High-Energy Lasers | Hacker News Reader

High-Energy Lasers

raytheonintelligenceandspace.com

99 points1970-01-01155 comments

Some other bits to read:

* Popsci got a range day with an earlier 10kW version (https://www.popsci.com/technology/firing-raytheon-laser-weap...). The version being deployed is 50kW. Naively extrapolating - they were able to pop unarmored drones in ~10-20 seconds at 10kW.

* Some scant technical details (https://www.laserfocusworld.com/lasers-sources/article/14277...). It's a fiber laser system

20 seconds still seems like a long time. Especially if you can presumably add something heat tile-ish to buy you extra time

The trend is strong though. Laser wars are coming

Mirrors and/or tinfoil are remarkably effective against lasers. Also, the IR reflective coatings found on most car windows.

This is nebulously true. The best reflector is silver for visible light, and that's about 95%. But as soon as you discolor from heat on the surface, the reflectivity plummets and the beam can then burn through - the first failure compounds into the rest.

Silver across frequencies, but engineered substances, the type used in laser safety devices, can have very good reflection at specific wavelengths without the weight of silver. For a flying object at any distance, anything close to 90% reflectivity for a few seconds would radically extend survival time. Local burn through can be survived as the beam will by dancing across the target.

Some of these lasers are effectively white light by design. You can design dielectric mirrors against one frequency but not all frequencies.

White lasers only look white by mixing a handful of colours. That's why laser safety goggles are still transparent, they only block those frequencies known to be generated by current laser tech.

Supercontinuum lasers are actually white, in that they are a broad range of frequencies of light. It is recommended you don't try to use laser safety googles with them, as there is no specific frequency you can guard against. Whether this applies to the weapons power laser discussed is another question entirely.

THIS- if you want a laser reflector for some hypothetical scenario; Electroplate some mirror-polished silver onto a big ass heatsink bulk metal. Aluminum foil by itself isn't going to do shit for any high-powered attack; as soon as it reaches a critical temperature the surface will get rough on a molecular level, decreasing the reflectivity 100 fold and burning a hole in itself.

This presumes that the big ass heatsink metal can effectively receive the heat from the laser. This is part of why some lasers are pulsed: the average power is not too high, but the instantaneous power is high enough to cause the surface of the material to ablate anyway. At which point your reflectivity goes to crap.

The best reflector is something that vaporizes into a aerosol and soaks up light. So the best reflector is a package of vaping fluid.

10 seconds on a moving target is a long time unless you have good quality tracking.

If the drones move anything like this https://www.youtube.com/@quadmovr/videos you're lucky to get 1 second. Tracking would need to be unreal.

True, but they're not deploying 10 kW lasers. They're 50 kW.

The consensus for years has been that 100KW is about where lasers become militarily useful. Solid state lasers are about there now.

There's a new line of development - the Tactical Ultrashort Pulsed Laser. One terawatt for 200 femtoseconds. Unclear what that will do. It's not much energy.

Stupid question: What about a drone with mirror finishing?

There's discussion of this already in the comments. TLDR, the reflective layer discolours and burns rapidly unless mated to a heat sink, so probably too heavy for drones, but there may be options against specific laser frequencies.

It would be interesting to see how well this thing performs against a drone wrapped in aluminum foil. I have some experience with high-power NIR lasers, and plastic is much much easier to burn than shiny metal.

Chrome spraypaint?

Makes me think of the frequent redditism "you do NOT want to find out why Americans don't have healthcare."

In this case, the old saw applies: do not look into the laser beam with your remaining eye.

That's not really true, though. In the U.S., public spending on health is comparable to private spending. Currently, the public/private split is very nearly equal.

https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/national-health-...

The U.S. spends more money per capita on healthcare than any other country. It's not even close; only six countries spend over half what the U.S. does. This means the U.S. spends more public funds than socialized systems like those in France, the U.K., or Canada.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?most_...

For all its callousness, the American system doesn't save the taxpayer a dime. There is no tradeoff being made here. It's just plain corruption and stupidity.

The way I read it, The reason Americans don't have healthcare is because of all the money that gets spent on the Department of Defense. If that $800 billion were spent on healthcare does Americans, I imagine a lot of the callousness could be worked out.

