Hi,

There is continuous arms race among opposing weapons technologies. I am wondering how the world will be in the arms race of this century. The USA Pentagon has the approval to push the envelope in developing and deploying technologies which are defensive and hopefully effective. An example is the anti-ballistic missile shield technologies. There are already operational high power lasers aboard large jet aircraft.

Will we see a time when all airborne means of carrying weapons will be extremely vulnerable to being shot to the ground? Are we seeing the beginning of the dominance of defensive weapons to control the air?

Take a look at this:

http://theweek.com/article/index/266871/the-us-marines-are-developing-laser-weapons-heres-why

As of when I posted this, the only lasers being deployed as weapons are HUGE, take a lot of power to operate, and are only capable of damaging small objects.

What is pictured in that article is a LaWS ... It's not very powerful ( relatively ) .

[media]http:

[/media]

Will we see a time when all airborne means of carrying weapons will be extremely vulnerable to being shot to the ground? Are we seeing the beginning of the dominance of defensive weapons to control the air?

I would say that is unlikely. If or when lasers become a dominant weapon on the battlefield, it will prompt a push in R&D towards laser specific armors, and I believe in that area airborn armors will be a possibility because they will rely heavily on reflecting the incoming energy away, which should be possible with lightweight materials; as opposed to current kinetic/explosive armors that have to either absorb or deflect the incoming energy, which by their very nature are very heavy and just can't be deployed effectively (or at least as effectively) on aircraft.

It's entirely possible that all that is needed to counter laser weapons is...

http://ifitshipitshere.blogspot.com/2009/10/cars-you-can-see-yourself-in-no-really.html

3Ddreamer, on 20 Oct 2014 - 6:47 PM, said:

Will we see a time when all airborne means of carrying weapons will be extremely vulnerable to being shot to the ground? Are we seeing the beginning of the dominance of defensive weapons to control the air?

I would say that is unlikely. If or when lasers become a dominant weapon on the battlefield, it will prompt a push in R&D towards laser specific armors, and I believe in that area airborn armors will be a possibility because they will rely heavily on reflecting the incoming energy away

Anyone who has played UFO: Enemy Unknown knows you have to wait till plasma finishes researching before you can consider yourself in the money.Puns intended.

Due to the nature of how a laser works, the majority of the power ends up wasted, the energy being converted into waste heat which for big lasers is a big problem, then you have the issue of the atmosphere between.

Highly mobile laser weapons like that are soft science fiction now. Lasers are great as sensors and for targeting, but not much else.

To make a functional laser defensive system you have to be plugged into a very high capacity grid or have an explosive energy discharge, and have equal access to unlimited coolant and a very large heat sink. Currently only deploy-able on very large trucks.

Then there's the issue, as another mentioned, that it's much cheaper to defend against lasers (as China is doing) than build them.

Energy weapons can be great for scrambling enemy sensors, though. If your missile is flying blind, it's a lot easier to just cause it to miss the target entirely or malfunction (and you can't protect sensors that detect light from the light they're trying to detect). IMO, that's where the real arms race is- building resistant guidance systems, and scrambling your enemy's.

I wouldn't say laser weapons are complete science-fiction.

http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/STO/Programs/High_Energy_Liquid_Laser_Area_Defense_System_(HELLADS).aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Energy_Liquid_Laser_Area_Defense_System

Sounds like things are coming along nicely.

As of when I posted this, the only lasers being deployed as weapons are HUGE, take a lot of power to operate, and are only capable of damaging small objects.

Is that necessarily so, though?

A 20kW laser only consumes about 100kW (well, only... but still). Military lasers are megawatt rather than kilowatt, but they do not really need to be. Laser engravers are typically considerably less than half a kilowatt, CNC lasers with 1 to 2 KW cut straight through metal plates (of a reasonable thickness), and 20kW lasers are being used to drill through massive rock, but even that feat isn't necessary.

The idea of shooting your lasers pheeeeeouwwww pheeeeeeeouwww in as Star Trek like manner and then the target spectacularly exploding is fun for television, but that's it.

Other than a drone or a missle (or any physical object with significant mass) a laser beam can be targetted and retargetted in very little time. Actually it almost only depends on how fast you (or your targetting computer) can react.

The target needs not explode because you make a pheeeeeouwwww sound and because that's cool. It's sufficient if the laser tracks the drone/missle for 1-2 seconds, heating the missle head to 250-300°C and causing all electronic circuits to fail. That's something 5kW can easily achieve, no need to atomize it (it'll do that by itself when it hits the ground).

Even so, putting a megawatt laser into an airplane is not impossible at all. Pratt & Whitney demonstrated in 2012 how it is feasible to turn a civil aircraft engine (such as you'd find on a Boeing 747-400) into a 120 MW power generator.

Industrial lasers are also working on far shorter ranges, and targeting far more stable objects than a weaponized laser needs to. So that little industrial laser with its few Kw of power can cut through material like butter because it can precisely and continuously target the exactly same very small area. Take that same laser and target bobbing, weaving, and fast moving object, and you're barely going to mar the paint. The problem gets even worse when the object is moving through air at high speed, as now they can radiate that heat even easier. (And if it is something like a ICBM with a heat shield? Good luck!)

Think about taking a candle or lighter. You sure don't want to sit there holding your hand right at the tip of the flame, because you're going to start to burn yourself in a few seconds. But move your hand at the right speed and you barely warm your hand and can comfortably do so for a very long time.

Tons of issues in reality make targeting high powered lasers at long range a horribly annoying task: Simply accurately tracking the target isn't easy, and you can't hit something if you don't know where it is. When you do know where it is it still isn't a perfectly simple thing to aim even a laser at it. Then you have to actually keep the laser on target long enough to cause structural failure which is critical enough to render the object catastrophically inoperable. (Doesn't matter if you burn a hundred holes through the craft's hull if it can still carry out its attack mission)

Make something with a highly reflective surface to the frequencies used in your enemies lasers, and then back it with high capacity cooling/heat pipe designs (which can be built into structural members so you're not actually carrying additional weight), and now the problem of shooting something down with a laser has just risen several orders of magnitude more.

X-ray lasers and other non-visible light lasers have a future in weaponry. X-rays and gamma rays penetrate almost any material, so the important target is the electronic system of an enemy weapon. It often does not require a lot of power to disrupt something inside of a weapon that depends on electronics and control mechanisms. People often believe that a weapon must blast a space cruiser into little pieces like Star Wars to be effective when in reality the thing only needs to hit one vital component.

X-ray lasers and other non-visible light lasers have a future in weaponry. X-rays and gamma rays penetrate almost any material, so the important target is the electronic system of an enemy weapon. It often does not require a lot of power to disrupt something inside of a weapon that depends on electronics and control mechanisms. People often believe that a weapon must blast a space cruiser into little pieces like Star Wars to be effective when in reality the thing only needs to hit one vital component.

Gama rays will also kill all organic life within 500 meters ... So firing one of those things will wipe out all life on your ship, and the enemy craft at the same time.

X-Ray exposure can be a bit longer before you fall over dead - however you still have the same problem of irradiating your own ship .