Northrop Grumman fires up rugged solid-state laser weapon

source phys.org...

The tests, conducted in the company's Redondo Beach laboratory, demonstrated that the laser could burn through the skin and critical components of a target drone used to simulate anti-ship cruise missile threats to U.S. Navy ships.

This article is a bit too technical for me but suffice it to say that it has a lethal range of several miles.

13.3 kilowatts just does not sound like that much considering the capability.

reply to post by oghamxx


Neat! I agree 13 kW is extremely low power for what it's capable of doing. Is this a game changer? I wonder what effective countermeasures there may be.

Mirrors maybe?
2nd

Gs

13 kw IS alot if its condensed into a narrow beam.

Imagine the heat of 13 one kw electric fires condensed to an area of a quarter inch..

Originally posted by oghamxx
source phys.org...

The tests, conducted in the company's Redondo Beach laboratory, demonstrated that the laser could burn through the skin and critical components of a target drone used to simulate anti-ship cruise missile threats to U.S. Navy ships.

This article is a bit too technical for me but suffice it to say that it has a lethal range of several miles.

13.3 kilowatts just does not sound like that much considering the capability.

If they are letting us know about this now the real question as to be

What do they realy have that we don't know

Now we know what happen to the N. Korea missile

reply to post by oghamxx


Is that all they got??? I have to laugh since I know about the 1988 technology transfer.

In 1986/87 RCA Optoelectronics division had a 1080w PRF stacked heterojunction semiconductor laser. Now it was only a 7% duty cycle at heat sinked room temperature. But if you pumped liquid N2 through a heat sink you could get that sucker easily to 75% DC. BTW, theses diodes use 25 amps at 400 volts.

So you take 20 of these using a power supply at 400v and 500 amps and you get 16,200w PRF (21,600w*0.75), man that was hard. So for about $15k in 1987 dollars, you could have yourself a nice little toy including the power supply. If you micro-space and sync the firing chain you get that true wattage. If you daisy chain and sync groups, you get multiples of the wattage, this ain't rocket science.

You should see what happens when you take a 2000 of them, cryo-cool them, use magnetic focusing and produce a ring laser with a gooey center of A and B particles coming off a p239 source with the whole thing being accelerated in a 4 meter light cannon... yummm. Couple of million watts, a trillion electron volts, what would Austin Powers say? Yeah baby!

I wonder how much money these clowns spent on developing this, or should I say redeveloping since they have had the finished technology since 1988 (it was in Airforce One in 1989). Reminds me of the stealth coating story that came out a couple of years back, think it was 2009 about the "new" stealth coating. DARPA got that one in 1996.

Information comes out slow to make it "look" like they are doing something with your tax dollars, but really, they are just blowing other people for the technology and calling it national security once they've stolen it.

Cheers - Dave

reply to post by oghamxx


I don't want to read technical jargon, which can take a complete lie and make it sound as though a Harvard professor wrote it.

I want to see a video of this thing in action.

Unfortunately, it will probably be absorbed into the "Military Secrets" file, which means it won't be released into the public for about 50 years or so...

Thanks for the thread, anyway.

reply to post by oghamxx


... um, so, when do the man-portable versions trickle down to the civilian population?

Set phasers to ... oops, there's only one setting!