Posted on 09/28/2004 8:12:49 PM PDT by ableChair
Greta Van Susteren reported that a Delta pilot enroute to Salt Lake City was lazed in the cockpit this last Wednesday. Only country I know that has that hardware (for lazing bomber pilots) was the Soviet Union. Pilot reportedly required medical treatment and this was not a minor injury (weak laser) wound. More will come out to tomorrow as this story hits the print press.
You seem to have a hard time understanding the difference between power and energy.
A jelly donut and a pipe bomb may have equivalent energy content, but one has a much higher peak power.
Nevertheless, retina damage can be acheived at great distances with either pulsed or cw laser light.
Pulsed would certainly be easier and cheaper.
Hell, Reagan should have hired you for SDI then all his problems would have been solved, being the "hobbyist expert" you are and all.
I've worked on anti-missle laser systems just like hundreds of other laser jocks.
How do you know Stobe Talbott tipped off the Russians?
I don't buy that either. There is too much energy dissipated in the atmosphere. Look at all the difficulties they encountered with SDI. They were working with astronomical energy levels. It wasn't because it was a metal target so much as it was that they were LOSING TONS of energy in the atmosphere. At point blank range, sure, but not 5 miles out. The atmosphere is only about 60 miles deep. ICBMs were to be targeted at the very edge of that. Just that little bit of atmosphere, along with diffraction over distance, was enough to weaken their lasers by HUGE amounts.
Snippet:
A partial search of the Russian ship that later docked at Tacoma did not lead to the discovery of a laser. However, Clinton administration officials had alerted the Russian government that the ship was to be searched, in what U.S. officials later would say was part of an effort to cover up the incident to avoid upsetting U.S.-Russian relations.
Yeah, I saw that, very nice matching of pic to quote!
A stick of dynamite contains about a megajoule. It is also sufficient to stop an ICBM. So a 1 Megawatt laser with a 1 second dwell time would be sufficient. You dont need 10^16.
As for pulses, the question is one of total aggregate energy
Only in the regime of thermal damage. A high peak intesity pulse will produce dieletric breakdown. Electrons move in response to E-fields, jolt them hard enough and retinal damage can occur at modest energies (but high peak powers).
Most metals spark around 10 Megawatts per cm^2. Melting and sparking are two different things. (one is electrical the other is thermal)
Driving an X-ray laser, much less an array of X-ray lasers with a nuke, is, well, hard.
Teller's brilliant pebbles idea was better, but one of the best interception techniques is what Moscow is rumored to have, nuke tipped interceptors.
The chemical laser needed to make SDI a reality have only recently matured.
EASY NOW TEX....
If the point of absorption is the missle tip, then, uh, yes we are.
There's more.
A large percentage of that energy is reflected off the target. Only some of it is absorbed. That fractional part that is absorbed has to melt the metal in a short period of time. Therefore extremely high energy levels are required in order to reliably succeed.
And back to energy.
A 100 watt light on for 24 hours is 8.64 million watt seconds (joules) of energy. Or - 8,640,000 watts for one second. If you laser only works for 10 milliseconds, the peak power level would be 864 million watts. Or the same thing used by a 100 watt light bulb for a day...
High energy lasers don't last long. They generate huge bursts of energy for short periods of time. Therefore in order to do damage to the target in that short period of time the power levels have to be absolutely enormous.
You're so invested in this hobby that you can't admit you're wrong. Okay, if it's so easy to do TODAY, then why doesn't GWB run down to radio shack and buy all the lasers he needs, throw 'em into orbit on a Delta rocket and scrap the missile to missile interceptor he's building now? Common sense would tell you that the atmosphere plays a HUGE role in dissipating laser energy. It's not hard to see or understand.
"Clinton administration officials had alerted the Russian government that the ship was to be searched,"
I wasn't aware of that, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
finally! kept waiting for that guy to show up.
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