Far too many don't trust the us gov to run such a critical service and our defense budget already effectively subsidizes Europe's socialized healthcare.

If you don’t trust the government to run healthcare you definitely shouldn’t trust them to run the military.

That's intensely reductionist. Also, the military's healthcare is some of the worst in the country. They couldn't even be sued for malpractice until 2021.

Some systems have worked historically under gov control, and others have not.

That doesn’t appear to be true. The FTCA dates back to 1946, and cases like https://www.levinperconti.com/press-releases/6-2-million-ver... predating 2021 aren’t hard to find.

This took literally 2 seconds to find

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/06/16/troops-can-fi...

VA healthcare is usually once you're not in the service anymore. VA healthcare is also another shining example of how bad gov is at medicine.

They don't trust them with a military either, hence the 2nd amendment and there being guns everywhere.

If half your political establishment is absolutely dedicated to making sure public health care fails as much and as hard as possible for ideological reasons, sure, it's going to be hard to get public health care to work.

Oh BTW your private medical insurance system also subsidises our health care by over-inflating drug costs, paying an outsized proportion of drug development costs, so cheers. From a citizen of a European country that does pay it's way militarily.

Totally agree. Thats an issue thats also been occurring in the UK. Remember WannaCry in 2017? Probably caused by Torries defunding it.

Lots of downsides to socialized healthcare with incompetent govs.

That’s what the meme is saying, but the comment is pointing out that we spend more public money than, say, Canada on healthcare. If we could implement the Canadian system, maybe we could afford more lazers.

Canada has a tenth of the population of the US.

The stats they linked are per-capita.

One political party keeps passing laws making it illegal for Medicare/Medicaid to bargain for drug prices. So the price that taxpayers pay is far higher than it needs to be. Every other country negotiates drug prices.

Yes, that's the way its intended to be read, the problem is it's really not true. $800 billion sounds like a lot, but the federal government already spends 2x that on Medicare and Medicaid, and there is a lot more healthcare spending beyond that at various levels of government and private parties.

The real reason we don't have (socialized healthcare) which is the insinuation, is because of bribery (better known as lobbying), and predictibly, the top lobby sector is Health: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/ranked-sectors

And your medical system is expensive. In germany the visit to a doctor is around 25€ for a semester. Yes 25€ and you get as much regular doctor as you want in half a year.

Even a full ct costs 1000€

Medicin is also very cheap because of generica and the state is making deals with supplyers

This and corruption is your problem.

Edit:// it is crazy how americans are spending way more than most other countries on social things and get way less for the money only to keep this fuck up form of 19th century capitalism alive.

You would be the richest people on earth if you had a good and efficient social system

Wishful thinking at best, more likely deliberate deception.

The real engineering fun with energy-based weapon will begin when we do battle in space.

From the theoretical perspective, light is a wave, and wave tend to spread out following inverse square laws. That is if you are using a standard beam, that doesn't consider the phases of the wave. But if you are using a non-diffracting one, like an Airy or Bessel beam, you can get a wave-packet that doesn't spread out in its working regime.

Airy beam only require FFT level to understand : you spatially phase-modulate a beam with a window function, so that the beam doesn't leak out of a spatial region.

Of course when you need to beam out huge amount of power, this phase-modulation must be done in a very efficient way so as to not destroy your emitter. In optic's lab, for low-power airy beams, you can use lenses sort-of-like fresnel ones, but this won't for higher power. So you have instead to have a large spatially distributed array of sources (antenna) which you can control precisely the phase.

Real Airy beam are only an approximation to the theoretical ones (that require an infinitely spatially-large source). But typically the smaller the wavelength, the more lobes you can match between real and theoretical.

But all your nice calculations and perfect orchestration of signal, then encounter the atmosphere that messes everything in an uncontrollable way.

So you check your wave-length charts for wavelengths that can go through the atmosphere, but would still impact the target. You are now talking X-ray lasers, or gamma-ray lasers. More power but harder to control precisely (phase wise) because the wave-lengths are roughly the size of atoms. At this point you are in high-energy physics can just strap your run of the mill particle accelerator and aim it at the target, and select the particles you want it to beam.

