveiled
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Feb 24, 2007 05:11 PM
from the very-big-sharks dept.
from the very-big-sharks dept.
s31523 writes "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has announced they have working in the lab a Solid State Heat Capacity Laser that averages 67 kW. It is being developed for the military. The chief scientist Dr. Yamamoto is quoted: 'I know of no other solid state laser that has achieved 67 kW of average output power.' Although many lasers have peaked at higher capacities, getting the average sustained power to remain high is the tricky part. The article says that hitting the 100-kW level, at which point it would become interesting as a battlefield weapon, could be less than a year away."
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Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, not Korean soviets as such, but those of the USSR type were not unknown during the Korean war (or 'police action'). Many UN/Allied aircraft were lost during the Korean war to Soviet fighter pilots. See here for some info: http://aeroweb.lucia.it/rap/RAFAQ/SovietAces.html [lucia.it]
I recall from my youth, I had opportunity to listen to one of my fathers' buddies that had flown an F86 Sabre in combat during the war. I remember him saying that they could quickly tell if the ene
Eleven (Score:3, Funny)
Not Car Wars level yet (Score:3, Funny)
-Uncle Albert
official name... (Score:5, Funny)
(damn, why couldn't he have been Dr. Yamato)
Rumsfeld Already Wants One (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Rumsfeld Already Wants One (Score:5, Funny)
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Not good enough (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not good enough (Score:4, Funny)
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Too big (Score:3, Insightful)
Picture [bbc.co.uk] in TFA shows a trailer which you would presumably tow through the streets of Baghdad zapping potential IED's but the opposition in that country have shown that they have the ability to adapt to changed conditions. So the bombs they plant will be in places you can't tow a huge trailer, or outside a place where blowing up the IED will only make you get the blame for killing civilians.
Too much overhead, not enough payload.
May cause som collateral damage (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:May cause som collateral damage (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:May cause som collateral damage (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:May cause som collateral damage (Score:4, Funny)
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67kW? (Score:3, Funny)
Tough decision... (Score:4, Funny)
Yanks developing more weapons (Score:3, Insightful)
For those who see these laser protecting them from the terrorists' attacks on their homes, I think this is being a bit naive. This laser is to protect military equipment on the battlefield, and the ruling class at home. Just look at how the military didn't lift a finger to stop 9/11, even though they had precise warnings from multiple credible sources. The only thing the US government did was to protect Bin Laden's family after 9/11, flying them back home to safety.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Name one, and explain how it's more free (not "a better place to live" or "more friendly to the environment").
Problem is, US citizens don't live in a democracy, so can't affect the foreign policy of their ruling class. Think I'm wrong? Think again. They just voted out the Republicans in an absolute landslide which is largely recognised as being a rejection of Republican foreign policy, but you watch just how much that policy c
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well you're making a very narrow definition of free. Are you saying that a country that bases it's whole existence on unsustainable living and exploiting 3rd world countries is free?
I already named Venezuela as moving in the right direction, based on 1 definition of 'free'. Want more? Fine. The UK has distinguished itself from both the US and Australia by defending the rights of its citizens illeg
Germany (and other civilized countries) (Score:4, Interesting)
> Name one,
Germany.
> and explain how it's more free (not "a better place to live" or "more friendly to the environment").
If I'm a 17yo guy I can make pictures of my 15yo girlfriend and send them to my email-account
without both of us getting sued for posession and production of child pornography and being
trialed as adults and jailed for my own good.
Of course, I can't yell "Heil Hitler" on the street in Germany without getting into legal trouble but frankly,
I prefer to live in a country with people taking dirty pictures of themselves than in a country where
people feel the urge to yell "Heil Hitler" on the street.
Or being 17yo and getting a blowjob by a 15yo and 10years in jail?
(http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?pag
Or being 15yo and being charged with sexually abusing YOURSELF?
(http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetli
Or just google about your sodomy-laws?
You are only free if it comes to destroying and consuming.
(and yes, there are a lot of things wrong in Germany, too.)
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Re:Yanks developing more weapons (Score:4, Insightful)
Jose Padilla is US citizen picked up in Chicago.
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Re:Yanks developing more weapons (Score:5, Insightful)
This is wrong for a number of reasons.
Firstly, I didn't mention spending as a percentage of GDP; I was talking about absolute spending.
Next, comparing spending / GDP with other nations with incredibly low GDPs isn't really giving a clear picture of what's going on. For example, who the hell is Eritrea, the so-called No 1 in military spending in the world? You see, if these countries have a very small GDP, the figures are going to look distorted even if they only buy a couple of grenades.
