Big stakes for lab to build battle laser

Oakland Tribune ^ | October 27, 2003 | Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

[Consort]

Please, don't make light of my jokes. There is no need to flame people who are trying to brighten up the day. Not all of us are comedic luminaries, but we try to shine from time to time. Besides, it's a small diversion from all these fires we are having out here.

[Laserman]

I can certainly ressonate with your reaction. It mirrors my sentiments.

[Ahban]

Forget the tracking problems. Why do we have to use them to shoot down missles in flight? Can we put a space-based laser into orbit that can destroy immobile soft targets? If we can do that, it is like having bombers that can hit anywhere on Earth without warning or risk.

Examples : Blowing up fuel/ ammo depos ; Torching the palaces of his supreme excellency whoever ; taking out bridges ; heating up bunkers and barracks ; melting transmission towers ; planes that have landed, or their control towers.....

I could go on and on. A space based laser capable of hitting immobile targets on the ground would be reason enough to move forward with this technology.

[inPhase]

adaptive optics cannot correct for thermal blooming if it is present.

however
wrt dwell time on the target,
this is not a problem if the target is rapidly moving.

The presence of absorption is not sufficent to conclude that there is
thermal blooming. One of the most important factors is how long any
parcel of air spends in the beam.

and if the beam slew is sufficiently large to prevent thermal
blooming from developing into a significant effect. Also, the beam is strongly
focused, making the dwell time in the beam even smaller.

For small scale blooming, the conversion of absorption into index of
refraction fluctuations does not occur near the beam director. The
turbulence-induced phase fluctuations must propagate to turn into
scintillations first. For even small beam slews, the beam is moving so
fast by the time this occurs that there is simply no time to heat the
air before the beam passes.

some JASON involvement before the JASONs were history

[inPhase]

cannot comment but problems well known

[inPhase]

laser cannot lase to the ground with DE from space.

[Light Speed]

Lots of goodies exist...our computers are still to slow.
Field containment and harmonic frequencies need to be learned active.
They have only been able to maintain fields for brief time periods.
When our computer speeds increase..stable fields can be generated..then they can learn them active instead of in theory.

Drive engines for space..particle accelerator weapons.,

soon..just a few years away.

[Theophilus]

Ever use the Yamamoto Cannon in Starcraft???

[inPhase]

wow, we need to tell the tok's

nice picture though

[inPhase]

the few years away that is,

the joke told is that fusion exp consume the power of a city and has not yet lit even a light bulb

[Light Speed]

I still do not fully understand what they mean by computer speeds.
A fella was on Coast to Coast A.M. recently..said that this was the basic problem for alot of the tech applications they have tried.

I used to operate a Cryogenic nitrogen Plasma gantry ..big scale..50 ton remote control cranes..underwater cut.

Our shielding was basically solid alloy metals..solenids sequencing by compuetr...the tolerances were severe..any divergence in tolerances and the Plasma stream would errupt..
Ceramic/Alloy insulators can take you just so far as application goes.

Boeing Zenon Ion drive thrusters work similar to my Plasma machine..their shielding is mechanical.
The new power applications require pure Magnetic fields..with the harmonics balanced.

We had some massive detonations....I can image the risk when trying to play with Terra Watts.

[Flightdeck]

Ha! As in "Tom Arnold in 'The Stupids'" bad.

[inPhase]

Computer speed referrs to how fast it computes in eg
MFLOPs
million floating point operations per second

that has to do with the size of the packet traveling on the "bus" at a certain speed

now even apple has a 64 bit addressable word (packet)
for a few $k maybe more. This goes along the computer bus at a certain drop off speed.

32 bit addressable is more common than this on desktops and it might not all be addressable.

So the packets need to get bigger and the speed of the bus faster to increase the amount of data tranferred. There are many computer architectures and ideas for the "packets."









Terra watts might be pulsed multiply by rep rate gives average power

for a laser usually pico femto or other small fraction of a second

but don't get in the way for the ssl's

[Laserman]

Good idea except for the cost and the resupply problem. If the SBl costs several billion, and it costs a billion to resupply when the magazine runs dry, it makes the cost of torching a barracks pretty expensive compared to a cruise missile or a smart bomb. Secondary missions such as you suggest have long been considered for the SBL. It would be valuable just to have a multi-meter size telescope up there at relatively low altitude to look at things. It could also illuminate things pretty well even if it didn't torch them.

[Laserman]

AO does help under certain conditions. The simulation codes and the experimental data were developed in the 70's (I did some of it), and repeated with greater fidelity recently that showed some AO utility. However, with turbulence you can develop a phase compensation instability that further limits its utility.

Worked in SDI myself as well as other national review panels.

[Laserman]

Got to pick your wavelength well.

[Light Speed]

Any recent news on the THEL program out at White Sands.
Last I heard..they were attempting to fit the THEL to a mobile platform.

Unless the media run was worked up..it appears they had success knocking down multiple Katuysha rockets..which is quite a test over a large incomming missile with a 5-7 minute telemetry track.

[inPhase]

It was established in early 90's that AO cannot help with tb only make things worse, in literature, easy to find.

If you did work in the 70's then you missed the phase compensation instability. Please look in the literature.

there is a real pole in the propagator

grows exp with time found in 88

When you have compensation feedback you have a pole in the propagator which is much worse than thermal blooming itself

all 90's work, many conclusions presented by jasons in dtic U/C


codes in 70's were steady state which cuts off instabilities
and the
existence of poles showed steady state theories were wrong

this was a major result

[inPhase]

yeah, Army is doing great!

[Laserman]

Current efforts are on MTHEL- ie Mobile THEL. As stated- Army is doing great work. Come a long way from the MTU days.