While standard electron-gun won't go through a meter of the atmosphere, because it's electrically charged. So you look at the neutral particles. Neutron beam generator (does seem to have bad radioactive properties so boss won't approve) and they are more difficult to accelerate because they are neutral. What about muonium : One part electron, One part anti-muon, electrically charge so you can accelerate them nicely before combining them and then neutral, they are quite light, they self-disappear after a few micro-seconds (of self-time so you just have to get close enough to c if you want them to last longer).

Let's try that : Muonium-aser, 95 balloons to go...

This was fascinating, thank you.

The wikipedia articles have gifs that eminently remind me of gliders in cellular automata.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_beam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessel_beam

It's one thing to shoot down slow moving and fragile drones, but they also claims the system is effective against mortars, artillery, and rockets.

Which seems more impressive if true.

They should demonstrate it in the Ukraine.

The country of Ukraine wants you to drop 'the', since 1991.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ukraine-isnt-the-ukraine...

They should demonstrate it in drop the Ukraine.

We can say "nitch" instead of "neesh" and we can say "legos" instead of "lego bricks" and we can certainly put a "the" in front of any word we want in our own language.

This is another example of cultural bullying and it's becoming pervasive.

People shouldn't let freedoms, no matter how tiny and miniscule, be tossed around by corporate or political marketing machines.

What freedoms are being disregarded? You're allowed to call it "the Ukraine" if you want, the callout is just that the country prefers otherwise.

This is like someone clarifying their name is pronounced "Marie" instead of "Mary". You are free to mispronounce their name still.

Or with non-English location names, like Piñar or Türkiye. Your rights to spell them "Pinar" or "Turkey" are not trampled in any way.

Come back to this comment in a few years and I am fairly confident they will be considered racist or "evil" or a micro-agression to spell or say these things you say we are free to say.

Sure, we are "free" to say them. The only time to fight against these things is when they are small, like now.

You are currently absolutely free to refer to the State of New York as New York Colony, and New York City as New Amsterdam.

That's not how the residents refer to their own state or city, of course, but they can't tell you what to do.

Assuming you do not, why not?

This isn't an issue of rights, though, it's an issue of culture and respect. I actually agree with you that it'd be unreasonable to consistently have to change the names of things, but this is 100% not an issue of whether you're allowed to call things by different names.

I think there's a balance to be struck between respecting the names which certain groups prefer, and that's the hard part of society: you might spell your name "Анастасия", and I think it's fine to Anglicize that as "Anastasia". Someone else might prefer not to have to change their name, though.

Likewise, grammar and what words are considered valid are constantly shifting. I actually agree with you that "I want to use this name because this is the name that has historically been used" is a valid reason and valid preference!

Figuring out how to balance all these preferences is a hard problem. Fortunately, though, the right to call things what you want is absolutely not in question for these scenarios.

If there were talk of banning certain references to things, I'd be in the same camp as you, but that's not a problem we're facing today.

It's cleaner

It would be nice to see it demonstrated in Ukraine.

I suppose this tech is so classified by now that it won't go anywhere outside the US soil, let alone somewhere hot. The risk that an adversary would learn too much by looking at it up close, or even capturing it, intact IR even broken, is,likely unacceptable.

Let's wait until it's a weapons system that the US use themselves, and ship to its partners.

It likely suffices to make a relatively small hole or deformity on a shell to make it tumble instead if keeping the trajectory, and thus miss.

I always wonder what happens to the energy that goes past the target and heads out into space. Seems like an upper limit on these things. :-)

That said, if the Russo-Ukranian war has shown us anything it is that drones, even ones that are either unarmed or carrying around one or two grenades, are a credible threat. Both from the role of "forward observer" for indirect fire, and "precision low yield bombardment."

Clearly opportunities in locating drones at a distance as well.

Perun released a video on drones in Ukraine today https://youtu.be/AlpZf1hpQYM

This was fabulous! Thanks for the reference.

The light that doesn't hit the target has to travel through a hundred miles of atmosphere before getting to space. Between diffraction of the beam and all that atmosphere only a fraction of the light will make it out of the atmosphere.

