U.S. Navy awards Lockheed Martin a $150M contract to develop laser weapons | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Navy awards Lockheed Martin a $150M contract to develop laser weapons

bloomberg.com

Affirmative, Crossbow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTx_qTwQqjU

get your popcorn ready.

Just looking at that thing hitting a non reflective target is going to melt your eyes.

Are we going to rely on traditional laser goggles that block certain frequencies? Or like fiber optic diagnostic microscopes, are we going to issue fully occlusive goggles that display a camera feed?

Yeah I wonder how they plan to resolve that issue. Even those ~$10 10,000mw green lasers from aliexpress can permanently harm your eyesight from a reflection.

And that's why laser weapons are a war crime: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_W...

Not quite. You have to be a lot more specific: only laser weapons specifically designed to cause permanent blindness.

"Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons prohibits the use of laser weapons specifically designed to cause permanent blindness. The parties to the protocol also agree to not transfer such weapons to any state or non-state entity. The protocol does not prohibit laser systems where blinding is an incidental or collateral effect, but parties that agree to it must take all feasible precautions to avoid such effects."

I believe there are international treaties against blinding weapons.

Some weapons get around those kinds of restrictions by having a different primary purpose; for instance, I believe incendiaries aren't allowed as anti-personnel weapons, but white phosphorous is allowed for creating a smoke screen.

I guess if you aren't intentionally trying to blind people that's allowed?

You can't target personnel with incendiaries (e.g. white phosphorus), but you can target their equipment with incendiaries. While this normally means stuff like artillery pieces or crew-served weapons, belts and canteens are also considered "equipment". There's ways around international law and enough fog of war on the battlefield that anything short of organized gross violation isn't going to get brought before a court. Totally agreed that the use of these laser weapons could obviously and easily blind someone won't matter because it's not intended to blind someone.

As Syria’s use of chemical weapons has shown, those treaties simply aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

As the general lack of widespread usage of chemical weapons since WWI (yes, there are notable exceptions, including the Iran-Iraq war) would suggest, those treaties have prevented a whole lot of human suffering.

Imagine what Vietnam would have been like if both sides had used chemical weapons extensively.

We did use chemical weapons, just not organophosphate nerve agents, vessicants, and choking agents. Instead we used defoliants, which just happen to also be carcinogenic and teratogenic agents. Besides, chemical weapons are for urban and open battlefield use, they would be counterproductive in a jungle.

You know why we don’t use them? They suck. Even in WWI, after people figured out what they were about, casualties from chemical agents were never as extreme as in their initial deployment. Militaries train and equip soldiers to handle chemical agents, which rely on favorable atmospheric conditions as well.

What chemical weapons are good at doing is murdering civilians, especially the very young and very old. They’re a terror weapon with minimal utility beyond killing people who were never going to fight you anyhow.

So no, we didn’t use them in Vietnam, we used daisy cutters and napalm and iron bombs, not because they’re kinder, but because they’re efficacious. Laws against white phosphorous and other incendiary weapons hasn’t altered their prevalence, because they work. Depleted Uranium, megatons of lead, and other horrific pollutants, not to mention land mines are still wildly popular because they work as intended. That they also decimate populations for years after conflict ends doesn’t matter to people, just that they work.

Don’t kid yourself.

>You know why we don’t use them? They suck. Even in WWI, after people figured out what they were about, casualties from chemical agents were never as extreme as in their initial deployment. Militaries train and equip soldiers to handle chemical agents, which rely on favorable atmospheric conditions as well.

My understanding is that chemical weapons are largely effective in that they force your enemy to run around in protective gear; you shouldn't measure direct casualties so much as how much time and effort is spent dealing with it. From reading the world war one era literature, chemical weapons have an outsized effect on morale.

Really, I think the reasons for not using chemical weapons in world war two are more similar to the reasons why even small nukes haven't been used since world war two; sure, there, are have been plenty of situations where tactical nukes would have made sense from a tactical perspective... but there's a certain psychology involved, I think; Using a chemical weapon is crossing a line in a way that using a landmine is not, in the same way that using a small tactical nuke to destroy a bunker is crossing a line in the same way that using a MOAB is not.

(I do think the landmine example is interesting just 'cause you can make an argument that landmines are more likely to cause unintentional casualties after the conflict has ended than most chemical agents, and yet chemical warfare is over the line, while landmines are not)

Fuck man. This is the kind of shit that makes me feel guilty about paying taxes.

Well, the money is going to R&D so it will advance human knowledge. Are there non-military used for the research? It’s only $150 million. Peanuts. One F35 costs around $100 million.

