Army raygun to boost power with starlight de-twinkling tech The US Army, in the process of building an enormous raygun on a lorry, has decided that it will enhance its laser cannon of the future by the use of adaptive optics - a crafty technology employed in telescopes by astronomers to eliminate the effects of the atmosphere on starlight. Under the High Energy Laser Technology …
first, battery powered motorcycles that (other than improper price/benefit balances) are useful, and now, mobile communication laser systems that are as good as fiber optics.
That's the killer app that will trickle down into the civilian world. Point to point laser datalinks that can adapt to weather and still maintain fiber speeds. It'll be like the old days of microwave all over again! :)
It would appear from the article that BOFHs can start soon putting in purchase orders for seriously powerful laser kit to replace all that "vulnerable" fibre. If ISPs can serve via various radio technologies, lasers should be a logical progression. Then it will trickle down to the consumer market....
It could make spaces in and above urban canyons very interesting. It will solve the pigeon problem if nothing else.
i wonder which country they will be testing it out in ?
the UK, Italy or Greece or maybe they will take it over to south korea or iraq ???
will the efects be the same as in Terminator movies ?
crewed no doubt by the 1% looking to protect their interests.
oh and yanks don't get taught about human rights and the articles of the geneva convention!
I remember reading that the Geneva Conventions only apply to warfare/hostilities between nations.
So the US could use this against the "Occupy ..." demonstrators. However, I expect they would use the microwave heat beam units first. Less chance of damaging any government or city property should a beam miss its target.
"employs piezoelectric actuators to warp the shape of a telescope mirror"
Changing the telescope mirror is Active Optics, which works against wind, gravity (a 10m telescope bends a bit as you turn it around), etc.
Adaptive Optics works with an entirely different (much smaller) mirror. It's a bit hard kicking around a few tons of mirror accurately on millisecond timescales. You can even fit Adaptive Optics to refracting telescopes ("ones wot got lenses"), whereas it's a bit harder to fit actuators on a lens (tends to get in the way of the light, apparently).
I remember Tom Clancy mentioning adaptive optics in the context of astronomy and laserweapon research in his novel The Cardinal of the Kremlin from 1988. In that novel both the US and the Soviets attempt to build an anti-ICBM laser and the US side uses adaptive optics to solve the problem of dispersion. The book even mentions that this is the same solution used in astronomy to prevent twinkling.
I can't believe it took 23 years for this to trickle down into actual weapons research (especially not because Tom Clancy sometimes uses scientists and military sources for inspiration).
Rumor has it, Tom Clancy has been brought in and questioned after the publishing of a number of his books. I don't recall if The Cardinal of the Kremlin was one of them.
Just because they are announcing it, doesn't mean it hasn't been available, and it's certainly taken time to develop.
As a mere astronomer with a PhD working on AO and high resolution systems - I would hate to suggest that they are "aving a larf"
There is a very big difference between an atmosphere very close to you tilts the angle of parallel light arriving from a distant object - and the disturbance of light with an atmosphere all along it's path.
Without getting into lots of details of Cn2 profiles and near-field phase screens - it's the difference between pressing a body up against a bathroom window and looking at that from a distance, and pressing your eye up against a bathroom window and looking at a distant body
So the Taliban need only to build a trebuchet and throw stones at the machine until the mirror breaks? They ARE used to stoning things after all.
But seriously, an inert projectile isn't going to care much how hot ite gets. In fact a molten projectile might be more effective than a cold one. Flechette artillery rounds would, I suspect, prove very hard to disrupt. Indirect heavy machine gun fire would keep the firer out of LOS of the laser while doing significant damage.
The usual issues over target detection, identification and damage assesment remain. Gonna be a lot of toasted avians in the vicinity of these devices. And if a bird filter is included, hows about some balsa wood explosive.gliders? Ground clutter and terrain masking will add to the problems of detecting and tracking a low level target.
Regardless of the laser wavelength, it is probable that a suiable obscurant can be found to significantly degrade the effectiveness of the beam. (Apart from natural problems of rain, fog, cloud or dust.)
Unless this has almost infinitely fast beam pointing, multiple units will be needed in any given location. One suspects that they aren't cheap. As the Strategic Defense Initiative has shown, the cost of defensive measures may exceed the cost of saturation attacks.
Taliban in tinfoil suits will. of course be able to attack with impunity. (And be immune to mind-control satellite feeds.)
The natural enemy of ultra-flat, ultra-reflective, ultra-expensive dielectric laser mirrors is dust.
Judging from the colour they painted it - they don't seem to have realised this.
Can we think of any circumstance in which the American's might want their army to be used in a dusty sandy country ?
So apparently they could load this system onto a predator drone and fly it over a battle zone and pick out the bullets from the air that are headed towards us? Awesome, would put enemy snipers out of business. It would be interesting to see them develop a system with that kind of resolution.
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