There’s a commonly held misconception that lasers “go forever”. I’m not sure how practically true that is in a vacuum, but I understand why the person said it.

Like all light, they do go forever. Like all light, they disperse, following the inverse square rule.

Unlike with an omnidirectional source (e.g. a lightbulb), for the purposes of inverse square rule the source of the laser beam is an imaginary light source far behind the emitter, and far more powerful than it; this makes the beam seem to disperse slower, but disperse it does.

Wouldn’t lightbulb power fade with an inverse cube?

It is inverse square

https://home.ifa.hawaii.edu/users/barnes/ASTR110L_S03/invers...

thanks for the link. oh, easy way to see it is surface area of a sphere, 4 pi r^2.

Correct. The light emitted at a particular point in time forms a section of a spherical surface; as that light travels out, it's like the whole sphere is inflating - the surface area covered by the light remains a fixed fraction of the entire sphere's surface, and so in absolute terms, it grows proportional to r². This means the surface density (light per m²) drops with r².

There's probably a nicer way to describe it. If I remember correctly, there's a similar explanation for other phenomena following inverse-square rule, including attraction forces such as gravity, as that r² comes from something forming a surface expanding in space.

Inverse cube would give you total energy/power contained in a volume, which isn't usually the interesting quality when talking about radiation.

Also, this is why strength of radar return signal drops with fourth power of the distance to target: the illuminating beam drops with 1/r² to target, and then the reflection drops with 1/r² again when traveling back.

The ABL was a megawatt class laser and when they cancelled it the reasoning was that it would need to be 10x more powerful for the mission. They wanted to knock out ICBMs during the boost phase from a considerable distance. This one is much more of a close in system, but the power level does seem to be a bit “low” for the claimed mission.

ABL wanted to shoot down missiles like 300km+ away. Lasers in atmosphere drop off faster than inverse square (because absorption and scattering are significant), so long range lasers need huge amounts of power.

Conservatively assuming inverse cube, going from 300km to 10km engagement gives you like 27,000x increase in flux.

ABL had a much larger aperture, so no, it doesn’t require 27,000x increase in flux.

Bigger aperture is always better until you're going through a scattering medium and now the different parts of the beam get different scattering.

No. The reason they canceled it was because it was a chemical based laser system and thus a logistical nightmare with a shallow magazine. The operational laser weapons are electrically pumped.

From what I recall, the chemicals in question, were kind of a “Satan’s Soda Pop” brew, and were quite difficult to manage.

> Satan's Soda Pop

I found this on Wikipedia and I agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_oxygen_iodine_laser

Looks like a good topic for one of those "chemicals I will not work with" chronicle.

The chemicals don't look that bad. Chlorine, iodine, potash, peroxide. I wouldn't go swimming in them but it's not like they're HF.

Wasn’t the ABL airplane-based?

That adds a new dimension.

Also, raw peroxide is pretty hairy. I think one of the X-planes (maybe the X-15) used it as fuel. Pretty hypergolic.

Raw peroxide would be the oxidizer.

Being airborne is a valid point.

The ABL would have also needed dozens of jets flying over the aggressor launching ICBMs to even start to fulfill its mission. To provide enough areal coverage and killing shots several dozen if not a hundred would be needed.

The ABL likely developed a lot of cool and still classified technology but it was itself unlikely to ever be a practical system.

That was for much more challenging targets at much longer ranges. Shooting down an ICBM at hundreds of km requires much higher energies than shooting down a drone at 1-10km

Not a fan of Raytheon but at least they are one of the few sites that I've seen that don't use dark patterns for their cookie modal. One of the choices is "necessary cookies only" right there front and center.

Skeet shooting with "bullets" that go at the speed of light would be a lot easier. No need to lead your target.

I do follow these things, casually, and AFAIK they're mounted on ships or tanks -- not on planes. So unless the range is a lot greater than I think it is, they won't be much use against an object in the stratosphere.

Not this system in particular, but they have tested plane mounter megawatt class lasers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1

A system that requires a 747 to carry it is just barely "plane-portable."

