Article

2006-05-03 Science & Technology

US working to develop ground-based laser weapon

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Posted by Dan Darling 2006-05-03 07:20|| || Front Page|| [3 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Definately feasible. Rumor has it the Soviets started something like this. It would be nice to use against the "new" GPS systems the Chinese and EU are building.

Posted by DarthVader 2006-05-03 07:51|| 2006-05-03 07:51|| Front Page Top

#2 What reason is there at present for such weapon technology?

Posted by Bernardz 2006-05-03 10:50|| 2006-05-03 10:50|| Front Page Top

#3 Space is the ultimate watchtower. Attacking the enemy C4I when the enemy is a control freak that is scared of independent thought in the trenches or the officer corps is the quickest way to dismantle those types of armies.

And ya gotta start someplace to get to laser weapons that can take out artillery shells, missiles, Qassams (hint, hint), and ICBMS. The Blunderbuss was a nightmare to use, but it was a start, and eventually led to the weapons we have today. Same here.

Posted by Ptah">Ptah 2006-05-03 11:18|| http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org]">[http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org] 2006-05-03 11:18|| Front Page Top

#4 First target? Certain idiots in the House!

Posted by 3dc 2006-05-03 12:04|| 2006-05-03 12:04|| Front Page Top

#5 BTW I remember reading about a ground-based laser idea, in the 70s, that was good for one great shot.

The idea was:

long tunnel
at one end of the tunnel a mirror pointed back into the tunnel
at the other end a 45 degree mirror pointed up to a steerable mirror with adaptive optics that would send the beam up to a cluster of sats that could bounce the beam between each other until sending it down to some target.

about 3/4s of the way down the tunnel an A-bomb.
The option of mirroring the tunnel walls or covering them with fiber or wire rods (wire for x-ray lasing). Another option would fill the tunnel with a liquid or gas that would provide a prefered lasing frequency.

This would make the tunnel a one shot nuke powered laser. (a massively powerful laser beam)

Posted by 3dc 2006-05-03 12:13|| 2006-05-03 12:13|| Front Page Top

#6 What reason is there at present for such weapon technology?

Simple. Size the high ground before someone else does. If we can knock out commmunication and military satellites and our potential enemies cannot, it makes the prospect of a war more remote. Most sane (Iran excluded) countries don't take on the biggest kid in the schoolyard when they KNOW he can kick your ass.
Both China and the EU are developing their own GPS systems so they won't have to use the US one and will sell it to other countries. Countries that may very well end up trying to fight the US. Can you imagine what could happen if Chavez had GPS enabled cruise missles that used Chinese tech? The aircraft carrier task force in the area could be on the receiving end of several hundred missiles, all very, very accurate. Knock the satellites out, and you remove that threat and help blind your enemy.

Posted by DarthVader 2006-05-03 12:27|| 2006-05-03 12:27|| Front Page Top

#7 C4I, Ptah?

I've thought of Command and Control, but what are the others, please?

Posted by trailing wife 2006-05-03 14:15|| 2006-05-03 14:15|| Front Page Top

#8 Is it in a hollowed-out volcano, like I asked?

Posted by mojo">mojo 2006-05-03 14:23|| 2006-05-03 14:23|| Front Page Top

#9 Also, if you've such lasers, you can adapt them to lunching payloads to LEO.

Posted by gromgoru 2006-05-03 14:26|| 2006-05-03 14:26|| Front Page Top

#10 Adaptive or agile optics, anti-satellite lasers and guide stars are all ideas and technologies that are decades old. Efforts to reduce the form factor of such engines might be somewhat new, but 90% of this article is old news. I was working on primary laser optics for a multi-megawatt anti-sat FEL (Free Electron Laser) in the mid-1980s.

Posted by Zenster 2006-05-03 15:54|| 2006-05-03 15:54|| Front Page Top

#11 Seems to me I've read dozens of stories about laser weapons, some being implemented, others in various stages of R&D. This is just one of many. I can see the Democrats being against it - the Democrats have been against every weapon development program since the F-100. As for the Republicans fighting this, those that voted against it need to be fired at the next election and replaced with someone who has a brain instead of a reflex circuit.

The Russians spent tens of billions of rubles on laser weaponry, knowing it was a winner for the guy that got there first. Failing to pursue laser weapons for any reason is insanity. There's nothing good about being "second" in any type of weapons program, especially with someone as paranoid as the Russians and Chinese.

Posted by Old Patriot">Old Patriot 2006-05-03 16:06|| http://oldpatriot.blogspot.com/]">[http://oldpatriot.blogspot.com/] 2006-05-03 16:06|| Front Page Top

#12 How big did yawl grow that FEL Zen Man? :<

Posted by 6 2006-05-03 17:14|| 2006-05-03 17:14|| Front Page Top

#13 Probably not that big. Ionization trails, y'know.