Didn’t I read somewhere that we spent $20 billion for air conditioning during the war in Afghanistan?

$150m and completion within 1.5 years, seems like zeroes are missing from those numbers

Because this is a development of a production version of an already-existing and -tested prototype.

> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.

150m could do a lot of good. 20B could do even more. Can’t we express a desire for our elected leaders to spend our tax money on good instead of perpetuating the military industrial complex?

It is the kind of technology that might prevent drone incursions into crowded stadia.

Countering large numbers of small drones will be a key defensive goal in the future.

Drone could just take a flight path between a passenger airplane and the ground laser pods, such that shooting the laser would fry the airplane behind the drone. It isn't a great solution, when it ever works.

No that's not how lasers and flight paths work. It's impossible to line up aircraft so precisely.

Why? This doesn't make much sense to me.

A small drone won't be able to go fast/far enough.

passenger airplanes not known for going into war zones.

MH17

One stray plane does not a military defense strategy make which was the GP: hide behind commercial aircraft

If you had a battery of lasers, you should be able to cover the sky without hitting unintended targets, because the distance between the drone and plane multiples distance between the ground lasers.

What I’ve come to understand by studying history is that countries without a superior military get subjugated by countries that have one. You can either play the game or lose without putting up a fight.

And yet, raising an army to be defensive just makes your neighbors arm faster to try prevent THEIR demise.

I suspect the details end up having a lot more nuance than one or two sentences can describe.

I mean diplomacy helps too but nobody is going to listen if you don't have a stick to back it up with. See Ukraine for example.

if True we would have 1 global empire.

Youve got enough comments to reply to so Ill be concise. If this can be used against drone craft or reliably against missiles then I'm for it. If it's just a better gun Im against it.

In all likelihood it's a pretty poor substitute for a gun. Consider that this weapon is suspected to cost around one dollar per shot (not including capital costs, I'm sure.) Figure that the navy generates energy pretty expensively and assume that means ~3kW*hr. Wikipedia says somewhere in the range 15-50kW. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Weapon_System).

I'm not up-to-date on the latest and greatest in batteries, but I think a person would have a hard time carrying the energy supply for a laser weapon that is comparable in effectiveness to the many forms of relatively compact guns in their many forms, whether we're discussing anti-air, anti-tank, or anti-personnel.

This is the navy trying to be able to deal with the asymmetry of a battle field in which the most credible threats are swarms of cheap drones. Consider that there are navy ships where the cheapest weapon on-board costs $0.75 million per shot, and it's not surprising that this would be exciting for them.

Just to note: a dollar a shot is not very far off from the current retail price of rifle bullets.

We don't actually point guns up very often though. In part, because the threats move too fast, and in part because bullets come down. What's the ballistic range of 20 mm depleted uranium round? If I shot drones in the Gulf of Aden and end up peppering a mall in Djibouti, we're all going to have a bad day.

The same physics that makes shotguns safe to clay shoot with seem like natural ballistic solutions to this..

But sure, lasers I guess.

The range of a 12 gauge shotgun with a sabot round is claimed to be up to 200 yards. The maximum firing range of a 20 mm cannon is 4 miles. That's without using depleted uranium (which both harder and denser).

Sure, if you can get inside of 40 yards, a shotgun is a great point-defense weapon. You put more muzzle velocity and bigger pellets coming out of it, so you can reach further, well, that gets back to square one.

It's not all that much fun being downrange from somebody shooting at airborne geese from a blind a couple hundred yards off, I can tell you...

Being downrange of a giant laser is probably not fun either. Seems like a good way to blind people by glancing a metal hand rail.

I'm also suspicious of the range of any laser based technology. Atmosphere seems to attenuate it pretty quick. I remember reading in 2007 on slashdot theoretical solutions that shoot some kind of hollow cylinder shaped beam that ionizes the air in the hollow center, allowing a laser to go further before being attenuated.

They must have made some physical advancements far beyond my reading, since birdshot just seems easier.

If you're on a ship with a reactor, it's more just about how you are using your energy than the cost of the energy. You're generating that power no matter what. However if you're on a conventional power then yes you would count it.

I completely disagree. Refueling is incredibly expensive and time consuming, and the frequency of doing so directly results from how carefully fuel is conserved throughout core life.

source?

If you live in the US about 1/3 of your taxes go to making sure we have the means to break things and kill people. It's been that way for a long long time. Whether that is good or bad is a whole different discussion, but throughout history having the biggest stick has proved to be beneficial at least for awhile.