Next generation lasers will improve power density by orders of magnitude.

"It was ultimately scrapped in September 2014 after all usable parts were removed." says Wikipedia

doesn't sound like they were too happy with it.

The video made it look like a continuous beam laser versus a pulsed laser (unless it's just pulsing very very fast which is a distinct possibility). Would there be any advantages or disadvantages to using a pulsed laser over a continuous beam?

The instantaneous energy level of a pulsed laser can ionize things, making them more susceptible to combustion. Indeed, there are different rules for the safety ratings of pulsed and continuous wave (CW) lasers at equal average power.

An analogy is a spark plug in an engine -- it produces relatively little average energy, but the instantaneous intensity is quite high.

I'm aware how terrible this will sound, but is there any reason why lasers are not already commonly used against infantry?

I mean, you could just sweep the enemy fortifications periodically, and, well, inflict terrible harm by blinding.

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

The inanity and insanity of humans is that we have rules for our violence, from war to fighting sports.

People often forget that "proper" wars are really just another facet of diplomacy, with certain rules to be followed.

Incidentally, no, what Russia is doing in Ukraine is not even anywhere remotely close to a "proper" war.

Thank you for your perspective, I agree on both counts. Sorry youre getting downvoted, but this is HN after all.

What you describe may have existed for parts of a few hundred years in areas of Europe, but it’s not the rule, and it’s certainly not the case today.

my current favourite are the melee rules chinese/indian army has in the mountains

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQJEiGiGc1I

Became aware of this after reading Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson! Great book. There's a small subplot involving the Line of Actual control (LAC), which is what made me first aware of these rules.

China is slowly flanking India by quietly annexing strategic territory: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/07/china-bhutan-border-vil...

It was a lot more insane in WW1, before we had these rules.

For example, they deployed gas that makes people vomit so soldiers can't keep masks on, followed by gas that dissolves the lungs so they suffocate on their own blood. Stuff that makes dying by conventional means merciful.

My point is a bit of a dual one. The fact that we both have rules and need the rules support the inanity and insanity of it all.

The defenders of a territory under attack aren't put in that position by any real choice of their own - none that is practical anyway. Being able to live with themselves after the conflict is over, being able to re-integrate them into civilized society, is an important facet of maintaining a peaceful society.

You don't plan for everything going well (no one ever goes for war). You plan for when things don't.

The Unmitigated Pedantry dude (shows up on this site a bit) makes a decent argument that chemical weapons mostly were abandoned because they don’t work against top-tier militaries, not really because we decided wars should be polite after WW1.

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

Main reason is that lasers don't do as much damage to people as bullets. Bullets poke holes, lasers burn. This laser is for drones and small warheads.

The other reason is that lasers are big and expensive. This laser is mounted on Stryker armored vehicle and probably costs a ton. Bullets and guns are cheap. The regular Stryker carries 50cal machine gun which is overkill for shooting people.

People and bullets are fine for hitting people. Enough that there hasn't been much work in automated targeting. The laser has faster targetting and more accuracy which is good for drones.

Lasers this powerful would cause severe damage to human retinas almost instantly. Even reflected light would be incredibly dangerous.

You aren't allowed to blind people on purpose.

Lasers also don't travel through smoke as well as lead does.

Yeah, Geneva Convention, more or less. Otherwise it would be trivial to mass blind infantry or other groups of people. I suppose, unless the laser was powerful, you could just use indirect vision(i.e. cameras + display goggles) to protect the troops' vision.

You'd expect lots of smoke on a battlefield

A laser this scale would mostly be an annoyance to infantry. Drones are mostly black plastic that immediately burns. Humans are mostly water and if you got hit with this, it would suck, but it wouldn't kill you and you'd have plenty of time to find something to hide behind before it got bad enough that you'd lose a limb or something. It would be roughly equivalent to being poked with a branding iron.

Also, expect that if said infantry finds you, you're gonna have a bad time.

> Humans are mostly water and if you got hit with this, it would suck, but it wouldn't kill you and you'd have plenty of time to find something to hide behind before it got bad enough that you'd lose a limb or something.

