Big stakes for lab to build battle laser

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

[demlosers]

General says he'll come up with $150 million if scientists produce mobile device within 18 months.

A two-star Army general threw down a challenge last week to Lawrence Livermore scientists: He will beat the bushes for more than $150 million if scientists can build the world's first mobile battle laser for test firing in 18 months. Livermore laser engineer Bob Yamamoto had been begging for this chance. But Livermore, specializing in nuclear explosives, never has built a full-up, firing weapons system for the battlefield.

"Eighteen months is very aggressive, and I'm saying that very politely," said Yamamoto.

On Tuesday, Major Gen. John M. Urias, the Army's chief acquisitions officer for air and missile defense, drew lab scientists and defense contractors into the hallway of an Albuquerque hotel so they could voice last-minute reservations.

Yamamoto, grinning wildly, said not a word.

The general then strode into a convention room and told 640 top U.S. directed-energy experts that Livermore's laser -- today, a profusion of wires, crystals and diodes on a tabletop -- was ready to be shoehorned into a Humvee and prove its mettle as a tactical weapon.

"We are no longer technology-limited. We are resource-limited," Urias said by phoneFriday. "I think we should charge on."

If he gets the money for Livermore and its team of defense contractors, the general suggested, the Army would get a prototype weapon that could open the military's imagination to what mobile lasers can do on the battlefield.

"I am convinced personally that the technology is evolving fast enough that we can do this," he said.

Three weeks earlier, the general donned green goggles in Yamamoto's lab and saw the world's most powerful solid-state laser drill through an inch of steel in two seconds.

"If anybody doubts what I am asserting, they need to go out to Lawrence Livermore lab and see this demo," said Urias, deputy commander of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command and acquisitions executive for Air and Missile Defense.

More than the flying sparks and burning steel, he noted that the laser's components -- hundreds of lithium-ion batteries, a chilled-water cooling system, control chips and the nine-foot laser itself -- could be shrunk at least in half, even as engineers install bigger slabs of garnet to create more light and a more powerful beam.

If Urias can find the money, the clock starts ticking for Yamamoto to triple his laser's power to 40 or more kilowatts and, within a year, make it hardy enough for firing out of a Humvee. Fortunately, Yamamoto said, the thick, clear crystals of manmade garnet already are being grown.

"It will be ruggedized so it doesn't fall apart when they hit a pothole. We'll be able to drive around and hit targets on the ground and maybe -- maybe -- targets in the air," Yamamoto said. "That's a little fuzzy right now...But we'll be able to hit targets out of the sky."

Ultra-high power diodes like the ones in CD players and supermarket scanners have propelled solid-state lasers into an arms race with giant, chemical-powered lasers. The Army's Tactical High Energy Laser, pumped by combusting chemicals, already have shot Katyusha rockets and artillery shells out of the sky.

Those shootdowns ushered high-energy lasers out of Buck Rogers science fiction and into military reality. But for years to come, chemical lasers are likely to remain bulky and needful of fresh chemical supplies at a time when the Army wants high mobility and less reliance on supply lines. Solid-state lasers are electric. They can run off a Humvee's diesel-hybrid engine or perhaps a jet fighter's turbine.

"I see ultimately that for U.S. Army purposes, we will most likely and even definitely down-select to a solid-state implementation. Because it works," Urias said.

Yamamoto shares the faith. But he's a bit unnerved at being handed the challenge that he courted.

"Twelve months is as challenging as it gets to put a six-slab system, ruggedized, in a Humvee," he said. "We won't see our children in those 12 months."

Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com .

[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.