1/3 is a wildly inaccurate number that only comes close to holding true if you don't include our non-obligatory spending which is massive.

Its varied from year to year. I cant keep track what goes to medicaid (and as the baby boomers continue to age it will shift as time moves forward) and want not over the year, Id say the low estimate is 20% of your taxes (and the number are different when you look at mandatory vs discretionary spending) and the high is 36% either way its a lot of money.

11.6% in 2017 https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown_2017USrt_19rs...

Drop in the bucket of the defense budget... This only amounts to about two new F-18s. At least some basic research might come out of it. There's things my taxes go towards that I feel much more negatively about.

that's not much money and there have been many many laser weapon contracts in the past. why is this news?

oh god. that article is crap. "Star Wars technology"!

I had a mental image of Dr Evil issuing his demand.

Star Wars was Ted Kennedy's description of SDI -- a nickname that stuck.

Now, if they could downsize it and kill mosquitoes in mid-air (while keeping other insects alive), I'd definitely buy that!

(Sorry, just a residual reaction to a mosquito-ridden vacation last summer.)

It exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

Except it doesn’t, because an ex-Microsoft patent troll - N. Myhrvold - got hold of the patents for it. And he baldly stated that his firm has no intention of ever making and selling it.

So now nobody can.

Not even close to true: https://www.geekwire.com/2015/intellectual-ventures-laser-mo...

I thought it was already deployed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5qKSKsfUPM

Operational test of the LaWS weapon. I believe what they're building is meant to be a permanent installation laser weapon.

Wikipedia has this additional information:

"Following a review of several ship classes to determine which had available space, power, and cooling, it was decided that after the Ponce's planned decommissioning in 2018, the LaWS will be moved to the new amphibious transport dock ship USS Portland (LPD-27) for indefinite testing, it will utilise the space and power connections reserved for VLS to house the LaWS power and control modules while the laser itself will be bolted to the deck. As its a trial it will not be integrated with the ships Warfare Centre command & control systems."

"In January 2018 the Navy announced a $150m contract with Lockheed Martin for the production of two more LaWS units to be delivered 2020; one will be fitted to USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) while the other will be used for land-based testing. Further contract options could bring its value to $942.8m."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Weapon_System

I want to know who has the job of naming these things and coming up with badass style acronyms that still sort of explain what they do. All weapons have seem to have cool names so it must be really important to get funded.

MANPADS leaves a lot to be desired on the masculinity front.

DroneShield has a much cooler solution. Watch the video: https://www.droneshield.com/dronegun.

I am surprised they aren't considering it for the Zumwalt class.

They've basically abandoned the Zumwalt class and are building lots more updated Arleigh Burke class destroyers.

Why are they abandoning the Zumwalt class? Due to cost/delays?

The DDG-1000 Zumwalt class was a huge expensive mistake. Those ships only exist because after the old battleships were decommissioned, the Marine Corps convinced Congress that the Navy needed new ships to provide gunfire support during amphibious invasions. But the reality is that modern weapons have become so lethal that amphibious assaults against a heavily defended beach would be suicidal anyway even with naval gunfire.

The Zumwalt class is left as a ship without a mission. The guided artillery shells were cancelled due to cost overruns so there's no ammunition to fire out of the cannons. They have no area air defense capability and minimal antisubmarine capability. The smart move would have been to keep the first ship as a technology demonstrator and test article while cancelling the rest but instead they went ahead with building three of the stupid things.

are they any good for arctic patrolling?

Well they're not icebreakers.

Cost overruns and delays

I've lost the bubble, have we heard if the next flight of Arleigh Burkes will be nuclear?

Nope, conventional power. They can't afford nuclear power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arleigh_Burke-class_destroyer#...

Reflective chaff costs a lot less than $150M... this seems like it's going down the Soviet Hind/Stinger Missile path of stupid cost trade-offs.

Let's see, mass of chaff in line of beam times one minus reflectivity of chaff at laser frequency times heat of vaporization plus heat of melting plus a bit more for raising the temperature of the chaff… I'm pretty sure any laser capable of penetrating an interesting military target is going to zip right through chaff. Aluminum and silver are only about 95% reflective at visible light frequencies and you have to figure as soon as the surface starts to go that value drops in a hurry.

150kW laser, chaff is 98% reflective mylar, that is like sticking a bunch of plastic in the microwave. Eventually it'll melt, but not fast enough to justify using a laser over a conventional weapon.

Honestly, just using a smoke source is probably even easier as a shield, and just let convection protect you.

