Royal Navy aims to put laser 'death ray' on ships by 2020 | UK news | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015 ... ships-2020

How much do you wanna bet that it'll be years late, cost hundreds of millions more, require extensive ship re-modelling, and only work on a Tuesday?



Considering the size of our country that should be ridiculous. But then a lot of countries don't send their Prime Minister on arms-selling trips.

Frickin' laser beams.

Mark

The USA and Israel have been testing this sort of thing for years. It has a lot of potential as a point defence weapon against incoming missiles, but needs a shed load of power to work. Recent anti-ship missiles swerve before impact to throw off radar targeted machine guns (due to the time delay between firing and the bullets reaching the missile). The Americans can't put them on their current carriers as they don't have enough spare power to run them. Their next generation carrier has been designed with much more electrical capacity to allow for this sort of thing.

I suspect we can't put them on our carriers - you know, the ones with no planes - but the yanks definitely could put a point defense laser system on their big ones, they've got serious nuclear power plants in them. The current carriers at sea have 50MW powerplants and the systems they're testing are in the 100KW range. if your tracking system is good you need a lower power laser, it's really all just about the total amount of energy you can dump into the target.

Jon

The current Nimitz class don't have the spare capacity at only 100MW. The new Ford Class have 300MW.

In that case it can only because they've somehow allocated every ounce of power the reactor makes to an essential system already, which is kind of bad idea in the first place but anyway. According to one source on research prototypes



According to reports I've read, a 100KW free electron laser could cut a hole in a 2 foot thick piece of steel plate in roughly a second. Say the 'time on target' of a PDW laser is a tenth that.. who's making missiles out of 3 inch steel? A 1MW laser is arguably a weapon for engaging other ships, not for knocking out incoming munitions. If they've got say 50MW to play with and a lasing system that can dump that, they could cut a big hole in pretty much anything between the carrier and the horizon, no trouble.

You forget how old the Nimitz class is. Back in the day the radar systems were lower powered, there were no computer networks and linked tactical systems etc.
It's no surprise they don't have the spare power for modern systems. They were designed for the world that existed back then.

Slowly, we are getting ready for the conquest of space.

I imagine you could actually get away with a lower powered laser in space than you need dirt side for the same destructive effect - no pesky atmosphere scattering the beam for a start.

True but I suspect your engagement distance will likely be longer and even 'the vacuum of space' isn't actually empty. Plus of course you've got to get the laser up there. The FELs they're talking about weigh 'many tons' if you include whatever power supply you'd need.


I was more forgetting than on the Nimitz class the reactors also drive the propellers - you need a lot of grunt to shift a ship that big and in combat you don't want to be dawdling. If the Ford class can do it, they're not going to refit the old ones with new reactors so yeah, probably not.