Yahoo Autos How the Military Will Be Revolutionized By Laser Weaponry
There's a technological revolution brewing in warfare. Silent and invisible, it relies on high intensity pulses of light to kill or incapacitate, all at the speed of light. After decades of promises and false starts, lasers are at last finally entering military service. And warfare will never be the same.
The first laser was demonstrated by Theodore Maiman in California's Hughes Research Laboratory in 1960. But it's taken over 50 years to make them practical battlefield weapons, overcoming numerous technological hurdles along the way.
It was only late last year Lockheed Martin announced it was exploring ways to put a laser on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. There is also consideration towards putting them in the AC-130 gunship and B-1 and B-2 bombers. The U.S. Navy has already fielded a laser weapon on the Austin-classUSS Ponce, and anticipates arming the rest of the fleet in the 2020 to 2021 timeframe. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is looking for ways to use lasers to protect troops in the field from artillery shells, missiles, and drones.
It's relatively easy to gauge how of how much damage a 155-millimeter artillery shell or 500 pound bomb will do. Both are munitions that release tremendous amount of energy when the chemicals inside of them explode. But even now as weaponized lasers become a reality, hardly anyone knows how they really work and what kind of damage they can do.
Thanks to science fiction, laser weapons have been in the public consciousness for nearly a hundred years. In the 1930s, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comics and movie theater serials portrayed lasers as weapons decades before a working laser had even been invented.
Unfortunately, fictional lasers such as the Star Wars laser blaster are totally wrong. Star Wars lasers fly through the air in bright colors and make a sizzling noise as they pass nearby. Their bolts of energy move so slow you can see them move. Finally, they actually make explosions on the surface of their target-like Greedo's chest for example. Lasers in the Star Wars universe essentially function like regular gun shells. The reality is about as different as one can imagine.
LASER is an acronym that stands for "light amplification through the stimulated emission of radiation." Lasers work by exciting the atoms, molecules, or ions in a medium-think gases, chemicals, fibers, or diodes-until they emit light at exactly the same wavelength. That light is then channeled into a narrow beam by a resonator, and then directed at a target.
In other words, lasers are essentially narrow beams of focused light that do damage by heating the target. They can burn holes in aircraft skins, the hulls of small boats, or the human body. They can heat artillery shells in midair, causing them to explode, or the storage containers at a fuel dump until the fuel ignites.
The strength of a laser isn't expressed in pounds like an aircraft bomb, or the diameter of a howitzer barrel. Military lasers are rated by the electrical power they consume, in kilowatt-and eventually megawatt-range.
Dr. Kelly Hammett, Chief Engineer for Directed Energy at the Air Force Research Lab, told Popular Mechanics: "Lasers can deliver precise and tailorable effects against a wide class of targets near-instantaneously and at a very low cost per shot. The type of gradual effects a 30 kW laser can deliver includes: deny, degrade, disrupt, and destroy of targets such as UAV's or small boats at a few kilometers range."
There are dozens of types of lasers, used in everything from your Blu-Ray DVD player to nuclear weapons. The AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System the U.S. Navy deployed on the USS Ponce in 2014 is a solid state laser operating at 30 kilowatts. The Air Force wants to put a 150 kilowatt rare earth laser on an AC-130 flying gunship capable of burning a "beer-can sized hole" in a target.
