Mysterious Laser Turret Appears on US Navy Destroyer USS Dewey
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
"Ruggedized High Energy Laser (RHEL)"
EDIT: There have also been suggestions that the current UK Prime Minister has done this.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/giuliani-associate-left-trail-o...
I hope I still have my copy laying around because it's one of those films that I can watch every few years and be amazed again and again.
Edit: I guess it will not be long before it's even harder to find, but at least the page is archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20190129000701/http://www.atomce...
Seemed like overnight it became nearly impossible to search for Cisco IOS (since many relevant posts didn't call out Cisco by name, since why would you, IOS is obviously Cisco IOS)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Red_Hat
And #7:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/the-n...
But #2-#6 are more what you'd probably expect.
> Speaking on Talk Radio on Tuesday, the frontrunner to replace Theresa May was asked by the interviewer, Ross Kempsell, what he did to relax.
> Johnson replied: “I like to paint. Or I make things. I have a thing where I make models of buses. What I make is, I get old, I don’t know, wooden crates, and I paint them. It’s a box that’s been used to contain two wine bottles, right, and it will have a dividing thing. And I turn it into a bus."
> “So I put passengers – I paint the passengers enjoying themselves on a wonderful bus – low carbon, of the kind that we brought to the streets of London, reducing C02, reducing nitrous oxide, reducing pollution.”
A few more cases have been ID'ed by people on Twitter:
>Boris Johnson has created the #BorisBus situation to bury the fact that three years ago he campaigned with an actual bus, promising Brexit millions for the NHS.
RHELinux pages are unlikely to mention lasers as well. Qualifying searches like this is pretty easy.
I so wanted that to be the Association for Supply Chain Management, but it's really Anti-Ship Cruise Missile.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_High_Energy_Laser
- reflect every part of the spectrum that the laser can produce (idk if military lasers operate in the visible part of the spectrum)
- keep the coating clean enough throughout flight to maintain reflectivity
- meet the same requirements as the current coating which probably includes aerodynamics, heat resistance, etc.
Idk if such a material exists, but I'm sure every country building lasers is also working on the defensive side as well.
I was using pulse lasers in the lab and traditional silver mirrors would get damaged by pulse energies over 100mJ. They would just turn black. The solution was to use interference mirrors for the exact wavelengths of the beam to reflect, which wouldn't have any absorption and such could survive large pulse energies. But those mirrors are limited to the exact wavelength at precise angles.
That sounds impractical. Either you're trying to coat shells on demand in wartime, or stocking extra quantities targeted to this or that wavelength. If you're already stocking extra ammunition, it sounds better to just overwhelm the defensive system with more shells, like another commenter suggested.
If you're going to design something new, maybe something more like a MIRV launcher that fires three shells in the time it currently takes to fire one.
But yeah, just throw a bunch of things and swamp their targeting systems.
Those don’t exist, it will be scratched off well before it’s even used.
Not to mention the cost of such material and the cost loss of scrapping or converting existing inventory won’t make it a viable solution.
The majority of mortars fired at US troops today were likely made in the 60’s and 70’s.
You are better off with simply using mortars in large volleys to saturate the system or simply attacking unprotected targets.
Most rounds fired at US troops can’t penetrate their body armor either it doesn’t stop them from trying not did it force them to switch to armor defeating projectiles.
They just are less effective and hope they’ll either land a lucky shot to the face or lower limbs or a debilitating shot to unprotected areas such as the arms and shoulders.
Not if there is some sort casing around that is discarded once the projectile is in flight
The same goes for Katyushas (rockets). Most of them have a range that's well over the horizon, so it would be difficult to fill the same use case with a laser.
Its also illegal to use excessive calibre bullets against human targets. Even though such large projectiles are much more likely to kill.
The exact phrasing is:
“It is prohibited to employ weapons, projectiles and material and methods of warfare of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.”
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...
"New laser turret" doesn't have the same cachet as "mysterious laser turret" I guess.
Obviously the solution here is to put another turret behind the ship, but is that actually the plan or am I missing something? Do missiles always come from the front of the ship for some reason?
Frank Dunnigan's "How to Make War", which is putatively about how to develop war games, goes into some depth of comparing offensive versus defensive impact of various weapon systems. It makes for an interesting read.
Presumably if a point defense laser reaches operational status it would be fitted to both PD mounting points.
Couldn't you now just home in on the laser? I feel like I'm missing something.
It's like saying in WW1: Don't build tanks because they will invent anti-tank guns.
It's a game of cat and mouse.
Set up a bunch of not-quite-parallel tubes with simple and durable light-sensors in the "deep" end, and whichever sensor measures the highest must be pointed at the light-source.
> So you want your lens covered 99.9% of the time, just in case someone points a laser at it?
Don't some missile seekers already work that way?
https://www.ausairpower.net/TE-Sidewinder-94.html:
> The Sidewinder's seeker used an ingeniously clever optical arrangement, with a Cassegrainian mirror fitted with a tilted secondary mirror. The secondary mirror rotated in unison with a reticle, projecting the whole instantaneous field of view of the mirror through the reticle onto a filter/detector assembly. Because the mirror secondary was tilted, rotating it about the missile's axis swept the cone of the mirror's field of view about the missile's axis in a fashion analogous to a conical scanning radar seeker (see diagram).
At the end of the day, everything with sensors is an arms race. We've actually seen this evolution before with the early spinning mirror IR missiles and those glass disco balls on helicopters.
That one is stationed in my hometown
Similar to how shooting to kill is ok, but shooting to maim is not.
(This is less important if the missile has a nuclear warhead...)
Between a good gyro, some satelitte positioning I can see it getting a good hit rate even if blind.
And even if you miss just triggering an explosion in roughly the right area will do a fair bit of damage to ship antennae etc
The whole thing strikes me as a bad stopgap till lasers are powerful enough to take down missiles
But if you don't steer along the way, and you're off half a degree, say, and you go blind 10 miles out, you miss by 10 miles times sin(1/2 degree), which is 0.09 miles, which is 460 feet. I don't know what the effective radius of an anti-ship missile is, but 460 feet seems to me to be a rather long distance.
That's assuming you just have to worry about aiming accuracy. You could also have things like wind gusts. And the ship could be not just moving, but maneuvering.
But say its subsonic (mach 0.9... so like 300 m/s). Now your talking like 13.3 seconds to impact, and now need like 0.85 m/s^2 acceleration to induce a clean miss. Ok cool, that has some utility.
Oh, and totally, its a stop gap. But it's still useful to learn things like... how do gimballed laser systems behave on a ship? What type of maintenance is required? What unexpected interference is induced?
We keep spending more and more, and are being outsmarted with less and less. Three-quarters of a trillion dollar (i.e., the USA's DOD budget) is a significant amount of money.
One school of thought is that cyber/IO is like the air force -- it prepares the environment for ground action but doesn't hold territory. So once the West is weakened and divided enough, kinetic operations (Taiwan, Ukraine, Georgia, Syria/Iraq) become possible. So it is still very valuable to have a kinetic defence.
The USA out spends the next 10 or so nations __combined__. Most of those are allies.
The US doesn't get beat in the fight, they get beat by the strategy the US govt chooses. They keep wanting what is almost impossible (like a peaceful, democratic and tolerant Afghanistan that does grow opium) and half committing to do it.