Incoming stuff, N Korean rockets VS U.S 747 lasers..

[ErikTheNorwegian]

Was

[sacherjj]

The North Koreans released a video of the attempted rocket launch.

[SeanB]

The US is using lasers? Where are the sharks?

[Wartex]

This is all nice and dandy until this thing faces Russian rocket complex SS-320 "black devil" with 17 nuclear warheads and 200+ fake moving (and IR-visible) targets on board. By the time they figure out, optically and radiometrically which ones are which, half the US would be molten glass.

It takes 2 freaking minutes for this thing to heat up the missile enough to disable it, it's useless in modern warfare.

[SeanB]

It is a pork barrel project....... A railgun would be both cheaper to run and faster, and you can just about fit one in a 747 now, using ultracapacitors. You will need multiple launch rails, as they do wear, but it is capable of tossing a small projectile at Mach 20 plus, and if it hits anything it will break it. Of course you will need a good target designator, and a really fast computer to fire it in the small window of opportunity because you use the whole plane as a pointer. CCIP with laser designator for ranging and a HUD with some basic sights are all you need. Basically a really big gun with impressive range, the US Navy is looking at this to replace the aging battleship guns they have, and a small version has got to be better than a Phalanx, at least it will not spray brass all over before failing.

[G7PSK]

First there was communicators then came the clam shell mobile phone then there was the phasers and now there is airborne weapon lasers, next it will be transporter beams. Star trek has a lot to answer for.

[alm]

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

[G7PSK]

Yes you would not want to fly into a plasma field. I have cut through 25 mm of steel with a 50 amp plasma ans the same plasma would punch through 12mm of stainless steel faster than you could blink, Plasma is used a lot to cut metal in industry not as clean as a laser but a lot lot cheaper.

[Kremmen]

I'm sure the N. Koreans botched the job quite without any foreign aid. Or who knows maybe they received covert "help" from this or that bunch of J. Bond wannabes but one can be reasonably sure that no laser gun equipped 747's were involved. The US military must be one of the only ones who don't find that concept ludicrous. But then i guess it doesn't need to make sense, it only needs to keep the gravy train going. Anything else just doesn't compute. A pity considering where else those bucks could go. But that of course is not my problem and neither should i give advise where it isn't needed.
Otherwise i think there would be more work to do for SEAL team #6 in N. Korea...

[Simon]

err so why tell the world. isn't this like the allies telling the germans that enigma had been cracked practically as it went into use ?

I don't know a lot about lasers but what if the missile is reflective, won't the beam just bounce off ? I would have thought a faster destroyer missile would have made a better job of it

[jerry507]

err so why tell the world. isn't this like the allies telling the germans that enigma had been cracked practically as it went into use ?

I don't know a lot about lasers but what if the missile is reflective, won't the beam just bounce off ? I would have thought a faster destroyer missile would have made a better job of it

No material is 100% reflective, though it has long been known that such coatings would increase the time to kill by an order of magnitude.

The problem with shooting a missile with another missile is delivery. Any smallish missile easily deployable from existing ship and air systems doesn't have the range to hit a ballistic missile beyond either the initial launch phase or the terminal reentry phase. This system does already exist and IIRC is currently fielded, but it's really not much more than a modified Standard Missile coupled with an Aegis radar system. Of course it really ends up just being a terminal phase defense unless you somehow manage to get close to the launch site. This would probably work for North Korea and there is absolutely no doubt that it's solution they are using. But it won't work for Iran or (most of) China, or Russia. Supposedly we're not building it to defend against them, and that basically seems true.

Wartex mentioned decoys and that is exactly what the ABL is designed to counter. The idea is that you can fly this airplane higher, and closer to the missile during the initial launch phase. At this time, the common decoys aren't really effective, especially since the target is visually tracked (and it by definition must always be since you're shooting light at the target .

The other option is the midcourse interception, but the technical problems are huge. You fight a ballistic missile at another ballistic missile, but now you have to track the target accurately at huge ranges. The radar becomes a large limiting factor and makes it really (really) expensive.

Ballistic missile defense is far from a solved problem and if it isn't technical problems it's practical problems. Luckily the North Koreans are a bunch of idiots (go figure) and they're the only belligerent ones at the moment. Other near term problem children like Iran only have simple launch systems so even simple terminal phase defense systems can easily defeat them. Hopefully long term problem children like Russia and China are growing up too fast to consider the use of ballistic missiles to be serious bargaining chips.

[G7PSK]

During WW2 the British conned the Germans that they had developed an infra red device for tracking ships in order to try and lure them away from radar, The Germans spent a fortune on developing a paint containing glass beads to absorb and refract the infra red beam, a version is still used today. It could be similar with the lasers.

[G7PSK]

That was not what I was suggesting. The point was the US defense department may wanting to trick the Russians and Chinese into wasting money and effort in counter measures and developing their own laser weapons.

[Simon]

that is possible, double crossing is as old as time.

[jerry507]

As far as I know, it's not "easy" to change the frequency of these lasers. They are after all resonant systems. At the very high power levels needed to destroy a missile in a reasonable amount of time, even small drops in power from going off resonance make that harder.

[wtkevin]

As if the Koreans are a threat with their rockets, those folks don't even have electricity for some parts of the day :/  As seen on the VICE documentary

[G7PSK]

Some years ago I read a proposal for a space based laser that would use a nuclear explosion to pump the laser, the idea being that such a system would enable ground based missile sites to be zapped as soon as a launch was detected. Whatever happened to the idea or was it just pie in the sky.

[SeanB]

That was an Xray laser, using a small ( 5kton ) nuke to provide the ionised plasma by blowing up a big vacuum capacitor charged to many kV. Kind of a use once item , with power output in the MJ range, but with a big problem of poor beam control, and a laser beam from each end when fired.

[G7PSK]

So you don't want iron sights on it then.

[SeanB]

Iron sights would be fine, i just don't want to be within 20 000 km of it when you fire it. 100 000 km if you are behind or in front in the beam path.

[Time]

iron sights, lawlz

[Rerouter]

hmm, 2 minutes is very far from ideal, considering you need the plane to be in range to fire upon it, and being nose mounted well that assumes the plane is tailing it not the other way around, one would think micomissiles filled with thermite would do a better job :/ and have the plane just paint the target for them