Laser weapon design hits 100-kilowatt target
A Northrop Grumman Space Technology engineer in Redondo Beach, Calif., monitors a solid-state laser, in a photo from January 2007.
(Credit: Northrop Grumman)From the week gone by on the directed-energy weapons front: defense contractor Northrop Grumman reported that it got a solid-state laser to fire a beam with a potency of 105.5 kilowatts.
For the ray-gun wing of the military-industrial complex, the 100-kilowatt threshold is a major milestone, marking the entry point to weapons-grade laser weapons. Adding to the appeal is that solid-state lasers are much more compact, and less noxious, than chemical laser systems such as the one in the works for the 747-centric Airborne Laser.
The technical details of Northrop's achievement break down this way, starting with a modular, "building block" approach that bodes well for scalable systems, the company said:
For building blocks, the company utilizes "laser amplifier chains," each producing approximately 15kW of power in a high-quality beam. Seven laser chains were combined to produce a single beam of 105.5 kW. The seven-chain JHPSSL laser demonstrator ran for more than five minutes, achieved electro-optical efficiency of 19.3 percent, reaching full power in less than 0.6 seconds, all with beam quality of better than 3.0.
Adding an eighth chain that the system was designed for would increase laser power to 120 kilowatts, Northrop says.
Where this test saw five minutes of continuous operation for the laser, altogether the system has been operated at above 100 kilowatts for a total duration of more than 85 minutes.
The efforts are part of the Pentagon's Joint High Power Solid State Laser (JHPSSL) program.
Even though 100 kilowatts has long been the "proof of principle" sought for weapons systems, Northrop says that "in fact, many militarily useful effects can be achieved by laser weapons of 25 kW or 50 kW, provided this energy is transmitted with good beam quality, as our system does."
Of course, this is still a laboratory laser system and not a field-tested, ruggedized product. "It is still a little heavy and a little big," Dan Wildt, vice president of Northrop's directed energy systems program, told the LA Times.
Shiny on the outside, sparkly on the inside? This is Northrop's laser weapon system demonstrator.
(Credit: Northrop Grumman)That's probably a significant understatement. Says Noah Shachtman at Wired's Danger Room blog of the news from Northrop:
Does that mean energy weapons are a done deal? Hardly. There are still all sorts of technical issues--thermal management and miniaturization, to name two--that have to be handled first. Then, the ray gunners have to find the money. The National Academies figure it'll take another $100 million to get battlefield lasers right.
In a separate post, Shachtman reports on what's involved in getting specific laser systems ready to go over the next several years.
Earlier this year, Boeing said that it had used a "kilowatt-class" solid-state laser to shoot down a UAV from a ground-based system. The company hopes that the Airborne Laser, meanwhile, will do its first-ever aerial target shoot sometime in 2009.
Jonathan Skillings is managing editor of CNET News, based in the Boston bureau. He's been with CNET since 2000, after a decade in tech journalism at the IDG News Service, PC Week, and an AS/400 magazine. He's also been a soldier and a schoolteacher. E-mail Jon. 
I agree with you about the FED, but I have a feeling you just don't understand why you shouldn't like the FED.
For all the billions we've spent on exotic weaponry, we were attacked very successfully by dudes with gasoline filled cans set off by cheap cell phones in Iraq. Conversely, US soldiers' family members were actually pooling their own personal money to provide something as basic as flack jackets to their sons and daughters who weren't getting these things supplied to them in enough numbers by the military. For a while they were doing the same thing to modify troop carriers with something as simply as a v-shaped hull that made all the world of difference to their survival.
What is money well spent? A fleet of futuristic bombers that is so expensive that it takes billions to build each one so we can only afford to have 11 of them, or direct some of the exotic space age Star Trek money towards adequate body armor and a $1,500 instant modification to vehicles already in use. Why do we need space age tanks and helicopters that are so complicated to operate that you have maintenance hours in multiples of 10, sometimes to a hundred or more per every hour in use because sand poses a major threat to their functionality. Sand. You know, the stuff deserts are made out of. You know, deserts. The places where most of our major military operations are.
Ironically, it turns out that often the most effective weapon has been cash itself. A good part if not the majority of "insurgence" fighting us were actually jobless poor people fighting for a few bucks from anyone who will pay them. Paying them just a little bit more (which wasn't much to begin with) to not shoot us turned out to save a lot of dough on bullets. It also turns out that sometimes when you blow up a country, spending money to get their infrastructure back in place and building schools for their children is a lot more effective at getting them to not blow you up than shooting high-tech laser guided missiles at them occasionally resulting in "civilian casualties" (or as they call it, their dead children).
If you're talking about spending a reasonable amount of money to develop reliable weapons that function in a wide range of conditions and keep our service men and women as safe and as far away from harms way, while doing as little damage as possible to innocent civilians, then I say your are talking about money well spent. If you are talking about throwing money at Ospreys, $300 hammers, and Haliburton built housing with such shoddy workmanship that our soldiers have as much risk of being electrocuted just walking through their own camps as they do getting shot in the field, than I say you might want to reconsider whether or not you want to offer a patriotic solute to each and every wild idea or military funding our government sends up the flagpole.
Bravo.
D~W
Frikkin' mutant sharks would be more useful. Yeah Baby!
Lets just go back to chucking stones to defend ourselves and others
lets not advance too much we should just give up all the things that science has
given us. That makes sense!
Solid state argon laser running at 5 megawatts.
To lighten this up a little.....
Now if there were truely a Romulan threat, that's a horse of another color. They have cloaking technology and thus a huge advantage. So do the Klingons. We are still a pre-warp civilization, living on a tiny M class planet.
1. No recoil.
2. No noise?
3. Fewer moving parts.
4. No toxic lead.
5. No explosive ordanance.
6. Greater range?
7. No muzzle flash?
8. Cauterizes wounds?
9. Totally smokeless.
10. Don't have to worry about windage or drop.
Advantages of a rifle over a hand-carried, solid-state laser weapon:
1. Loud and intimidating.
2. Cheaper.
3. Easier to ricochet around corners.
4. More ammunition options (standard, rubber, gel, incendiary, hollow-point, armor-piercing rounds).
5. Hydrostatic shock from a peripheral hit can also incapacitate.
6. Can't be reflected or blocked by mirrored or optical surfaces.
7. Easy to disassemble and clean in the field.
8. Ammunition (projectiles and propellant) can be forensically tracked to specific weapons and manufacturers.
9. You can test people for whether they have fired a specific weapon or not by powder residue.
10. You can use ballistics and windage to curve the shot around objects.
11. You can knock down the target even if it doesn't take much damage.
12. Never heard of a case of a wild fire being started by a hunter who missed a shot.
"never passed grammer school, as this makes zero sense. Your an idiot. "
Ah, you're (contraction of you are) one of the NCLB brigade, aren't you. Better desist from criticizing another's writing until you can spell basic words like 'grammar'.
- by 802dave March 24, 2009 8:14 AM PDT
- "Companies that make weapons practically get blank checks to develop"
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(35 Comments)That is the way it used to be years ago; more recently, the DOD holds contractors to fixed price contracts which do occasionally get modified. This fact is the reason why several projects have been cancelled over the past few years - for poorly managed projects that end up costly vastly more than contracted and missing contracted schedule requirements.