Big Freakin' Lasers!

[Xavier Onassiss]

The Navy is working on a free electron laser, and it sounds like they're making some progress.

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/01/21/zap-i-sunk-your-battle-ship-with-a-laser/

[Escafarc]

Re: Big Freakin' Lasers!

 

I guest the next step is to make it small enough to fit on a shark.

[Pizza Man]

Re: Big Freakin' Lasers!

 

The Navy is working on a free electron laser' date=' [/quote']

That's a switch. Free? Normally they can only come up with expensive stuff.

 

 

Bad joke over. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Re: Big Freakin' Lasers!

 

And a giant middle-finger to all those naysayers who said lasers will never become practical weapons systems....

[Starcloud]

Re: Big Freakin' Lasers!

 

And a giant middle-finger to all those naysayers who said lasers will never become practical weapons systems....

 

Huh? Lasers have always been considered potential candidates for emplaced weapons. A large enough vehicle, a ship, a large enough plane, a fortification, those all can handle having a generator powerful enough to generate a laser that can do damage.

 

What is, so far, utterly IMpractical is the *man portable* laser. Rayguns the size of rifles or pistols that can do damage just aren't going to happen until we develop tiny capacitors that can store the equivalent of millions of volts of energy safely.

[austenandrews]

Re: Big Freakin' Lasers!

 

Many people have said that, engineering-wise, lasers will not be preferable to bullets and missiles in the foreseeable future.

[McCoy]

Re: Big Freakin' Lasers!

 

Many people have said that' date=' engineering-wise, lasers will not be preferable to bullets and missiles in the foreseeable future.[/quote']

Yep. Where I'd like to see them is an antimissile system. Seems more likely that you are going to be able to hit an incoming missile with a SOL beam rather than a missile of your own.

[Old Man]

Re: Big Freakin' Lasers!

 

Yep. Where I'd like to see them is an antimissile system. Seems more likely that you are going to be able to hit an incoming missile with a SOL beam rather than a missile of your own.

 

That is exactly what the first operational laser systems are being planned for. Even free electron lasers still have issues with atmospheric dispersal, so they are best employed against targets at short range or soft targets like aircraft. For the Navy specifically, lasers also have the drawback that they are unable to strike below the horizon. But they'll have their place.

[Markdoc]

Re: Big Freakin' Lasers!

 

Many people have said that' date=' engineering-wise, lasers will not be preferable to bullets and missiles in the foreseeable future.[/quote']

 

And that may be the case: this article describes the success in generating slightly over 1% of the power needed for a workable weaponised laser, from a warehouse sized set-up. As 40 years of laser development have taught us, generating weak lasers that are ineffective weapons isn't the hard part.

 

Here's what it looks like:

 

Now this is a relatively new technology, so it's entirely possible that it will be able to escape the giant pit of fail that has claimed all the chemical laser boondoggles .... but me, I'm waiting to see. After all, despite the hooha about "9 months ahead of schedule!" they fail to mention that this is the third iteration of the navy's FEL laser: the program actually started back in the early 80's. Bill Colson has been running the science program for nearly 25 years now, and routinely offers equally optimistic press releases about how prototype laser weapons will be deployed "real soon now".

 

[Edit: I was wrong - when I checked, the Navy' FEL project actually started in 1979. So after 30 years of optimistic press releases and nearly 200 million bucks, we have a gigantic laser that will scorch the paint on your car if you drive up and park real close to the business end ... and then wait around for a bit].

 

Buuuuut ... the last "breakthrough" was 7 years ago when the same team cracked the 10 kw barrier. Since then, they've been able to amp power up to 14 Kw and reduce the size of their laser from "gigantic" to "huge". Now that's not nothing, but it's not what I'd call a breakthrough, either.

 

Note that the 100 KW FEL was supposed to be ready back in 2008. Now they saying they can - for real this time - hit that milestone in 2018. Yeah, well, maybe. Their track record does not fill me with confidence.

