Defence Shield

[All Seeing Eye]

I was thinking about the US missile defence shield and wondered why it's so hard to just build a single Laser beam weapon facility to take down all incoming missiles?
Take the UK as an example, what's wrong with building a large Laser weapon on top of a mountain somewhere in the middle of the UK so it's got a clear 360 degree shot of the Horizon, the laser weapon could be one huge stationary facility hooked up to a nuclear reactor, the facility could spin around in order to get a clear 360 degree shot at any detected incoming missiles at any angle, it could maybe even be powerful enough to shoot down a sattelite or craft in orbit.
If they can build a laser weapon onboard a Boeing 747 to shoot down missiles i'm sure they could construct an even larger more powerful one on land that can take out an object at a distance. As for targetting it could work in conjunction with orbiting radar sattelites and radar sites running along the coastline.

So where's the difficulty?

 

[Garrovick]

Clouds, rain, snow, dirt in the air and just the atmosphere it's self.

Are just some of the sigtnifricant limiting factors.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Clouds, rain, snow, dirt in the air and just the atmosphere it's self.

Are just some of the sigtnifricant limiting factors.

factors that could effect small scale lasers such as the 747 variety but i'm talking large scale nuclear powered lasers here.

 

[FredH]

factors that could effect small scale lasers such as the 747 variety but i'm talking large scale nuclear powered lasers here.

Same physics, same problems.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

^ How so? the laser would have more 'punch' behind it allowing it to penetrate further through dirt, clouds, etc etc
we're not talking laser pens here.

 

[Garrovick]

^ How so? the laser would have more 'punch' behind it allowing it to penetrate further through dirt, clouds, etc etc
we're not talking laser pens here.

Scientists have been working the Laser area for decades. Current technology says, they don't work as well as a missile. It's not like Laser based defences have never been thought of before.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

^ How so? the laser would have more 'punch' behind it allowing it to penetrate further through dirt, clouds, etc etc
we're not talking laser pens here.

Scientists have been working the Laser area for decades. Current technology says, they don't work as well as a missile. It's not like Laser based defences have never been thought of before.

I'm not saying they've never been thought of before, what i'm saying is that there's not enough being done, lasers the size that fit on a 747 just isn't thinking big enough. Building a huge facility powered by a nuclear reactor capable of targetting missiles within 250 miles or more is what we should be aiming for. Why spend our time having a small laser mounted on a plane when we could have one a thousand times bigger and more powerful on land.
Problems they're facing with dust and clouds etc can be overcome if they simply pump more juice into them.

 

[Trekker4747]

Clouds, rain, snow, dirt in the air and just the atmosphere it's self.

Are just some of the sigtnifricant limiting factors.

factors that could effect small scale lasers such as the 747 variety but i'm talking large scale nuclear powered lasers here.

Seriously?

The fuck? Seriously?

Large-scale nuclear powered LASERs to blow missiles out of the sky? What year do you think this is?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Clouds, rain, snow, dirt in the air and just the atmosphere it's self.

Are just some of the sigtnifricant limiting factors.

factors that could effect small scale lasers such as the 747 variety but i'm talking large scale nuclear powered lasers here.

Seriously?

The fuck? Seriously?

Large-scale nuclear powered LASERs to blow missiles out of the sky? What year do you think this is?

pardon? the strength of a laser beam goes on two factors, the power put into the device and the gas used, the more power and gas the stronger the laser beam.
What's the problem?

 

[Trekker4747]

factors that could effect small scale lasers such as the 747 variety but i'm talking large scale nuclear powered lasers here.

Seriously?

The fuck? Seriously?

Large-scale nuclear powered LASERs to blow missiles out of the sky? What year do you think this is?

pardon? the strength of a laser beam goes on two factors, the power put into the device and the gas used, the more power and gas the stronger the laser beam.
What's the problem?

Building giant nuclear-powered LASERs is the problem.

Who are you? Dr. Evil?

 

[TheMasterOfOrion]

What's the problem?

