Occasional reader Potosi Joel turned me on to a Wired article about a company named Applied Electronics getting a contract to place ultra short pulse lasers on naval aircraft:
USP lasers shoot incredibly fast pulses of light that create channels in the air for electricity to travel to a target. The targets are vaporized so quickly that the lasers don’t generate any extra heat. People have mostly speculated that USP lasers could be used in medicine to help blow up dental plaque or cancerous tumors. The armed forces, no doubt, could find all sorts of useful things to do with them. Judge for yourself if Applied Electronics will come through, given their track record.
The post’s tone is a little snarky, considering that the author considers light pulses to be “incredibly fast.”
I wonder how fast he’d find credible, for a laser?
Cool stuff…and in the current version of Pop Sci: UCAVs that pulse a gigawatt microwave to destroy electronics (test flight by Boeing in 2012…) and an underwater 2 person minisub : Deep Flight II.
Ah, “incredible.” A word not to be used lightly near scientists – they tend to take it literally.
I wonder what the range of something that is being talked about as a tool for dental cleaning can possibly have when scaled up to try to provide some sort of lethal effect on just the size of a fighter. One of the big reasons why the 747-sized YAL-1 laser was cancelled was that apparently its range was so small that in order to shoot down any boost phase ballistic missile it would have to be loitering some mere tens of miles from the launch site, i.e. probably even within SA-3 range. I’ll believe this when I see it (sorry to be the downer again.)
Minor nit re. ABL — the second tail was cancelled in the FY10 budget, the first is very much around with the first airborne test against a ballisitic missile target slated for mid-fall ‘09.
- SJS
Austin Powers humor is all that comes to mind..
Dr. Evil: Okay no problem. Here’s my second plan. Back in the 60’s, I had a weather changing machine that was, in essence, a sophisticated heat beam which we called a “laser.” Using these “lasers,” we punch a hole in the protective layer around the Earth, which we scientists call the “Ozone Layer.” Slowly but surely, ultraviolet rays would pour in, increasing the risk of skin cancer. That is unless the world pays us a hefty ransom of 1 Million Dollars..
The technology, quite simply, doesn’t have much use. A pulse-laser is what it sounds like, a high-powered short-duration (like a strobe light) laser. The nice thing is you can ramp up the power quite a bit without overheating compared to a continuous beam.
The down side is about all you’re doing is ionizing air. Which, yeah, that’s how lightening gets that first little boost to jump the air gap and make a nifty fireworks display, but for practical purposes there’s a little bit of a problem. First, static electricity isn’t easy to generate in large quantities. Second, high-voltage direct or alternating current doesn’t like to jump air gaps either — take a look at the insulators on high-tension lines and you’ll see 10 feet is a safe gap for a 20Kvac charge.
So let’s say the pulse-laser lets me jump an air gap of, say, forty feet. I still need to power the laser, plus pump out 20Kvac with enough current to fry something, I still need to be within 40 feet of it, and I need to place a ground lead somewhere near the thing I’m trying to blow up so the current goes through it.
Which, ya know, I can probably shoot the beejeebers out of an IED and *then* hit it with a quarter-pound of plastique for just what it would cost in *gasoline* to run this pulse-laser gizmo and generator.
High-tech isn’t always a solution. Often times it’s a tool looking for a problem.
– Max
Perhaps he intended incredibly short pulses of light, because incredibly fast when applied to light implies that light may have some other speed than, well, the speed of light.
ProwlerAMDO, you are misinformed… by an order of magnitude.
Wouldn’t be the first time . . .
I have to admit I don’t know the actual ranges demonstrated but I would be very surprised if 100’s of miles was achieved. I have heard that ABL might be operationally effective against a North Korean launched missile, but against missiles launched from either Iran or China it would have to be well within either country’s IADS.
But in all honesty I’m not an expert. If you know better I would be interested in hearing anything you could say that’s not classified; beyond what you’ve already mentioned.
