Army soldiers not impressed with Strykers outfitted with 50-kilowatt lasers
breakingdefense.com
breakingdefense.com
Do you really need to burn through steel plate? Seems like something like this is for shooting down cheap drones.
Though I've always wondered about laser weapons -- I'd think the obvious defense is cladding the device in a mirror surface.
If you want a fun read, the Galileo probe wall ablation paper is fun, the re-entry power density (at the wall!) was ~10kW/cm^2.
Rotation dramatically increases effective armor thickness if energy is delivered over a long time frame etc. But drop to the nanosecond range and a cloud of plasma which used to be the armor is going to between the laser and what’s left of the armor. That said, you don’t need to drill through a target, a jet of ablated material means an equal and opposite force is going in the other direction.
Really though the biggest limitation of a laser defense system is pure kinetic kill weapons. Big thing moving Mach 2+ is deadly even without pinpoint accuracy or being filled with high explosives.
Intumescent paints are considered the lightest form of passive fire protection. An intumescent is a coating that, when exposed to heat, is rapidly transformed through sublimation, and expands many times its original thickness (up to 100 times), to form a stable, carbonaceous char.
The resultant char reduces the conduction of heat from the fire to the substrate, delaying the time it takes to reach structural failure.
I'm considering getting some for my kitchen remodel.
https://www.nullifire.com/en-gb/expert-insights/expert-advic...
not if you're accurate enough to hit its sensors
It's possible to have a pre-programmed map, objective destination and accelerometers to judge distance.
those things usually have some sort of heat/EM/something seeking sensor to make it accurate to the last meter, and those still can't "see" through metal (yet (that we know about))
A mirror will not work. At the power levels involved, any mirrors must be precisely tuned to the exact wavelength of the laser (e.g. dielectric mirrors) and they must be immaculately clean. That level of cleanliness is impractical in a military environment. Furthermore, the US has developed "white" laser weapons, which will defeat any tuned dielectric mirror like it wasn't there since the lasers have a broad spectrum of wavelengths.
There are fundamental limits to material physics. Spinning doesn't help because there are always fixed points by definition. There are both materials science and engineering limits to spin rates, so you can precisely design your laser power levels to be reliably effective at the upper bound spin rates. All of this was fully modeled out and calculated half a century ago. Other countermeasures, like dielectric mirrors, would be very expensive to use on cheap weapons, and the US already developed a counter-countermeasure anyway with the invention of lasers that emit "white" light.
The scientists and engineers that did R&D on this over the last several decades weren't idiots. Everything "obvious" that armchair weapons experts might come up with were accounted for a long time ago.
That alone would be a major capability for a layered defense system. Cleaning up decoys would be another one (not necessarily getting those down, IDing them due to reflectivity is almost as good).
1. Russia had its own DEW system since at least 2018, and doesn’t currently use it on or off the battlefield
2. Israel has Iron Beam, reportedly a 100KW DEW system, and also doesn’t use it
Perhaps it’s not as cool as it says on the tin?
A common misconception
Mobility to deployment, then defended asset which in turn offers perimeter defence against unmanned subsonic directed or non ballistic weapons. (I'm guessing supersonic and ballistic bring different problems)
[Edit: I wouldn't for a minute discount the complaints from boots on the ground. Lots of amazing tech turns out to be useless in the field, has to be redeployed fit to purpose]
"The Protocol does not prohibit attacks against binoculars, periscopes, telescopes, and other optical equipment because it was unknown whether laser attacks on such devices could cause permanent blindness."
It must be said that the last two are in the realm of things the US military might plausibly be decades ahead on, in secret. The power source on the other hand is far more likely to emerge from the public or academic sector.
And yes, this is a problem for laser optics too: which is why these designs tend to use focused arrays of beams, cooling systems and/or parabolic mirrors (which also helps with divergence).
That’s correct, but it will definitely require more time, which practically speaking, you won’t have, after all the mirror is made of thin sheet of metal, which requires an extremely high temperature to melt. I think beryllium -which is used already in military- make a good choice, plus the spinning drone as mentioned above would disperse the energy, making it harder to take down.
No, it won’t. Occlusive ablation and spinning make more sense, though that comes with other trade-offs.
What do you think 4kW in a square centimeter generate? Spring air?
Also, beryllium would be an odd choice because all you get is energy soaked up by ablation. No reflection whatsoever. How thick would you like to make that beryllium coating?
If you assume one millimeter (which is a pretty chunky coating), you'd need about 1/10th of a second to ablate it.
As for spinning... you do spin around an axis. And that axis is likely aligned with the direction of travel, otherwise you have interesting dynamic properties.
Which means if you aim at the nose, you can spin all you want. It's not moving. If you miss the nose a bit, oh well, it'll take maybe 2 or 3 tenths of a second. Even if you're well into hypersonic speed range, that's not enough to get the missile on target.
And drones... well, drones just limber along at speeds that make any rotations just a waste of engineering resources. You have time to heat up the whole thing. And fry an egg on it.
Look, there are issues with DE weapons. But 50 years of research mean you're not discovering them from first principles while typing a HN comment.
For a drone to fly a system of motors, batteries, sensors and microprocessors has to engage in a complex real-time process to maintain stability, navigate and acquire targets.
Disrupt any of that, the drone falls out of the sky. Or goes off course. Or explodes.
Punching through steel is useful when you're trying to shootdown dumb-fire artillery rounds which have to survive being fired under a 310MPa pressure and need to trigger an internal detonation.
A drone with a camera will be blinded if it catches even a glancing reflection of a 50kW laser. And every bit of defense you add to that system is now increasing cost, weight and power requirements. How quickly can the laser track and engage a drone? It's light, so the time is limited solely by optics tracking speed - for all purposes impact is instantaneous.
And the idea of "stealth" runs in direct opposition to all ideas of reflective coatings - since that does the exact opposite of what stealth materials do to defeat RADAR and LIDAR.
If you haven't read the article: The final paragraph addresses most costs. Prototyping the laser - which is always a bit more expensive than a productionized version - was $73 million. A single missile shot is $4 million.
That's 20 missiles shot at drones. That's it. Which means, on a pure cost basis, this thing getting off 20 shots at drones means it's paid for itself. Given it's capable of firing 6 shots per minutes, you need 4 minutes to make it worth the investment. Which, given drone speeds, probably means you fire for 2 minutes and start moving - another advantage it has over a more stationary missile systems.
Cost isn't the issue here.
As the fine article points out, the problems are of an operational nature.