Complication: if you got hit with this, or even saw something far away being hit with this, chances are it would be the last thing you'll ever see, making finding something to hide behind that much more difficult.

If this were a real threat, laser safety goggles would be standard issue.

They're not, because so far powerful enough lasers weren't used in the battlefield, in large part due to international ban on such use.

Anti-infantry lasers will likely continue to be banned for a while, but as anti-air and anti-armor ones get introduced, the risk of soldiers getting blinded off beam scatter will rise fast, so laser safety goggles might just become standard issue.

Or not. The problem is that laser safety goggles and screens are built to be opaque to specific frequencies. There may not be a way to have the goggles protect you from every laser frequency you're likely to encounter on the battlefield.

Typically these burning lasers are in the infrared spectrum and it's pretty easy to block the entirety of that. Visible lasers, particularly very powerful ones, tend to only fall in a handful of wavelengths due to the way they work so it's less of a problem than it sounds like it is.

I have had the same grim thought. Laser this powerful would be incredibly effective at damaging unprotected retinas. Even reflected laser light would be able to cause permanent damage.

I think that these lasers have not been used for this purpose yet is because of the inherent human psychological aversion to eye damage and the potential for escalation.

If you can see someone’s eyes long enough to hit them with a laser then you could just kill them instead with a bullet.

Imagine being outflanked because your vehicles are out of fuel because you used it all powering the generators for your lasers that can’t touch infantry inside a blacked out Landcruiser.

It happens occasionally: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Juan_de_Fuca_laser...

The first reason is that it is a war crime. The second reason is that it would be trivial to defend against with standard laser safety goggles.

Friggin lasers are a war crime and bullets are not? Says... who...? And how big is their laser?

Says the UN [1]. Yes, war crime legislation is very weird, but some countries sometimes pretend to care a little bit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Wea...

Not to worry, these are the kind of lasers that make rockets explode and pierce through armor.

This UN thing is about the kind of lasers pranksters use to temporarily blind airline pilots.

Pretense is certainly the key concept when it comes to the UN and people who eagerly cite it. Nuts to the UN.

“With a low cost-per-shot ratio, lasers offer a nearly infinite number of shots,…”

We should tell them how big infinity is…

Reminds me of some fun calculations on how to get the most value per photon, electron, fission event, etc. depending on industry.

Its actually incredible, how much the us could keep its military industrial complex going, after the soviets basically dropped out in the 70s and china is basically a similar "virtual capabilities" enemy only.

Its like a shadowboxer keeping going round after round, long after the opponent dropped with a K.O. and everyone went home. Im sure, if they keep it up, one day a opponent may arise, even if its just the janitor. You got this champ!

Because a modern military-industrial complex is not something that can be scaled up and down as easily as docker containers or VMs. If you wait until you actually need to K.O. someone to start shadowboxing after years of sitting on the couch....it's far too late.

Fair. Also, one has to admit that alot of modern society is based upon military ground work. The chip in the device i type this was originally developed to launch ICBMs.

I wonder what the countermeasures to these will be. To construct your drones and missiles out of highly reflective mirrors?

Maybe retroreflectors?

Others mentioned reflective shielding above but ablative coverings seem to work much better.

For lightweight applications like drones I would hazard a guess that specifically engineered aerogels would do well.

Wouldn't aerogels let almost all of the laser's energy through?

The aerogels would be thermal insulators under an opaque coating.

My Children of a Dead Earth favorite is a thin layer of something reflective for short-burst thermal reflection, under that something that can take high temperatures like carbon-carbon for sustained lasers, and then a big slab of aerogel to keep that heat off of the more delicate bits.

Is it just me or did this look like some kid's high school CG project.

Drones? Fake looking. Laser? Fake looking. Marketing? Check.

Is this posted due to all the balloons/objects being publicly shot down recently?

I suppose a cheaper way to shoot down trash will be a good thing if this keeps pace.

Currently thos could be a scheme to get the US to waste 1M dollars to shoot down a 20k drone/balloon... The tactic only works when the cost is imbalanced

Keep in mind US pilots are frequently flying training missions against targets we create just to have something to engage with. Shooting down these balloons does not necessarily need to be a net cost increase.