Wired has, IIRC, a little bit of history Applied Electronics, namely that AE often oversold that or similar concepts to some military agency.
By now Wired meets anything with AE’s name attached to it with derison and will continue to do until they deliver.
Without really knowing – hey, this is the blogosphere – I’m sensing an alternative form of IR jammer here rather than an offensive weapon. If you can quickly fry an inbound threat’s electronics it saves a lot of bother in the chaff/flare/maneuver category.
That makes a lot more sense . . . wonder how they would integrate in that case and what sort of azimuth/elevation coverage it could provide.
Lex –
NorthropGrumman and various others have been working on such directed energy IRCM for quite some time – I saw test footage of a system by NG from around 5-6 years ago – the laser blasted the seeker head off the missile, which then performed a few sidewinder moves before going ballistic.
Shoot ‘em in the face, works (most) every time.
I keep hearing directed energy weapons are just around the corner, but they never quite seem to arrive.
As an IR jammer the pulse-laser has a lot going for it. The old saw about, “With your remaining eye do not look directly into laser” applies just as well for electronics as it does for eyeballs — pump a bright enough beam into a sensitive seeker head and the thing is going to be blinded.
– Max
We have had directed energy weapons around for centuries. The problem is that they are all kinetic energy weapons.
The articles dismissive tone hides a lot of the information, I think.
I don’t think the laser beam is ‘incredibly’ fast. Light being credible, what is incredible is the speed of the alternating of ‘beam on’ and ‘beam off’.
I believe the idea of punching holes in the air is to provide a pathway without the resistance offered by air, not to provide a lightning bolt display, but to prevent a lightning bolt display by clearing the air, so to speak, for the laser pulses to travel in a void.
How much of the AL-1 is devoted to heat sinks and radiators? (Not rhetorical… I don’t know, I am just guessing all of Business Class and the back half of coach, by weight, I bet it is worse) Power generation ordinarily means heat dispersion, or melting parts, and of course in this case- melting targets. The pulse advantage in being not continuous is to generate less waste heat per engagement.
The question is an interesting one. IF we call the speed of light “warp speed”, and consider it incredible, is .5 Warp credible? Maybe .35 Warp? Once the credible speed is determined, we can put scientists to work slowing light down until we can believe it.
But what would be ludicrous speed?
“If a laser is swept across a distant object, the spot of light can easily be made to move at a speed greater than c.” Faster-than-light observations and experiments” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
VX, USAF Plots Needs for a Fantastic Future: http://tiny.cc/0dVYt
Spaz/
I guess all that will keep the guys at Wright-Pat and Edwards happy–don’t know about anybody else over 1/lt–they’ll all be retired before that stuff is fielded if the 35 program is any indication–or if Obama wins a second election. If that happens the choice will probably be between box-kites vs traditional Diamond with tails and a few Chinese/Thai fighting kites thrown in for good measure.
Boeing Airborne Laser Team Completes 1st Airborne Test Against Instrumented Target Missile: http://tiny.cc/TRpx0
For the record, yesterday the ABL successfully acquired, tracked, provided atmospheric compensation and simulated the directed energy kill sequence against an instrumented boosting missile target using three onboard low-power lasers on August 10 at 9:50 p.m. PDT. The missile was launched from San Nicolas Island, located in the Naval Air Warfare Center-Weapons Division Sea Range, off the central California coast. This was the third “test” intercept in the last two months. Looking at hard kill test in another month or two…
- SJS
What in the hell is a “simulated kill”? It’s crap like this that gets a program cancelled.
Reporter interviewing AF General:
Reporter: How did today’s test go?
General: Excellant we obtained three simulated kills against three targets. We have proven that our targeting system works. Give us another year to install the high powered lasers in the aircraft and we will be ready to begin operational testing.
Headline: ABL Program in Trouble. Air Force Needs Year to Get Back on Track.