Posted on 05/08/2020 10:42:19 AM PDT by BeauBo
The Army is working overtime to ramp up to output of one of its next-generation vehicle-mounted laser weapon systems.
Defense contractor Dynetics is currently working to increase the power of the 100 kilowatt High Energy Laser Tactical Vehicle Demonstrator (HEL-TVD) to roughly 300 kw, roughly the output needed to defeat an incoming cruise missile, the company announced on Friday.
Initiated in 2017, the HEL-TVD program sought to develop and mount a 100 kw laser on an existing Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV) truck to provide a counter rocket, artillery, and mortar (C-RAM) capability...
In its announcement, Dynetics noted it had formally transitioned from the HEL-TVD program to what's called the Indirect Fires Protection Capability – High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) effort, which is designed to deliver four prototype laser weapons to a platoon by fiscal year 2024...
The ramp-up is big news not just for the Army, but other laser weapons across the U.S. armed forces which are looking to the HEL-TVD prototyping efforts to inform their own directed energy capabilities.
"Under the new directed energy strategy, the Army is leveraging progress made in that effort in order to merge the HEL-TVD with similar technologies in development by the Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense," the service said in August 2019, adding that this partnership "will allow the services to achieve a higher power system ... that can protect sites from RAM and [unmanned aerial systems] as well as more stressing threats."...
"Even if you take all the other elements of a laser weapon and have them be perfect" – the targeting, the cooling, the beam control — "we still don't have enough power," as Frank Peterkin, a senior scientist at the Office of Naval Research, put it in a recent CRS report.
(Excerpt) Read more at taskandpurpose.com ...
The Navy’s $500 million effort to develop a futuristic railgun is going nowhere fast
Jared Keller Apr 24, 2020 2:57 PM EDT
This could be the Army's next light tank of choice
Jared Keller Apr 24, 2020 1:14 PM EDT
The Navy is working on bird internet
Jared Keller Apr 29, 2020 12:16 PM EDT
I have written many angry and complaining letters to the Star Trek people in that regard. So far, no response.
I'm old enough to remember when there were still people saying that "color" movies would never replace "colorless" movies... Then they said the same thing about "colorless" TV...
{:-)
Re: 5:
That’s fake - was done with mirrors.
If you have diffuser optics across the entire spectrum, you can’t see through them.
Laser beams are not visible unless there are quite a lot of particulates in the path of the beam that are reflecting or refracting the light. You can see this yourself with a cheap laser pointer and a bathroom fogged with steam; so no, real lasers don’t look like Star Wars or Star Trek in real life. Things that DO look like SW/ST weapons in real life - particle beams and hypervelocity weapons (railguns, among other things). If we ever get plasma weapons working, they will look pretty much like they are depicted in Hollywood.
Correct, that’s how it works.
High resolution camera system with a relay to VR goggle system, would be capable of protecting a users eyes from direct exposure. The camera hardware is still vulnerable.
Possibly a cold plasma sheath absorbent to the weapons operating frequency might offer a protective dispersion effect for an optics system. A good spot to begin to dig for an answer.
I agree.
Someone could actually develop a protective helmet for troops who are near the source and who ma be victims of laser bounce from reflective objects and water.Such a device should likely have a hardened polished mirror surface.
Laser operating outside the visible spectrum? Collimated laser light is so tightly focused that dispersion is required to reveal. Lecture pointers are visible spectrum lasers.
S.H.A.D.O.— Gerry Anderson?
Everything developed for the Railgun projectile could be applied to overcome the deficiencies of the Combustion Light Gas Gun, the forerunner project for extended range Naval bombardment which used a purely ballistic round.
The CLGG was successively prototyped three size ranges, 14mm, 45mm, to culminate at 155 mm for 200 nm. range, with 2.5 km sec. velocity at this larger size.
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