Is it effective practice to shoot targets that don't camouflage, don't maneuver, don't evade, don't shoot back?

It's the aerial equivalent of a shooting range.

Does firing a gun at a static target teach you anything about shooting?

> Is it effective practice to shoot targets that don't camouflage, don't maneuver, don't evade, don't shoot back?

You mean, like balloons?

Still have to take off, navigate, talk to ATC, talk to wingman, talk to AWACS, send/receive target data, maneuver, sensor lock, fire, maneuver... Not exactly a top gun mission, but good practice.

Just book it as a training exercise ;-)

Ground lasers unlikely to be effective at the balloon altitudes, and especially with atmospheric interference (eg. weather, moisture, etc). Airborne and/or space-based lasers are a different story and may work well when they're ready to be deployed. I believe the plan-based solutions are in trials.

I was interested in checking whether any treaties exist to limit the use of space based lasers.. and surprised to see that there are no rules against using them.

https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/ils/vol93/iss1/6/

I would be sincerely surprised if there were any treaties, since I don't think any space lasers have ever been used.

There's one in place for WMDs, and I don't think one was ever delivered from space.

Of the Gentile variety, anyway

These have been around since the 50s

https://youtu.be/vqLkpcHavZE

https://youtu.be/sbjXXRfwrHg

I just wish the costs of lasers for cutting and welding metals would go down.

Relevant footage:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rthHSISkM7A

I’m curious to know how fog/clouds affect performance. I would expect a large drop off due to scattering.

Really badly. Fog quickly dissipates the laser beam.

It is basically impossible to shoot through a cloud to hit a target behind it.

Watching more of the marketing videos, they show someone using a video game controller to engage targets. Why are they doing that? Why not just have computers do the aiming and you just hit 'k' for kill on your keyboard??

Is there something related to 'human in the loop' in the geneva convention because it seems a lot like a waste of time and effort.

Because this is how these systems are controlled. Because the operators grew up using XBox controllers. Because they're dirt cheap (by military procurement standards). And Just Work.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-military...

I can tell you from personal experience working on missile defense systems that they don't use xbox controllers. When a track is established, the phalanx will be controlled automatically to probabilistically aim for targets as they come over the horizon. This is a matter of seconds.

Why would a drone swarm require humans to target? The computer would make the decision much faster. And as any gamer would know, you're much better with a mouse and keyboard than you are with an xbox controller.

The controller is because they aren't integrated into radar, or the target doesn't have enough of a signature, or it's not in an area the radar can see, and AI vision isn't good enough to pick them out of the image yet. Also, you want to be able to tell the system to hit target X, not target Y, because X is a bogey, while Y is a friendly.

A Phalanx CIWS can do fully automatic against a missile, but there's other targets you might want it to take out, like small boats. So they have an electro optical sensor to see, and a controller to let them aim it manually.

As to why a video game controller? Because they're cheap and people already mostly know how to use them. Mice might be more precise, until you're bouncing along a dirt road, or in sea state 5.

If you put several of these together could you down a hypersonic missile?

If it had a micro-nuke onsite it would be like having infinite ammo.

anybody else feel like that marketing video was a let down?

Well, it lacks the expected sci-fi beam and flash effects, but if you think about it some more, this version is actually much more scary.

This beam will reach out across dozens of kilometers, to set your drone on fire. Or your plane. There's shit all you can do about it. This is not Star Trek, there are no shields or hull sensors. Your flyer likely won't realize it's being shot at until it suddenly stops flying.

You can not see the beam. If the beam sees you, even in a faraway reflection, you won't be ever seeing anything anymore.

I suppose it's the appropriate counter to the experience that military drones serve, i.e.:

There's a buzzing sound permeating the air. You may or may not hear it. Some time later, you die, and don't even have time to notice the fiery explosion that killed you.

Modern weapons are stuff of nightmares.

pew pew

Announced just in time for their UFO marketing ploy to spend yet more taxpayer money.

Another domain name that looks more like a phishing domain then anything else.

Reminds me of an IT email warning against clicking links to strange domains, followed almost immediately by a password reset reminder to something like microsoftlogin.com rather than login.microsoft.com.

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