In New Attempt to Build a Practical Military Laser Weapon, Lockheed Inverts a Prism

"according to Lockheed. It uses fiber optics to produce near-perfect beams. The method also confines the laser light to the fiber’s glass structure without using mirrors or other optics"

To use the different frequency of light to combine them into a laser is a big achievement because most laser are monochromic, one light wave. The more we learn to combine light waves from different spectrums into a coherent beam of light the less energy needed resulting in a huge increase in efficiency.

This also has commercial applications in Earth Based Beam Energy where instead of the huge uncontrolled solar arrays in space that will cost trillions of dollars just to launch, we simply beam the energy from anywhere in the world off a reflector in space to the customer. Any energy, renewable or nonrenewable, can be transmitted this way making the huge cost of transmission lines and pipelines a non-issue.

See "Proposal to Beam Untapped and Hard to Transport Energy to Any Location on Earth" here:

www.shineinnovations.com/6112.html

Ron Bennett

Army rolls a $14 million dollar laser weapon only to be thwarted by an enemy holding $10 mirror. LOL. When will these millitary apes ever learn. Use brains over brawn.

@boka

Just like holding up a ballistics plate will stop you from getting shot.

"@boka
Just like holding up a ballistics plate will stop you from getting shot"

was just about to say that, and besides no mirror is perfect, it will heat up, lose its reflectivity, and the laser will break through. likely all within a fraction of a second

I concur. No mirror has 100% reflectivity.

it looks like something out of Half Life.

SOME BODY GRAB MY DAMN PHASER ALREADY please!

damn military always has the best toys.

well, the 10 dollar mirror would probably vaporize in a matter or seconds with a high powered laser, due to the plasma generated around the laser beam

I wonder if they are using an array of nichia 445nm diodes?

@SJak

I corrected your statement.

"@boka
Just like holding up a ballistics plate will stop you from getting shot by a tank"

This laser-if it is as good as they say it is- would make modern warfare even more difficult. Imagine half a dozen aircrafts equiped with these lasers in a dogfight. I wonder how it would end.

Next in the news: Scientists discover 16 new ways to kill someone – all created in the name of “peace” for “enlightenment” and the “advancement of man-kind.”

Until all of man-kind is united with a common enemy, we will continue to simply point these weapons at ourselves.

Where are the alien invaders already?! We need an intergalactic war so that we as a species can put away our petty differences and can finally be united in peace. Oh the irony.

I think the prerequisite for every scientific discovery is that is has military application.

@Silent Knight

modern warfare is already difficult thats why i play halo

Hummmm. Inverse combiner prism thingy? Dilithium crystal anyone?

It's a chemical laser but in solid, not gaseous, form. Put simply, in deference to you, Kent, it's like lasing a stick of dynamite. As soon as we apply a field, we couple to a state, it is radiatively coupled to the ground state. I figure we can extract at least ten to the twenty-first photons per cubic centimeter which will give one kilojoule per cubic centimeter at 600 nanometers, or, one megajoule per liter.

@boka

How will an enemy jet fighter know exactly when and from which direction the beam will come?

What does the enemy pilot do? Pop the canopy and hold out a handmirror? But covering which part of the aircraft? Shall he run around the exterior of the vehicle for the duration of the flight, never knowing when that 3 second burst will arrive and which part of the craft it will impact?

Please.

Questions for those with knowledge on lasers.

Assuming a 100kW laser of this type, what are you looking at as far as beam duration? And how quickly would you estimate that kind of beam could destroy, say, a B-52, assuming you could lock it on to the cockpit or fuel tank?

@ThisNameTaken

not even a intergalactic war would bring peace, all sides would still be fighting for power. the only way to find peace is for the human race to give up its need for power and control.

the problem is peace means everyone is equal and that's something alot of people don't like at all and as long as there are people who want to be better then others you'll never have peace.

@Silent Knight

I believe that extensive military simulations have already answered this question. Eventually, the dogfight would boil down to a single, plucky pilot being chased down a narrow trench by a powerful military leader and his two wingmen.

At the last possible second, a surprisingly fast cargo freighter would swoop in from behind to provide cover fire, allowing the plucky pilot to complete his mission.

Waitasec... that would make a GREAT movie!

So you spend a hundered bucks, and have 10 layers of mirrors at different angles. The laser is bound to lose some hitting power. But I guess the suprise is what gives it the advantage.