Or just have a thin layer of ablative armor designed to maximize laser bloom. We either need a lot more power behind these beams, better adaptive optics, or best of all really responsive phase conjugation to overcome realistic countermeasures.

I’ll take a wall of tungsten carbide, steel and lead over something that can be defeated by a foggy day. The promises of DEWs are enormous, but we’re not there yet.

Those lasers are intended as defensive weapons against drones, missiles, and small boats. Such targets have no practical way to protect themselves with reflective chaff.

They develop a laser to do job that relatively small caliber autocannon can do.

I don't think autocannon can be efficient against drones. You need to hit a small and fast-moving target - that's a job either for AA gun (which will need to spend a lot of ammo saturating the area around drone) or for high-powered precision laser.

Laser does have a slight advantage, it's more immediately obvious where misses are going to go, less likely to miss, which might be easier to avoid civilian bystanders closer to land/port where a drone would be more likely.

Lockheed makes those, too. Lasers have unmatched range and speed and would be very useful in some situations.

In the long term I'd expect lasers to outperform bullets at intercept tasks. They certainly travel faster and have the potential to aim faster and carry a deeper reserve of ammunition. Even if this system is only an incremental step towards that goal I think it makes sense.

They are impacted by weather - dust, humidity, rain and clouds. If there is dust or smoke in the air that touches the optics they easily melt into the glass and start fast degradation process.

The HEL demonstration with 15 kilowatts laser took forever to ignite small fire in a target boat (directed at a single point in the outboard motor). 150-kilowatt laser is ten times faster but simple water pump in the front of approaching boat is effective countermeasure.

DARPA has had low power laser demonstrators for 20 years. They are cheaper now but developing yet another is not going to produce more improvement in the power scaling of lasers. High power lasers are hard for optics and all other parts.

I think they mainly do it for cheaper-per-shot defence against badly equipped armies. Which means they don't like spending a lot of bullets on the phalanx system to counter enemy artilety in middle east, and it doesn't rain much in the desert anyway, so they're good to go.

They can also have applications in high-altitudes and in space. Maybe to take down MRVs? That makes a lot more sense actually.

>Maybe to take down MRVs?

You need very high power lasers for that. These are the hopes DARPA has for lasers but they don't seem to materialize.

I see main application as air defense against UAV and missiles, not boats.. Hellfires and javelins will probably be more effective against boats..

Lasers have vastly different external ballistics, meaning they are not impacted by wind, density altitude, and gravity as much as a bullet would be. This means they would have a greater range and accuracy.

Benefit of this, to a solider, is there is no difference in elevation between engaging a target at 20 meters out to say 700 meters. This will enable them to be far more effective in urban battle fields as they can engage targets far more quickly and effectively.

They need line of sight here, don't they? Or are they going to bounce weaponized lasers off mirrors in space?

So from my understanding of urban warfare you would have direct line of sight of the target, and that distance can vary from very close to over a 1000 meters. It may sound like a long way, but in the grand scheme of things this is like looking down a few blocks, if you are on just the 2nd-4th floor of a building you will realize how far you can actually see.

Lasers in questions are for navy air defense, they will have line of sight.

I know it's not fashionable to RTFA, but these aren't really intended for air defense, nor limited to air targets. They won't be much use against high speed aircraft...

"HELIOS...is designed to track and destroy small, unmanned aerial vehicles or boats that approach a ship."

Sure, both boats and UAV will be within line of sight. What is your point in this discussion? What are you trying to add?

You stated incorrectly that these lasers were for air defense.

So, shooting down UAV is not air defense?

Only in the broadest of terms. Naval air defense doesn't worry too much about UAVs currently. Most UAVs that the USN is facing are small drones that aren't a serious threat. They're easily handled by Phalanx. When the USN talks about air defense, they're primarily talking about manned aircraft and anti-ship cruise missiles. These are handled by Evolved Sea Sparrow and Standard missiles managed by AEGIS.

Though these lasers are capable of downing small UAVs, they're really intended to counter small boat swarms (Boghammer type vessels) favored by Iran.

And they are quieter. With stealth ships being built, if you start shooting drones out of the air you'll be heard pretty quickly.

The three main advantages are: 1. can create effect on target independent of evasive manuvering 2. effectively infinite magazine 3. near infinite cost of exchange ratio.

All of these make lasers very compelling for defensive CIWS.

The fundamental problem the Navy is terrified about is huge barrages of high speed, high maneuverability, anti-ship missiles. Existing systems are very limited in stopping such an attack if large enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com