Posted on 10/14/2009 6:21:45 PM PDT by Nachum
There are a number of effective targets in warfare for this weapon. A shot at the cockpit of any airborn craft might be effective, the warhead of a head seeking missile, or the heads of infantry as they advance. If it can hit the hood of a car from the air, its accuracy is possibly effective enough to deal a lot of damage to an enemy.
Vehicle NOT moving, didn’t even see a hole completely through, and that was the hood of the vehicle, not the fender.
If you think the goal of this program is to put holes in fenders then you really might like some other websites more suited to your age-range.
Raytheon has already demonstrated the effectiveness of a commercial grade welding laser (20KW?) mated to the CIWS radar and aiming mount. Basically remove the gun, drop in an off-the-shelf laser, and zap. Demonstrated to knock down mortar rounds. Could probably be souped up (faster radar/computer/mount) to take out RPGs and short range rockets. The gotcha is 20KW isn't exactly an exciting power level. It really relies on the explosive in the incoming round to do the destruction, the laser just cooks it off...
correct, but complex systems require lengthy development schedules that proceed in steps. one more step was taken. once they get proof of concept, systems tend to decrease in size and cost whiole increasing in effect.
no matter how far away or doing who knows what in terms of motion relative to the target is the final arbiter of hit/miss.
That’s right. And for certain aims, the system can simply go for a “functional kill” —to disable the sensitive electronics of some would-be, high-end platform. For many platforms, that means that it is out of the fight, for practical purposes. My preference obviously is to toast the living crap out of any muzzie crew, but to win a very fast-moving battle, this needn’t be the case.
Some observers here are not recalling the recent past —40 years ago technical experts who theorized about the eventual feasibility of SDI were denounced as nuts —such critics only needed to shout, “You can’t hit a bullet WITH A BULLET..!” and talk about missiles that would strike other missles would just STOP.
But now such missiles are a very common form of naval defense, and now even emerging continental defense.
The ABL and other projects like it probably aren’t much use in destroying ground targets, but they might hold some promise in their ability to disable/destroy ICBM’s in flight. Of course we could do that with a more traditional missile defense shield also, but the idiots in Washington are playing political football with that. If they can make this thing work, we might have a mobile alternative that could be deployed anywhere, regardless of the objections of Barry’s Russian buddies.
Ada does have some interesting features, and I’ll admit that I’m impressed by the number of compile-time checks that the compiler does, but Pascal [and even Java, IIRC] have range-checking on arrays. {And Pascal’s you can turn off w/ a compiler directive.}
{Tangent: Ada, Java, PHP, and Python (IIRC) all have a “foreach” or similar construct which uses the array’s own indecies as bounds wherewhich to iterate over; pascal doesn’t have this ability (though it could in theory) and C/C++ can never have it, as “arrays” in C & C++ are really merely pointers/addresses... which is why it is legal to write array[index] and index[array]: they mean the same thing.}
But the reason I mentioned array access is that it is a big problem-area for a lot of security-flaws. {I have a friend who runs security-analysis on code for the government and virtually 100% of the code that he reviews is C/C++and looking for just that sort of mistake.}
I’m also a fan of strong-typing, of which claims that Pascal is a strongly-typed language actually fall short. But one of my personal “IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE!” peeves about C/C++ {and C like syntax in general} is the ability to perform an assignment in the conditional portion of an if-statement... that bugs me to no end because the condition-check is logically separate from the assignment and (IMO) shouldn’t be mixes; I realize that it is merely the result of the assignment being a function which returns the value assigned, I also realize that it can be used to “chain” assignments. That doesn’t make it a good design-choice though.
But let me ask, why would you rather code in C++ than Ada? I’m, as you can probably tell, a fan of having the compiler do optimizations. And, to be perfectly fair, a compiler for a language which “knows” about a structure can run non-destructive optimizations on those structures w/o intervention; a good case would be parallel processing where Ada has the task structure vs C++ & its threading/OpenML (IIRC) extensions. [ http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/browse_thread/thread/0be98569334bf359 ]
There I was, driving along, not a care in the world when suddenly....
Those are some interesting developments. Makes you wonder though, about how the arms race would develop if something like that were deployed on a large scale. If planes use lasers to shoot down AA weapons, then I would guess the next step is to develop ground-based laser AA batterys to take out planes. You can’t shoot a laser down with a laser!
I programmed in Ada back in the late 80s when the first compilers came out. They were slow and lacked libraries and debuggers. I soon found that I could buy a $30 C/C++ compiler (with development environment) that could run rings around an Ada compiler. I’d rather put in my own logic to do run time checks than rely on the compiler to do it for me. I know Ada compilers/environments have improved since, but I will always think of it as a lumbering beast.
Most of my code these days is in C# or Java.
That's the beauty of a modest power airborne laser for tactical situations - the ranges are agreeably short, maybe a few dozen miles. This is not like ABL trying to reach out hundreds of miles and hit a boosting ballistic missile. A tactical battlefield laser is focused, and if the frequency is selected with care, can minimize atmospheric absorption and losses.
Of course, as I understand it, ABL doesn't worry too much about losses from the main beam. Things like clouds are only a factor for the targeting beam. The main beam will ionize everything in its path. Smoke, smog, water vapor, vanishes nearly instantly.
Energy dissipates with range.
I don't think laser beams obey the inverse square law.
> I don't think laser beams obey the inverse square law.
Yes and no.
It's just that the inverse-square only applies over the (tiny) angular dispersion of the beam, so there's a huge divisor in the equation instead of '1' in the case of an omnidirectional dispersion. Within that small angle (laser beams do broaden with distance, just not much), it's weakening as it goes downrange.
Or so my 30-years-ago recollection of physics tells me...
Or so my 30-years-ago recollection of physics tells me...
But I'll take a wild guess that the angle is so tiny, that reflection and refraction in the atmosphere is a much bigger hurdle to overcome.
I would agree with that. Not to mention little disturbances like water drops (probably immediately boiled away), dust (vaporized), and birds (who never knew what hit 'em)...
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