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Now, this thing is also going to take a lot of juice, right? Everything you need to power the lasers is going to be able to fit in the 747?
Beason: Absolutely, and that's why you need a 747 to carry all the chemicals necessary to generate the laser light. Basically, the laser is generated by the transition of an excited iodine atom going from its excited state to a nonexcited state, but in order to get that iodine to the excited state, there is a chemical reaction that has to occur that transfers energy from oxygen to the iodine.
With the ABL, will that be a single-shot weapon, or would you be able to fire it multiple times--or is it too early to tell?
Beason: You'll be able to fire multiple times, and basically when you lase a target, you have to lase it for some certain amount of time in order to get the weapon effect. The effect that it wants to gain on these tactical ballistic missiles is that it heats up the skin of the missile and then the internal pressure of the fuel tank actually causes the missile to explode. Also what you want is to be able to go from one target to the next in a very quick amount of time, because you don't want to give the enemy the ability to fire off three or four missiles and to overwhelm your system, so it has to have the ability not only to lase for a long time but also to jump from target to target.
And there are other laser weapons that are being studied, smaller-scale ones--there's the tactical laser, and then there's Zeus, which is not a weapon per se.
Beason: Right, the Advanced Tactical Laser is actually a smaller laser than the ABL that is being put on a smaller tactical platform. Right now, they're looking at a C-130, but it could possibly be put on a helicopter. That's a laser that is in a class that is greater than 50 kilowatts, so it's a few orders of magnitude less powerful than the Airborne Laser. Its missions are designed to supplement what the Airborne Laser is doing, that is, to help with special operations and antiterrorism and that, but at very close distances, that is, kilometer range versus the many hundreds of kilometers range that the Airborne Laser is working on.
The Zeus is actually a solid-state laser developed by the Army to heat up mines, to be able to clear minefields at a distance. In fact, the Zeus was deployed to Afghanistan, and several hundred mines were cleared by the use of this tactical weapon. There is another one called the THEL, or the Tactical High Energy Laser, that was developed for the Army, and this laser had actually shot down Katyusha rockets in White Sands Missile Range, and after over 30 Katyusha rockets were shot down, they decided to see if they could also shoot down mortars and artillery shells, and they were successful on that.
Even though all these systems have different energies and different power levels--and some are strategic, some are tactical--some of the attributes that they all have in common, and we're going to see this with high-power microwaves, is that they all travel at the speed of light and so they can deposit their energy instantaneously. Light travels 186,000 miles a second and so that means it can go around the Earth more than seven times in less than a second, and it's extremely accurate--and so therefore it's an inherently defensive weapon and not an offensive weapon, because you can't attack large amounts of areas.
The other system I want to talk about is Active Denial, the microwave weapon--this is a very different kind of system, obviously, than the laser?
Beason: The Active Denial is actually not a microwave, but what they call a millimeter wave. Microwaves are 70 times larger than millimeter waves. The Active Denial system operates at about 100GHz, and what scientists discovered a few decades ago was that millimeter wave energy at about 100GHz is absorbed about a third of a millimeter into the human skin, and so it doesn't penetrate the body, but what happens is that this energy is perceived by the body as heat. The nerve endings perceive a near instantaneous increase in heat and in fact the effect is kind of like opening up a supercharged oven and feeling this heat all over your body.
Now what the body does when it experiences this is undergo something called the "flee effect"--the body just wants to get away from it; it wants to flee. When the person moves away from the millimeter waves that are causing this effect, the effect goes away, so what the military is doing now, it is investigating using this Active Denial effect as a way to what they call "assess intent."
The idea is that, as a crowd starts to descend upon an embassy, let's say, that at first you have loudspeakers broadcasting "stay away," and then when the crowd gets closer and closer, that you can expose the crowd very selectively to this Active Denial effect. If the people turn and run away, then you know that they perhaps didn't have the intent to storm the embassy, but if they turn around and start to come back again and then you again expose them to millimeter waves, then the intent is surely one that they want to take over the embassy. And so at that time, as they get closer and closer, you can use lethal force to stop it.
See more CNET content tagged:
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A fascinating set of systems -- The evolution of Science, Science
Fiction and Imagination now coming to fruition.
DJO
Beam weapons are not your choice as the victim, they are the choice of the attacker. And they are a good choice for a number of reasons. You won't ever have a world without weapons... and when you need one, you want to have the best.
It is not the job of a microwave to subdue or eliminate threats. Thus, the microwave is designed to be safe.
Also - this is not just a tool they're going to turn loose on crowds of people. This would be something you turn loose when you're sitting in a humvee or tank somewhere with people chanting death threats and throwing rocks at you.
"Beam" type energy weapons have been on the radar for a long time. There are various reasons why they aren't being used to the same extent as traditional firearms, but once their capabilities can honestly exceed those of traditional means, then the change will only take a matter of time.
I wrote about beam weapons last year:
http://www.inaniloquent.com/PermaLink.aspx?guid=8b31029f-76d0-4b26-b276-945efb836da8
If they don't have it already ;)
If they don't have it already ;)
Further, all the laws of physics, energy, thermal dynamics and inverse projection laws are fixed in this man's universe.
Interesting read, but still in the realms if science fiction!, such is life!
Further, all the laws of physics, energy, thermal dynamics and inverse projection laws are fixed in this man's universe.
Interesting read, but still in the realms if science fiction!, such is life!
The real test....can it pop a house's worth of popcorn?
The line about "Airborne Laser" already having flown without the actual laser is a crock, Why even mention that? No one cares that a 747 was capable of flight. That's like decades ago when there was supposed to be an experiment to test the feasibility of a nuclear powered aircraft. All they ended up doing was loading a small reactor (not hooked up to anything or providing any power) into a plane and flying around. Whoopee.
We found back in the 60's that transmitting high powered laser pulses over 100 megawatts in peak power and in excess of 50 joules would result in breaking down the air. The leading edge would heat the air changing the index of refraction for the following energy and the pulse would actually shorten in length with the tail trying to catch up with the leading edge.
The energy density would get so high that the air would break down and absorb the rest of the pulse.
The answer of course was to increase the beam diameter but I still wonder what effect this laser will experience in the atmosphere.
I realize that there are atmospheric windows in the IR and that the density is much lower at high altitude but it still sounds like a challenge.
Larry Eccleston
- by RobX1 September 27, 2009 10:05 PM PDT
- They used to test microwaves on dogs in Russia in the early 60's.
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(22 Comments)I suppose now testing on humans is assumed to be safe because its a safer means of crowd control
The amount of pain they can inflict by burning the upper part through microwave or heat energy of the skin they produced these vehicles over seas on our enemies for control now they are safe enough to be used on everyone. Safe depends I guess on whether one is victim or the person using the microwave on the crowd
So lets say some portions of the bodies like intestine and interior brain regions just spat out when the military used it on who ever considered was hostile.It cannot be a mass weapon of destruction because only our enemies possess those.
Besides whats a little free tan for crowd control now a days. Off course one could argue not everyone has the same level of resistance like a child versus teenager compared to an adult or elder since not everyone has a different level of sensitivity so what could be considered lethal for one person may not be for another. Crowd control or testing Guinea pigs is my question under the security banner.