Next, the US hides massive amounts of its military spending. The figure they used in that CIA table was the official maintenance cost of the US military. This is the amount that would be required just to keep the military at home. But they're never at home! Things like the wars aren't counted by the US, for some reason. These are 'extra' costs. The trillion dollars that Dubya has asked for to cover the next year in Iraq, well that's not counted. The budget of the CIA, with their military coupes against democratically elected governments and such, well that's not counted. And research on weapons such as this laser. That's not counted either. So you see, if all these things were counted, then the US would be at the top of the list in terms of GDP as well. They're already at the top of the list in absolute terms, which is the point I was originally making.
That's because you're either in denial, or you'e completely fooled by the propaganda. It's YOU who needs a tin foil hat
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Re:Yanks developing more weapons (Score:4, Informative)
China? Sorry, the US military budgets dwarfs them incredibly. The official US military budget accounts for 50% of the world's military budget. So they are outclassing you, but not in the way that you mean.
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Re:Get real (Score:4, Interesting)
Good to see you're starting out from a defensible position
BULLSHIT! You mean like in Vietnam? Or Iraq? Or Afghanistan ( while they were setting up the Taliban, and now )? Or when they assassinated the democratically elected leader of Chille in 9/11, 1973? Don't give me this 'America support democracy' crap please. I didn't come down in the last shower.
It's true that the economy of a bourgeois democracy under a capitalist system will grow the fastest out of all the organisations structures that we know. That isn't necessarily a good thing, but this is a topic for another discussion. The cold hard truth about the US economy is that it's not exactly riding the wave of exports at the moment. The US economy owes a lot more to its imports than it does to its exports . For example, the US is unbelievably dependent on China for a source of cheap labour. You don't see them pushing China towards a democracy, do you? The only places where the US mentions the word 'democracy' is where they have a natural research worth stealing, and then you can bet it's not democracy that will eventuate, but exactly the opposite. You see, democracy isn't something that is handed down from on high. It's something that people have to struggle for. It's a process. You can't bomb a country into democracy. And I'll say it again: the day when the US pushes for democratic reform in China ( and not via bombing, mind you ), is the day that I reconsider my statement that the US hates democracy.
Well, the thing is that there are plenty of US-bashers around at the moment. It goes without saying that the Arab world thinks as I do. Europe is no different
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
He also forgets that the our military has very limited ability to operate within the territorial United States (e.g. the Posse Comitatus Act.) Oh, I agree that there are many someones, somewhere, who bear the responsibility for not
Re:Yanks developing more weapons (Score:4, Insightful)
I find that people are throwing these mindless 1-line responses around as AC a lot recently
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Venezuela is looking very promising. They're creating soviet-style workers' councils and other community-based groups
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, I've entertained the idea. The problem at the moment is that Venezuela is unstable. It's on the tipping-point of a revolution, but hasn't quite gotten there yet. I also am heavily rooted in my own country - mortgage, job, family, etc. I'm certainly not the kind of person to move countries just because they have some advantages in some areas. They have more freedom of speech, for example. But in Australia, we also have some degree
So close (Score:4, Funny)
WARNING (Score:4, Funny)
Do not stare into laser with remaining co-worker.
Blind Soldiers (Score:4, Interesting)
Here, kitty, kitty.... (Score:3, Funny)
Uh-oh.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Need: Sharks, duct tape (Score:5, Informative)
The Air Force has a real hard on for laser systems. Though it doesn't say specifically in the article it appears this lab was awarded the AFRL's contract to produce a solid state equivalent to the ATL system being developed largely by Boeing. The ATL is a smaller cousin of the ABL weighing in at about 70kW. It's an order of magnitude lower power than the roughly 1MW ABL but is also quite a bit smaller. The ABL requires a 747, the ATL is being developed to be mounted on a C-130 or V-22 Osprey. A solid state ATL would be far more useful for the Air Force than a chemical one. A solid state laser system on an aircraft could be powered by generators hooked to the engines and fired an indefinite number of times in flight.
Prism Tanks anyone? (Score:3, Funny)
Popcorn, hell. It's an assassin in orbit. (Score:3, Interesting)
Do we really trust the new SuperPresidents(tm) that Bush has created with a silent assassin from orbit? How long until a terrorist(tm) is smoked? The family around him? An environmentalist - already labeled terrorists. Hell. PETA members are now semi-official terrorists. REPORTERS are being labeled fellow travelers. The Army already smoked one building full of reporters with a tank. They'd love them some lasers. We've killed one foreign head of state by hanging, another still is in prison on charges that no one understands. You think the New American Century Cheney/Rice types will hesitate one second in smoking a head of state?