Missile defense has been a colossal waste of money for many reasons but let's stick to the topic the futuristic laser gun. Lasers are not very good weapons to be used in a world with atmosphere, that's it plain and simple. They are best used up there in space where there is little or no atmosphere.The reason you see a laser in the first place is it's energy is being disrupted by the air, the person using the weapon in order to get the best from it constantly needs to compensate for atmospheric turbulence otherwise the air continues to diffuse light energy. The more foggy, cloudy the atmosphere is the more the laser experiences the bloom effect and loses it's energy, they have tried pulsing the air out of the way but this in turn causes other problems. They would also require huge energy sources which is why the YAL aircraft flown by Boeing in tests is jam packed mostly with machinery to supply the huge bulk of power needed. Another problem is that the enemy could simply coat their missile with reflective material therefore start limiting the power of the laser. The is also the rate of fire to consider, if the proverbial really hits the fan and some Iranains or DPRK people actually do build some real ICBMs and not some dinky scuds or IRBMs and launch a large scale attack on the United States there is no use in building some Star Wars stupidity that's going to run out of ammo in the first five mins - in other words you want something like that THAAD, missile interceptors etc can keep firing and won't run out of power, ammo etc

 

[Brent]

I want sharks with friggin nuclear powered lasers on their heads!

 

[Trekker4747]

I want sharks with friggin nuclear powered lasers on their heads!

We have Sea Bass.

Mutated Sea Bass.

 

[rType]

The ABL is designed to intercept missiles in their boost phase. The ground-based system you're proposing would be intercepting missiles during re-entry, post-MIRV (smaller targets and more of them) and travelling several times faster than during boost phase.

 

[Dayton3]

Modern lasers are no where nearly powerful enough to "destroy" incoming warheads.

At best, they burn through and cause damage. Which is difficult given that the warhead bus is designed to resist heat and stresses of the atmosphere

The Airborne Laser for example, is designed to burn into the missile carrying a warhead and cause missile failure during the boost phase.

 

[JustAFriend]

Yes, tell us about these large, nuclear-powered lasers.....

Perhaps the very fact that NONE EXIST explains a lot.

 

[Timo]

Not necessarily. For example, anything nuclear powered might be hated with enough passion that it would not come to be even if it were highly practical.

However, while lasers themselves are rather impractical weapons (and the atmospheric problems would probably get worse when beam power increased, as many actually emerge from the interaction of the beam with the air), the use of nuclear power for them sounds like a problem point as well.

Lasers require high power output in brief bursts. Nuclear power generated by fission reactors is incapable of that: it pumps out very steady thermal energy, which is then usually very steadily converted to electricity with the help of clumsy turbines and generators. And we all know that electricity is a really shitty way to store power, as must be done to create the required brief bursts.

It's not that we couldn't have the nuclear reactors and the lasers, technologically speaking. It's that we couldn't have the capacitors needed for storing and releasing the required power. There's a good reason why the ABL planes use chemical fuel for their lasers, even when this means running out of juice pretty quickly: energy generated or stored in other ways just wouldn't cut it.

If we invented a way to use electricity for superlasers, it would solve a lot of other problems as well. Electric cars might finally become superior to gasoline ones, for one. And nuclear power could replace coal and oil, whereas today it would be impossible to satisfy the power demands of a nation with nuclear power only because nuclear reactors cannot be ramped up or down according to demand.

Now, superlasers in space would be quite another matter. Nuclear power there would be quite practical, because one wouldn't need to use the stupid fission-thermal-electric chain for producing the power. One could simply explode fission bombs and tap the energy of the explosion for creating the lasing effect. Sure, such a system would always destroy the laser itself with the first shot, but that would be worth it. Building a hundred one-off fission bomb lasers would be more practical than building a single one capable of a hundred shots, not the least because the hundred one-offs could provide volley fire...

(Probably each fission bomb laser would be configured to fire multiple simultaneous beams, though, making best possible use of the explosion.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dayton3]

^I believe that was the "Bomb pumped X-Ray Laser proposal" for orbital laser platforms.

One of the better ideas for dealing with a lot of ICBMs in a massive attack.

Problems.

You're looking at several hundred laser platforms in orbit...all with a nuclear bomb as their power source.

Any of those platforms could be deorbited and used to dump their nuclear warhead power sources on a target on Earth.

Thus, you have an immensely threatening offensive nuclear system in orbit as well.

 

[farmkid]

^Not to mention the EMP that would be produced by detonating the bombs. Depending on the size of the bomb, at that altitude, the EMP from the bomb could do major damage to electrical systems over a large area.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Hey, I like this new laser bomb idea, they'd be great for orbiting the moon waiting incase of an alien invasion and we can deploy them to open fire on incoming alien craft.