laser weapon feasable yet?

jkthomson

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I know that it is 2003, and we are supposed to have flying cars, and robots that do housework...

I've noticed that you can get high power greenie laser pointers. how many mW of energy will it take to become a true "weapon", I don't think it should be able to cleave a person in half, but should definitely burn a hole in wood...

second, how portable are the types of laser that could output this much power? could you possibly carry it, ignoring power supplies for the moment... is it fragile?

or is the hand lasergun just like the flying car? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 

The_LED_Museum

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I think the handheld laser or phaser pistol or laser weapon like Walter Koenig had on Space: 1999 is like the flying car...probably still a ways off. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/blush.gif
 

BlindedByTheLite

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well.. i know scientists work with very powerful lasers.. i imagine the technology could be applied to weapons.. but not affordable ones or practical ones..
 

soloco

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The USAF has airplane mounted energy weapons. I think an effective hand held energy weapon is pretty far off, at least for most tactical uses. Maybe a long range hyper-accurate, silent sniping 'system'. Probably not man portable; need at least a squad to use in the field.
 

kev1-1

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The U.S.A.F Anti-Ballistic missile laser mounted on a 747 conversion is incredibly heavy...and can only manage a few shots before requiring refueling (which means a landing is needed.). Although, it does generate enough energy to heat up a missile 50 miles away...at least it should do when it goes from testing to production!!
 

83Venture

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Think I remember a thread here a few months ago that had links to articles about a hand held laser being developed that acted as a wireless TASER.
 

kakster

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Lets not forget SDI from the 80's, Regans "Star Wars" . The heart of this system was an X-Ray laser mounted on a satelite. Anything caught in its beam casts a negative shadow and combusts most impressivley.
 

Al_Havemann

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A portable laser weapon system might be technically feasible, it's possible to design a laser pump with sufficient output and small enough to classify it as a portable weapon but the sticking point is power.

Such a weapon could be designed with current material science but the power requirements would be prodigious indeed. We're not talking about a few batteries with a few watt hours here, we need hundred of amps/kilowatts to drive such a portable system and give it equality with conventional portable weapons currently available. For a laser to deliver the same power to a target as a conventional high-powered rifle bullet would take a power pulse of at least 25kw into a laser. Not trivial!.

A major byproduct would be large amounts of heat. It's conceivable that the cooling requirements could be managed by incorporating a defused refrigeration laser as a component of the system, but again, where do we get the power?. Conventional battery technology isn't even close with the very best available.

What's needed is a breakthrough in power generation, a quantum leap, if you will, and there's not a hint, not a whisper, not the slightest sign of a breakthrough in physics that point in that direction. Nothing at all, and it would seem like there should be at least some hints by now if there are any to find. Is it possible we?re hitting the wall with physics?.
 

nattuggla

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For something _really_ far out, you can read about the Stavatti TIS-1 gasdynamic laser rifle here (PDF): http://www.defensereview.com/352003/TIS1.pdf

Requires almost impossible amounts of Po-210 (it's made in microgram amounts and extremely expensive), would produce 50-100kW of heat _when_idling_ (in a 5kg weapon, that's hot, hot, HOT!), have a recoil force of 90lb over the 0.35 s "burst" (not exactly what _I_'d call a "practical" personal weapon).

(If you go to Stavatti's web page, you'll se aircraft designs, but if you read this http://www.stavatti.com/customer_support.html you'll get a better idea of what the company really does.)
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Leaving the world of fantasy, this one is certainly feasible:
http://www.defense-update.com/directory/THEL.htm
But at 180 tons, it's not exactly portable.

More on lasers: http://www.afa.org/magazine/sept1999/0999lasers.asp

Not as big as the AL-1, the F-35 will possibly get a 100kW electrically powered laser in a compact package:
http://aviationnow.com/avnow/news/channel_military.jsp?view=story&id=news/masd0926.xml

Lasers have been used as weapons: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/other/laser.htm

An old article which mentions some systems, don't know how many of them were realised in any way:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=D8n8I2.C6t%40ranger.daytonoh.attgis.com
 

Gransee

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Traditionally, the challenge of a man-portable LASER was one of mostly power supply. But just as there have been incredible advances in LEDS, LASER diodes have made incredible advances in efficiency in the past 10 years. Quantum efficiency of 40% or more is now possible. Osram for example, has 5mm laser diodes that can produce 75watts for 100ns. They have larger diodes in TO packages rated at several watts CW. You can also purchase diode arrays that have CW power levels of 100 watts or more and pulse power levels much higher than that.

Combine this with a high densitiy power source (LiIon, fuel cell, etc), power supply and aerogel capicitor and a man portable LASER weapon that can deliver 500watt pulses is now doable.

Now, the problem becomes reflection. At 500watts, even the reflection off a dull metal surface can permantly blind a person. Having a bird fly across your beam would create a reflection strong enough to at least temporarly blind everyone in your squad. If you are going to use a laser weapon, everyone in a mile or two radius must have eye protection. It is against the geneva convention to use a laser on the battlefield that is intended to blind people.

A lot of the systems planned by the military involve shooting things in flight high above the battlefield. I imagine some of this is for safety, but mostly LASERS are very good at shooting fast moving things.

Another possible use for LASERs is for extending/reducing the range of artillary rounds.

Peter
 
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funkmasterta

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Why spend so much time & money on this when a simple, shiny reflective surface can just bounce the laser off?
 

Gransee

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That was suggested as a defense against SDI. Another was spinning the missile to diffuse the laser power. Other ideas were electrical curtains and particle clouds.

Yes, this would deflect quite a bit of laser energy. But the response is to turn the laser power up even more.

Needless to say... Unless they have a nicely polished, mirror exactly where the laser is targeted, the target is going to go boom.

On the ABL, an oversized, cooled mirror is used to focus the laser energy.

Peter
 

McGizmo

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I hope all of this loose and intellectual information on a public forum isn't picked up by the wrong people. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif I'm glad to here that the Geneva convention has "outlawed" the use of lasers on the battle field. Now as long as everyone abides by the Geneva convention, there shouldn't be any problems, right? I have certainly heard enough about lasers in off forum discussions to be very concerned about the implications and ease of the wrong stuff getting into the wrong hands! I'll be darned if I'd discuss it here!

- Don
 

BuddTX

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[ QUOTE ]
jkthomson said:
I know that it is 2003, and we are supposed to have flying cars, and robots that do housework...


[/ QUOTE ]

Don't forget the food replicators, People living on the Moon and Mars, and of course, EVERYONE WEARING ONE PIECE SILVER JUMPSUITS!
 

Roy

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Back in the '70's, I talked with some of the guys at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds pulse nuclear reactor. They were talking about a Gamma laser that NASA had brought up for testing. The devise shot a coherent beam of gamma rays (x-rays)but needed a nuclear reactor as a source of the gamma rays! They were talking about having gamma pulse reactors in orbit to pulse the gamma lasers. Even today, it takes the output of a small powerplant (20-40 megawatts) to power a weapons grade laser.
 

Ratus

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AFAIK the laser is not used to burn or melt a target, but to transfer energy into it.

Mirrors used with high energy lasers are polished metal with a cooling system on the back. But the light does not reflect off the metal, but an "Optical Coating". If the cooling system fails or the "Optical Coating" is too thin, thick, wrong compound, etc. It absorbs too much energy, and goes BOOM


[qualifier] I an not an expert in this or any other field. [/qualifier]
 
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