What really worries me is, say, an individual with advanced power storage tech (coming soon) or a hybrid car generating enough juice to have a lovely laser handgun. Perfect as a targeting system, perfect as a killer. No noise, good for miles, untraceable by conventional means in real time. Also good for "riot" (AKA protest) control for unruly peons. Goes with the microwave cannon, the electrical stunner, the sound cannon.
In all of this, how exactly are we becoming safer? What the hell do we need this thing for? and once we show it can be done, the Chinese and the Indian research teams will whack their own models out in a couple of years, selling it to the highest bidder. STREET GANGS will have lasers in fifteen years.
Re:So will this give me bionic eyesight (Score:4, Funny)
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Worse (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It will vaporize your head... Unless... (Score:5, Informative)
If your mirror is 99% reflective (which would be very, very good -- and it won't stay that way in a dusty dirty battlefield), you'd still be absorbing 1kW of power. Which might be very easy or very hard to dissipate, depending on the beam diameter and how well the targeting system can keep it on the same piece of armor. And, as soon as your armor starts to heat up more than a little, the reflectivity will drop and it will fail.
Everyone always thinks mirrors are an easy answer to laser weapons, but it's not really that simple; sure they're worth considering, but they're not obviously a winning strategy.
A better armor might actually be an ablative -- eg a phenolic or graphite plate that absorbs all the heat at the very surface, and vaporizes into a cloud of gas that then takes the majority of the heating while the armor continues ablating from conducted heat and laser heating that gets through -- meanwhile the targeting system frantically tries to keep the laser on the same spot long enough to punch all the way through, and the tank driver tries to conduct evasive action. Modern ablative technology for rocket engines can take 1kW/cm^2 of heating and last for minutes of service; ablatives derived from such technologies might make very effective armors.
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Re:It will vaporize your head... Unless... (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to put the reflective surface on the intercept side of the substrate, glass or otherwise. That way, it is the first thing the laser hits. And of course, you'd better make sure that the efficiency is high enough that the laser doesn't manage to ablate the coating. Maybe coatings aren't that good an idea in the first place. Maybe thick, mirror-polished armor that can direct heat away from the surface really quickly is more what you want. Of course, a little dirt on there, you have a localized heat event, and all of a sudden things aren't as reflective as they should be, and zonk, you have a hole right through the armor.
100 KW for a battlefield laser, eh? Personally, I'm thinking being in front of one of these is a very, very bad idea.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Industrial uses of high-powered lasers include laser cutting and welding. I don't have any experience with either one, but I imagine they could benefit from power increases (cut thicker parts faster) and solid state (hopefully means cheaper and lower maintenance).
Laser-thermal rockets are also not that far away from reality; what they lack is a fair bit of development effort, currently hindered by the cost of high power continuous output lasers. The basic way they work is a high power laser on the groun
Re:two things (Score:5, Funny)
2) Later that night you could pick out a cinema in Paris and really piss off the audience by squiggling on the screen.
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Re:two things (Score:5, Informative)
The satellite-based lasers for Star Wars (Reagan's wet dream, not the Movie) primarily worked by kinetic activity.
A cutting laser doesn't take anywhere near 67kW, but they work fairly slowly (slow enough for an armored target to take countermeasures). Instead, you want to basically vaporize a few nm of the surface, resulting in exactly the sort of explosion you say doesn't happen.
Search Google for "arc flash"... Though a much more mundane effect, it gives the general idea... Basically, if you vaporize copper bus bar by shorting it out, it produces a pretty impressive "explosion" due to the copper suddenly occupying 67,000 (no connection to the laser from the FP, just a coincidence) times its original volume.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Alright, the good guys gets the red ones and the bad guys can use the green ones. That way we know when we got killed by friendly or unfriendly fire.
Re:Shortly after introduction 100kW battlefield la (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1. If you want to read about sharks, search for 'lasers'
2. If you want to read about lasers, search for 'sharks'
3. If you want to read about Microsoft doing something good, search for 'itsatrap'
4. If you want to read about Vista, search for 'defectivebydesign'
5. If you want to read about Canada, search for 'blamecanada'
Nowhere in the tagging beta faq does it say that the main purpose of tags is for searching. It says "We don't know exactly how this wi