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Aerial laser gunboat 'burns hole in fender' of moving car
The Register ^ | 10/14/09 | Lewis Page

Posted on 10/14/2009 6:21:45 PM PDT by Nachum

The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) ray-cannon, mounted in a specially-equipped Hercules transport plane flying above New Mexico, has now succeeded in "putting a hole in the fender" of a ground vehicle driving along beneath it.

The not particularly awesome result was announced by Boeing, maker of the ATL, yesterday.

"In this test, a directed energy weapon successfully demonstrated direct attack on a moving target," said Gary Fitzmire, Boeing raygun veep. Though that is nothing new; Boeing's Humvee-mounted "Laser Avenger" ray-turret shot down a small flying robot earlier this year

(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: aerial; burns; gunboat; laser
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To: gaijin

There are a number of effective targets in warfare for this weapon. A shot at the cockpit of any airborn craft might be effective, the warhead of a head seeking missile, or the heads of infantry as they advance. If it can hit the hood of a car from the air, its accuracy is possibly effective enough to deal a lot of damage to an enemy.


41 posted on 10/14/2009 7:16:31 PM PDT by Nachum (The complete Obama list at www.nachumlist.com)
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To: Nachum

Vehicle NOT moving, didn’t even see a hole completely through, and that was the hood of the vehicle, not the fender.


42 posted on 10/14/2009 7:18:29 PM PDT by TheBattman (Pray for our country...)
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To: rbg81
What part of "this is a test" do you children not understand?

If you think the goal of this program is to put holes in fenders then you really might like some other websites more suited to your age-range.

43 posted on 10/14/2009 7:20:28 PM PDT by hinckley buzzard (Truth--The liberal's Kryptonite)
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To: gaijin
...this tech could also easily work as defense against AA missiles, something that grows more important as enemies are researching new ways to detect stealthy aircraft.

Raytheon has already demonstrated the effectiveness of a commercial grade welding laser (20KW?) mated to the CIWS radar and aiming mount. Basically remove the gun, drop in an off-the-shelf laser, and zap. Demonstrated to knock down mortar rounds. Could probably be souped up (faster radar/computer/mount) to take out RPGs and short range rockets. The gotcha is 20KW isn't exactly an exciting power level. It really relies on the explosive in the incoming round to do the destruction, the laser just cooks it off...

44 posted on 10/14/2009 7:21:05 PM PDT by ThunderSleeps (obama out now! I'll keep my money, my guns, and my freedom - you can keep the change.)
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To: rbg81

correct, but complex systems require lengthy development schedules that proceed in steps. one more step was taken. once they get proof of concept, systems tend to decrease in size and cost whiole increasing in effect.


45 posted on 10/14/2009 7:23:09 PM PDT by sig226 (My President was President of the week at the Norwegian Slough Academy.)
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To: ThunderSleeps

no matter how far away or doing who knows what in terms of motion relative to the target is the final arbiter of hit/miss.


Think about what you’re saying. Whenever you’re transmitting energy, range matters, weather too. You have to keep the beam focused to deliver the required energy. Energy dissipates with range.


46 posted on 10/14/2009 7:25:09 PM PDT by rbg81 (DRAIN THE SWAMP!!)
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To: Nachum

That’s right. And for certain aims, the system can simply go for a “functional kill” —to disable the sensitive electronics of some would-be, high-end platform. For many platforms, that means that it is out of the fight, for practical purposes. My preference obviously is to toast the living crap out of any muzzie crew, but to win a very fast-moving battle, this needn’t be the case.

Some observers here are not recalling the recent past —40 years ago technical experts who theorized about the eventual feasibility of SDI were denounced as nuts —such critics only needed to shout, “You can’t hit a bullet WITH A BULLET..!” and talk about missiles that would strike other missles would just STOP.

But now such missiles are a very common form of naval defense, and now even emerging continental defense.


47 posted on 10/14/2009 7:25:59 PM PDT by gaijin
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To: rbg81

The ABL and other projects like it probably aren’t much use in destroying ground targets, but they might hold some promise in their ability to disable/destroy ICBM’s in flight. Of course we could do that with a more traditional missile defense shield also, but the idiots in Washington are playing political football with that. If they can make this thing work, we might have a mobile alternative that could be deployed anywhere, regardless of the objections of Barry’s Russian buddies.


48 posted on 10/14/2009 7:26:09 PM PDT by Boogieman
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To: rbg81

Ada does have some interesting features, and I’ll admit that I’m impressed by the number of compile-time checks that the compiler does, but Pascal [and even Java, IIRC] have range-checking on arrays. {And Pascal’s you can turn off w/ a compiler directive.}

{Tangent: Ada, Java, PHP, and Python (IIRC) all have a “foreach” or similar construct which uses the array’s own indecies as bounds wherewhich to iterate over; pascal doesn’t have this ability (though it could in theory) and C/C++ can never have it, as “arrays” in C & C++ are really merely pointers/addresses... which is why it is legal to write array[index] and index[array]: they mean the same thing.}

But the reason I mentioned array access is that it is a big problem-area for a lot of security-flaws. {I have a friend who runs security-analysis on code for the government and virtually 100% of the code that he reviews is C/C++and looking for just that sort of mistake.}

I’m also a fan of strong-typing, of which claims that Pascal is a strongly-typed language actually fall short. But one of my personal “IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE!” peeves about C/C++ {and C like syntax in general} is the ability to perform an assignment in the conditional portion of an if-statement... that bugs me to no end because the condition-check is logically separate from the assignment and (IMO) shouldn’t be mixes; I realize that it is merely the result of the assignment being a function which returns the value assigned, I also realize that it can be used to “chain” assignments. That doesn’t make it a good design-choice though.

