Laser to disorient pirates | Hacker News Reader

Laser to disorient pirates

newscientist.com

10 pointsubasu15 comments

"...the system can automatically regulate the intensity of the laser beam to ensure there is no lasting eye damage, he says..."

I wonder if the intensity can also be regulated in such a way as to completely ablate the surface of the retina.

Sounds like a useful tool to have if you are a pirate and you want a better chance at shooting the crew before they shoot back as well.

Wait, bad guys can have weapons too!?

Might be a little harder to aim from a 6-meter skiff bobbing in the open sea. I think the freighters are a bit more stable.

Let's see if Kent has that tracking mirror completed yet.

It's interesting to think of this whole situation as an arms race, and I wonder if any of the pirates are active in developing countermeasures to such systems, or even innovating on their own attack methods and equipment. The only photos I've seen are of guys in small wooden boats with AK-47s but one would assume that any technology improvements for the pirates would improve their piracy yields.

I'd say the next step would be some green laser glasses. I don't think there'll be a ban on import of that particular item in Somalia.

This sounds like a pretty expensive toy to me. It seems like chemical irritants (ex tear gas) would be more effective, and cheaper? I suppose you could get gas masks, but those might be harder to come by than oh, say, a 2x4 to hold in front of your face.

What if the pirates have mirrors? What if they have laser safety glasses with the correct range of filters?

What if the laser that's tuned for a long distance reflects off of something closer and permanently blinds the crew?

This sounds like an expensive and dangerous solution that can be easily circumvented.

The pirates get around in basic dinghy's with fairly basic weapons. They're not that sophisticated in their attacks or their defenses (at least not yet).

The effective intensity of a laser falls of as the range squared, so you need a pretty hefty laser to dazzle someone at range. The intensity of reflected laser light falls of with the fourth power of the range, making reflected light not much of a concern for the crew. Its quite possible for the pirates to put a mirror between them and the ship, indeed it should be quite possible for the pirates to just turn their heads away from the defending ship.

The problem for the pirates is that its hard to effectively attack something you can't look at, however. Red glasses might be an effective countermeasure, though, as other people have pointed out.

If the mirror is wider than the cone of the laser (1 meter in this case), then irradiance still falls off as the range squared. Reflecting the laser back at its source only doubles the range.

> "This is very much a non-lethal weapon," says Bryan Hore of BAE Systems in Farnborough, UK, where the system was developed.

How's the old saying go? Stop a pirate with a non-lethal weapon, and you've stopped him for a day. Stop him with a lethal weapon, and you've stopped him for life.

As they're only using a single green laser, I wonder if the pirates could wear a head mounted display, with a webcam attached, which could display only red-blue.

Those would be sunglasses that filter out green, otherwise known as red sunglasses.

Prediction: It keeps the lolcats being cute, and the pirates don't bother doing anything else.

...

Oh, that kind of pirate.

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