Hay!
They stole my idea!

I hope I can watch the YouTube video of some kook standing there holding a $10 mirror when this ray hits it. Actually, I'd pay "tree fiddy" to see it.

If in space, the mirrors can be made of a superconductive material that can be connected via superconductive cable to a large heat sink. This will help dissipate the heat. BTW... this was loosely taken from the third book in the Ringworld series.

Pew Pew!

Also, covering something in highly reflective surfaces makes it A GIANT SHINEY TARGET for conventional weapons.

buckrodgers
For every measure a counter measure will be developed. I predict this will come in the area of electromagnetic fields to deflect the incoming energy beam insted of trying to absorb it. In space a dampening field may work to absorb the energy but in our atmosphere it will need to be redirected away from its intended target. Maybe even back to the original source.

Ideally, the aircraft-that-may-be-a-target should be covered in a retro-reflective skin overlayed by radar-absorbing material.

When struck by a damaging laser, the radar-absorbing material will burn off nearly immediately, exposing the retroreflector second-layer immediately underneath which will send enough of the laser energy back to the originating aircraft or facility to probably damage the emitter's focusing optics, aiming or atmospheric-distortion-compensators.

The retroreflector-skin won't last long, but long enough to send most of the energy it receives exactly back to the origin, which is extremely unlikely to be armored to withstand a hit from some significant fraction of its own energy level.

The net result is that the aircraft will have lost a few cm2 of radar-absorbing material, exposing a now-damaged retroreflector underneath, which hopefully is built to be transparent to radar or your slightly-scratched aircraft will show up like a harbor radar beacon to any radar system that is looking at the side of the aircraft with the scratch.

See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector

At these beam energies, any small fraction reflected back can blind friend and foe alike. This is the primary reason high energy laser weapons have limited battlefield applications. Synchronized switch-off googles might protect the operating crew but other friendlies would be exposed. Even if the laser operates outside the visible wavelengths, eye damage, as well as damage to instrumentation, would be widespread.

reminds me of a james bond movie with a giant ABL clearing a minefield.

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@Otto Maddox
Why did you Quote Val Kilmer from Real Genius? Is it because you heard the word Laser and wanted to add something completely bogus and lame to the subject. Please, plagiarizing a movie is no way to be perceived as intelligent or gain respect.

Retroreflective skin wouldn't hold up any better than the mirror. Even if it held up to the 100mw laser for a nanosecond the skin would not be accurate enough to redirect it back to the source w sufficiant power to do any dammage to the optics. Unless you plan on covering every military airplane w Phase conjugate mirrors sending the beam back will b impossible. That may be an interesting way to waste money and add 5 tons to any plane making it worthless because it can now no longer fly due to over loading and aerodinamics.
Sarnac your idea is what is commonly known in the inventing world as a good idea born dead. But at least your thinking harder than most.

One excellent defense against laser weapons is a simple right angle mirror - two mirrors at right angles to each other. Any laser energy that hits the mirrors from any angle will automatically get directed back to the sender. So if the reflectivity (albedo) is 95% then 95% goes back to destroy the laser and 5% to the target. The laser would be destroyed first or at least would not get off more than one shot before destroying itself. Such mirrors are both a defense and a cheap counter attack requiring no aiming or knowledge of where the laser actually is. Nor is any pilot or vehicle operator input needed just two cheap mirrors.

In principle the skin of any vehicle could be covered with small right angle mirrors to armor against shots from any direction. But the laser does have one advantage in a combined arms scenario. If an enemy used them then it makes stealth impossible because the right angle mirrors would be like wearing a highly reflective night jacket and make them much more reflective on radar - unless, of course, the mirrors did not reflect microwave frequencies preferentially. Back to the lab.

i want friggin laser

I forsee a Death Star looming in the future. That or a death plane.

A "smoke" type screen emits from the nose and coats the missile with different size and particles... each frequency would be scattered and diffused in the particles to render the laser useless

mister green wins again...

so much for multi billion dollar "high tech" weapons research by us the USA...

why not solve the reason we need such weapons like the OIL problem we have... pickensplan... nuclear.. thorium breeders and nano battery technologies.. the money should be spent on solving problems and not a race to destroy

how bout instead of trying to blow eachother up with lasers, lets try pointing them at some tritium fuel cells and figuring out how to harvest energy off the resulting reaction? idk about you, but free energy for all sounds much more appealing then war. :) just saying.