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Comment by jahnu | Hacker News Reader

Have these ever been weaponised?

You betcha. I remember in the late 90s an anti sniper technology that could detect lenses at long distances and fire a laser at them.

The idea was to mess up scope optics, but human heads have lenses too. It was not Geneva Conventions friendly.

I’d love to read more about this. Especially the part about the Geneva Convention.

I’m guessing it was the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_W...

Wow that’s pretty amazing. Wonder why I’ve never seen it in a film or tv show.

Experimentally, sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_weapon?wprov=sfla1

Big pewpews require big power and it's not super practical yet

US Navy has a few deployed and in use

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SEQ-3_Laser_Weapon_System

Wikipedia says that one is just one unit on one ship (moved to another ship). Has it seen more widespread production since then?

The end of the article mentions another system, HELIOS, but didn't have much more information, and that was only two units, I think?

I believe you, just wondering how widespread these are relative to traditional projectile weapons.

I think they are still in the testing phase but they are being deployed. The Marines do this all the time with all kinds of tech.

I've read that the main reason they like it is more about the incredible long range optics and not the laser, tbh.

It's against the Geneva Convention to use blinding weapons.

Has the Geneva convention ever stopped anyone? They can only arrest you if you lose the war, and people don't tend to plan for that.

The application would be more civil than war-alike, if it existed.

That's even harder to prosecute, pretty much no one is starting a war over what rulers are doing to their own citizens.

Still need a major supplier both the laser emitters and esp. the optics. The weapons will be a lot more expensive compared to conventional weapons, or any anti-riot weaponry.

Aside the sci-fi vibe, I could imagine James Bond esque - still quite hard to use, has to aim for the eyes, scatter can cause collateral damage, doesn't work in fog, rain, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_%28weapon%29?wprov=sfl...

They're "intended" to cause only temporary blindness

It has. That's why countries don't have real chemical weapons anymore. They are easy to make (for an industrialized country), but they don't provide any real advantage when both sides in a war have access to them. They just increase misery for everyone involved.

Blinding laser weapons are in the same category.

That's not really the Geneva convention though, chemicals weapons are just not effective for any actual warfare (aside from committing atrocities).

I'm sorry but that is totally incorrect. Being able to clear out a building without damaging its capacity to provide cover is enormously useful.

Chemical weapons are incredibly useful, just awful.

The argument I've seen against their usefulness is that they only work against static militaries that don't have NBC training, and a modern military can already defeat threats like that without paying the political cost of using them.

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

> Chemical weapons are incredibly useful

They're not. They're effective against an unprepared adversary. Any real military will have anti-chemical-weapons tactics and protection.

So this happens: you douse a building with a gas, and then walk inside and get shot by defenders in gas masks. And by the way, you also will have to wear a gas mask yourself.

General rule of thumb: if it's been banned, it's useless for the signatories. Ex: chemical weapons, but also biological weapons, land mines, and cluster munitions. Note that land mines and cluster munitions are still actively being used, especially in Ukraine, and the countries that signed onto the ban largely got rid of those systems well before the ban was signed.

Sadly it's not against it to use killing weapons.

They are called direct energy weapons, more like a sci-fi, though.

It'd be a rather short range weapon, that's not easy to aim, require a line-of-sight, can't penetrate armor... or goggles, or fog/dust.

I’m pretty sure high powered lasers penetrate goggles by just vaporizing them.

True but how would you deploy high powered ones and keep line of sight?

Use an X-Ray laser, as Larry Niven liked to use as a MacGuffin in a few of his stories

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