But let me ask, why would you rather code in C++ than Ada? I’m, as you can probably tell, a fan of having the compiler do optimizations. And, to be perfectly fair, a compiler for a language which “knows” about a structure can run non-destructive optimizations on those structures w/o intervention; a good case would be parallel processing where Ada has the task structure vs C++ & its threading/OpenML (IIRC) extensions. [ http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/browse_thread/thread/0be98569334bf359 ]


49 posted on 10/14/2009 7:26:15 PM PDT by OneWingedShark (Q: Why am I here? A: To do Justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God.)
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To: jackibutterfly

There I was, driving along, not a care in the world when suddenly....


50 posted on 10/14/2009 7:27:11 PM PDT by MARTIAL MONK
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To: ThunderSleeps

Those are some interesting developments. Makes you wonder though, about how the arms race would develop if something like that were deployed on a large scale. If planes use lasers to shoot down AA weapons, then I would guess the next step is to develop ground-based laser AA batterys to take out planes. You can’t shoot a laser down with a laser!


51 posted on 10/14/2009 7:30:38 PM PDT by Boogieman
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To: OneWingedShark

I programmed in Ada back in the late 80s when the first compilers came out. They were slow and lacked libraries and debuggers. I soon found that I could buy a $30 C/C++ compiler (with development environment) that could run rings around an Ada compiler. I’d rather put in my own logic to do run time checks than rely on the compiler to do it for me. I know Ada compilers/environments have improved since, but I will always think of it as a lumbering beast.

Most of my code these days is in C# or Java.


52 posted on 10/14/2009 7:30:40 PM PDT by rbg81 (DRAIN THE SWAMP!!)
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To: Nachum
But what about that car wax that you could fire a laser at and it wouldn't hurt the car's finish? I think it was called Dura Shine. They even mentioned it's infomercial on “Friends”.
53 posted on 10/14/2009 7:33:28 PM PDT by Hillarys Gate Cult (The man who said "there's no such thing as a stupid question" has never talked to Helen Thomas.)
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To: rbg81
Think about what you’re saying. Whenever you’re transmitting energy, range matters, weather too. You have to keep the beam focused to deliver the required energy. Energy dissipates with range.

That's the beauty of a modest power airborne laser for tactical situations - the ranges are agreeably short, maybe a few dozen miles. This is not like ABL trying to reach out hundreds of miles and hit a boosting ballistic missile. A tactical battlefield laser is focused, and if the frequency is selected with care, can minimize atmospheric absorption and losses.

Of course, as I understand it, ABL doesn't worry too much about losses from the main beam. Things like clouds are only a factor for the targeting beam. The main beam will ionize everything in its path. Smoke, smog, water vapor, vanishes nearly instantly.

54 posted on 10/14/2009 7:36:40 PM PDT by ThunderSleeps (obama out now! I'll keep my money, my guns, and my freedom - you can keep the change.)
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To: rbg81
Energy dissipates with range.

I don't think laser beams obey the inverse square law.

55 posted on 10/14/2009 7:38:17 PM PDT by Willie Green (Go Pat Go!!!)
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To: Willie Green; rbg81
>> Energy dissipates with range.

> I don't think laser beams obey the inverse square law.

Yes and no.

It's just that the inverse-square only applies over the (tiny) angular dispersion of the beam, so there's a huge divisor in the equation instead of '1' in the case of an omnidirectional dispersion. Within that small angle (laser beams do broaden with distance, just not much), it's weakening as it goes downrange.

Or so my 30-years-ago recollection of physics tells me...

56 posted on 10/14/2009 8:42:26 PM PDT by dayglored (Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!)
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To: dayglored
Or so my 30-years-ago recollection of physics tells me...

Well you certainly did a better job of dusting out the old cobwebs then I can!!! I think I must've forgotten that as soon as I passed the final exam. LOL!

But I'll take a wild guess that the angle is so tiny, that reflection and refraction in the atmosphere is a much bigger hurdle to overcome.

57 posted on 10/14/2009 9:00:57 PM PDT by Willie Green (Go Pat Go!!!)
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To: Willie Green
> ...I'll take a wild guess that the angle is so tiny, that reflection and refraction in the atmosphere is a much bigger hurdle to overcome.

I would agree with that. Not to mention little disturbances like water drops (probably immediately boiled away), dust (vaporized), and birds (who never knew what hit 'em)...

58 posted on 10/14/2009 9:44:55 PM PDT by dayglored (Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!)
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