Comments on: Laser weapon design hits 100-kilowatt target

Northrop Grumman strings together seven laser systems to get a single beam at 105.5 kilowatts, and thus enters into weapons-grade territory.

[tadbittipsy]

PEW PEW!!!

[2opinionated]

Terminator anyone?

[expatincebu]

More taxpayer money thrown at welfare ho companies. America simply cannot afford this crap. When will people wake up and realize the reason their country and its economy are circling the bowl are the Federal Reserve and the military? I have one suggestion, take that big laser and use it to fry everyone and teh Pentagon and the Fed. Then it qualify as money well spent.

[t8]

Says you sitting in relative comfort and safety due to the military and technological superiority in the USA.

[ckurowic]

Exactly, T8. Expatincebu, you have NO idea do you? The reason you can spew your crap is because of our military. ******.

[fubar22]

A fine example of some average jo who thinks they are voicing a reasonable opinion....Except that it would seem said person never passed grammer school, as this makes zero sense. Your an idiot. You want to help the world out?....Please do it by passing high school. And the military is not the reason for our current debt. (See companies like AIG)

[fubar22]

And in case it crossed your mind...which from what I have seen out of you...it hasn't.....I joined up specifically to make fun of you....Doesn't that make you feel special?

[Endbringer]

Defense is Constitutionally mandated. Our military invents things all the time that end up being used for civilian use. Hell, look at the Internet. Look at NASA. These "welfare ho companies", as you succinctly put it, protect us and provide new innovations for us.

I agree with you about the FED, but I have a feeling you just don't understand why you shouldn't like the FED.

[biffhenerson]

Defense is the ONE thing the Federal government is supposed to do for us. Its all the other stuff that should be cut out.

[Art Dir]

I think OP's argument was somewhat overstated. I also think all you folks praising all military spending as laudable are just as simplistic. Of course we need the military but not all money spent is money spent wisely. Companies that make weapons practically get blank checks to develop all sorts of things and the American tax payer foots the bill for all of it, the ingenious and worthy, and the ludicrous and wasteful alike. If you think every wild idea we've funded was worth the money or yielded useable results you are a rube. Super complicated technology built into a weapons system for the sake of utilizing the most advanced technology is not a justification for virtually unlimited spending or an end unto itself.

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.

[fubar22]

To Art Dir.....
Bravo.

[boogedy1]

When they test this thing from an aircraft, someone should change the coordinates to the huge jiffy pop inside the designer's house. Then kids from around the neighborhood will gather and eat the popcorn.

[fubar22]

Jiffy pop....A blast from the past....nicely played good sir...(or madam).

[mrcockrell]

yeah i saw the movie real genius too

[thelemurking]

Only if we get to hear Tears For Fears - Everyone Wants To Rule The World

[Draq Wraith]

This still sounds like a line of sight assassin tool. I think the song 'Mad world' would be a better one to play for this.

D~W

[twburger]

I was in the army. We needed better communications, better body armor, better rifles, better trucks and APCs, and more helicopters - not a fancy laser that only can be used in line of sight and is defended against with a pile of dirt.

Frikkin' mutant sharks would be more useful. Yeah Baby!

[mrbroncosfan]

If they can make this platform airborne, similar to the weapon systems already onboard an Gunship, you won't need the better body armor because we'll be able to hit targets from the air nearly instantly. And, from reports recently from military commanders, it seems that some of the guys on the ground are wearing too much body armor, not too little, which is making them less mobile and more vulnerable from more agile targets. As far as Trucks and Helicopters, you are half right. If we're focusing on Afghanistan now, they will need tons more helicopters than what has been used thus far, but most of the terrain makes trucks nearly useless for anything but close support missions.

[Endbringer]

Wouldn't lasers bascially be an ammo-less weapon that could be used however often and whenever you want? Perhaps I'm wrong, but I would think that would be a great boon to our military.

[biffhenerson]

How about working towards eliminating the need for soldiers to be in harms way. Automation.

[admiral100]

Bwa ha ha, boogety has seen Real Genius.

[7David712]

Yah, that sounds about right.
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!

[missingxtension2]

its for mutant sharks with lasers, don't you know where technology is going?

[Maarek Stele]

REAL GENISUS! Funny movie.

Solid state argon laser running at 5 megawatts.

[xcal78]

This is a great way to save the planet. No need for brass, lead, and gun powder anymore yay! After lasers maybe they'll move onto lightsabre's so we can get back to some old fashion close quarters combat!

[k9jdk]

It is amazing how much we, and others, invest in getting rid of each other. I think this all started with Cain and Abel and has not slowed down since.

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.

[Art Dir]

Technically, that would be a horse of no color at all (at least when cloaked).

[scottdysart]

Is it just me or does the scientist look a little bit like a storm trooper.

[Art Dir]

No, that's just a fake surgical mask he's waring to conceal his ant-like mandibles. That is so we won't know he's an alien our government is getting to feed us technology and paying them off by allowing them to core out the bungholes of midwestern cattle (aliens eat it like we do calamari) and to let them occasionally insert alien "toys" into the rectums of abducted Larry the Cable Guy's core fan base.

[Dr_Zinj]

Advantages of a hand-carried, solid-state laser weapon over a rifle:

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.

[Art Dir]

The main disadvantage of a hand-carried solid-state laser is they currently don't exist for all intents and purposes. The one in the article is probably intended for mount in an air vehicle. Even with the improvement in efficiency, it is still some time off before a laser and/or it's coupled power source is small enough, powerful enough, and long-lasting enough to be the military's holy-grail equivalent of an individually carried, laser based Start Trek phaser-ish weapon as you're describing.

[Jack Gratteau]

Chemical lasers have had this capability for some time. Pratt & Whitney very famously set fire to the Corbett Wildlife Area next door back in the '70s when test firing a unit on a flatbed rail car. Laser weapons are already deployed to blind pilots and snipers. The mega power is to shoot down aircraft and missiles. Putting that in an AWACS type platform is too easily defended against. Ground based like Patriot batteries can be inoperative by weather, dust, rain, etc. That leaves SDI. Edward Teller's grand idea to put nuclear weapons in orbit to power x-ray lasers. Here you would put a solid state laser in the satellite, but that still leaves the problem of how to power the bugger.

[NoVista]

@ fubar22

"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'.

[techno777]

If the beam can destroy a missile, that would be a huge advance in missile defense.

[802dave]

"Companies that make weapons practically get blank checks to develop"

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.