Posted on 10/27/2003 12:45:44 PM PST by 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 .
DAMN IT PEOPLE! Have you not smidgeon of shame among you?!?!
I think I'll have another brewster and leave this thread to you engineering geeks.
I'll take the Prometheus xasers with dual Maxim cannons from Freespace 2 anyday.
Now, if I can fit the things on the rollbar of my Wrangler...
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