 

cheers, Mark

 

Edit: I just got back from Washington, where I was doing technical project review for DoD. If I sound curmudgeonly, it's because my tolerance for companies helping themselves to the taxpayers' buck while promising things they know they can't deliver has been scraped dangerously thin.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Big Freakin' Lasers!

 

I've harped in various places around here about GE and Westinghouse successfully selling the United States Navy on high-pressure steam naval engines in the 1930s, but I'll just bring it up again for the sake of comparison.

 

The developers who first put chromium steel on power plant designer's radar in the 1920s pointed out that steel starts to show undesirable allotropic (I hope I'm using the technical lingo right) above 800 degrees Fahrenheit back in 1923. Through the 1930s, no-one used steam at that heat in naval plants. (Land-based, where weight isn't an issue, they came in during the rebuilding of Britain's electrical power generation infrastructure in the first half of the decade.) Then Admiral Bowen's Experimental Boiler Establishment at the Brooklyn Naval Yards announced that this was just the thing for the Navy.

 

So they started building warships with these plants, starting with (I think) the 1937 Mahan-class destroyers. Yet no-one stress-tested the pipes under the proposed 850 degee/600 lb/sq in steam conditions until a university lab set up an experimental run. The university lab experienced carburisation failure in the welded seams early in 1941, and it was promptly reported in the Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute.

 

The Navy did nothing, as contracts for Essex-class carriers, Iowa-class battleships, various destroyers and the new light cruiser contracts poured out of Congress and into the yards to meet their chromium steel powerplants. Finally, in December of 1943, the annual Christmas ASME conference on powerplants heard about the catastrophic carburisation-related "unzipping" of steam pipes in several of the new extreme condition land power plants put up in the last half-decade by GE and Westinghouse. Someone in the audience asked, "so, do we know why this is happening." And the investigators said, "'Cuz they're running too hot, duh."

 

At that point, the Navy ordered the derating of all the power plants in the new, building warships, and, because it had little other choice, wrote "replace all steam pipes" on its postwar to-do list. I have a suspicion that I admittedly can't confirm that this underlies much of the whole FRAM programme.

 

Now, it wasn't a big deal. Aside from losing most of the postwar export market for carriers and cruisers to British war surplus and maybe spending some money that would otherwise have been invested in other stuff that never got to shoot at Russians, it's not like it affected national security in any way.

 

What did happen, though, was that in 1954, Admiral Bowen published his memoirs, in which he claimed that the whole thing was, like, the greatest naval engineering triumph ever and won the war. And people are still quoting that book. It turns out that "superheated high pressure steam with double-reduction turbines" is an impressive phrase that short circuits all the complicated discussion of regeneration and reheat and turbine blade design and fuel atomisers that you'd actually have to have if you wanted to explore the causes and consequences of naval machinery fuel efficiency in World War II.

 

Look: the guys who run these labs understand that their livelihoods rest on delivering successes. They aren't just about salvaging their egos. They have entire workgroups of followers who have invested their lives, and the families and suburban homes with picket fences a half-hour drive away from the facility on whatever-it-is-that-you're-researching. You know that you'll succeed eventually, and on the long road from here to there, every budget where you're not zeroed out is a year closer to retirement for everybody. So as you move towards the budget debate, especially in years when the Secretary of Defence is putting the squeeze on, you ....hype.

 

The moral of the Bowen story is that there's no cosmic censor up there that'll throw a lightning bolt at you if your hype isn't true. You won't necessarily be exposed. On the contrary, people will leap to defend you if you find the right way to spin your project, or it just seems inherently cool. Those people are a powerful asset. You need to feed them with some good results and maybe some pie-in-the-sky projections, and they will keep you in the news. In fact, it's likely that they'll hitch their hobby-horses to yours and get their egos involved in protecting your research.

 

Another year closer to that golden watch, baby.