Posted by mojo">mojo 2006-05-03 17:26|| 2006-05-03 17:26|| Front Page Top

#14 The Soviets reportedly tested an anti-satellite laser way back in the early '80s. In addition, they did extensive work with explosively-powered lasers and particle beam weapons (you detonate an explosive in a chamber, the chamber walls absorb some part of the detonation energy and transfer it to a power convertor, which stored the energy in a capacitor, which can be used to fire the laser - the basic principle is similar to the idea for bomb-pumped x-ray lasers, but the firing platform is not destroyed in the resulting explosion and laser discharge). In addition, as I recall, there was much to-do about a Soviet radar installation that was thought to be either intended for anti-ballistic missile systems or anto-satellite systems or, at least according to one report, was actually a cover for a ground-to-space laser.

LBNL has developed table-top particle beams using laser wakefield technology. This has some fairly obvious military implications and applications, potentially. It's even unclassified work. See Nature last year sometime.

Posted by FOTSGreg">FOTSGreg 2006-05-03 17:44|| www.fire-on-the-suns.com]">[www.fire-on-the-suns.com] 2006-05-03 17:44|| Front Page Top

#15 C4I==Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence

http://www.psycom.net/iwar.1.html

Posted by Ptah">Ptah 2006-05-03 17:58|| http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org]">[http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org] 2006-05-03 17:58|| Front Page Top

#16 ya gotta start someplace to get to laser weapons that can take out artillery shells

Already in test phase on these.

Posted by lotp 2006-05-03 20:42|| 2006-05-03 20:42|| Front Page Top

#17 I see your c4i and raise you c4i2tsr!

Posted by DarthVader 2006-05-03 20:44|| 2006-05-03 20:44|| Front Page Top

#18 How big did yawl grow that FEL Zen Man?

My work was subcontracted by a company whose name rhymes with Huge Aircrash. There was talk of a 5 megawatt system the optics were going into. The primary optics consisted of a 12" diameter by 3" thick monocrystalline silicon blank worth about $10,000 each. Mind you, this was in the late 1980s, and only in the last few years have we economically grown 12" (1,000mm) silicon ingots. According to the visiting engineers, these blanks were hogged out of an 18" diameter ingot in order to eliminate any slip or dislocations in the crystal structure that are commonly found near an ingot's outer edge.

The blanks were then coated with a thin film of slicon dioxide and returned to the manufacturing facility for diffraction patterning. At this point the blanks suddenly grew in value to $40,000 a piece. The light table these blanks were exposed on was supposed to be one of the most massive on earth in its time. Based on a multi-ton slab of solid granite, it had a beam path of several feet and resolved down to 1/20th of a wavelength in the ultra-volet end of the spectrum.

To put things in perspective, a surface becomes a "mirror" when it is able to resolve better than 1/2 a wavelength of the highest frequency visible light (blue color) it is supposed to reflect.

As you can see, at 5% resolution, that well beyond an entire order of magnitude better performance than your regular mirror. This resolution was necessary to ensure that the optic's reflectivity was maximized. Likewise, this was the reason for selecting a monocrystalline substrate. As the mirror's surface heated during exposure to the live E-beam, power would tend to dissippate more evenly through a monolithic (consistently spaced crystal) lattice. Ergo, that is why they shaved off so much of the blank's outer circumference, in the pursuit of eliminating any irregularities in the crystal's structure. Similarly, the reflective coating had to be incredibly consistent so as to avoid anomalies or discontinuities in surface heating which (despite the water cooling journals bored through the optic's backside) would result in hotspots able to cause (as the military likes to put it) "spontaneous catastrophic disassembly."

#13 Probably not that big. Ionization trails, y'know.

Actually, the FEL remains the laser of choice for ground based antisatellite DEWs (Directed Energy Weapons). Issues of tunability, scalability and stability are all optimal for such a system. The beauty of a FEL is that the beam can be circulated in an oscillator cavity and then pumped via "wigglers". These smaller magnets interact with an E-beam to stimulate the release of powerful synchrotron radiation that is tunable over a very wide range of millimeter waves to X-rays. Newer versions have a straight path single-pass system that submits the beam to an "undulator" (basically a long path wiggler) to obtain extremely powerful emission via SASE (Self Amplified Spontaneous Emission).

For a great primer on FELs, go to:

http://www.plasma.ernet.in/~beta/whatis.html

Posted by Zenster 2006-05-03 21:36|| 2006-05-03 21:36|| Front Page Top

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