On Friday, September 25, 2015 at 11:00:37 AM UTC-4, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Fri, 25 Sep 2015 07:49:05 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Wednesday, September 23, 2015 at 6:31:56 PM UTC-4, jonathan wrote:
On 9/23/2015 5:41 PM, wrote:
College kids are constantly pushing the military to modernize itself with respect to technology, engineering and science. Having decades old habits and traditions don't always do it. Its always been like that. There's no such thing as "oldie, but goodie".

On Tuesday, September 22, 2015 at 10:26:17 PM UTC-4, Martin Eastburn wrote:
The cannon as I recall was intended for ICBM intercept. MIRV bodies...
The cannon is likely very close to the one I consulted about with
the R&D/E company as they needed a fanout buffer and we had a good one.
I developed a level shifter to get to the logic (non-standard) levels
of the barrels in the R&D gun.

Martin

On 9/22/2015 6:54 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
This is an interesting article that may explain why the Air Force
decided to drop the A-10 Warthog:

http://arstechnica.com/information-t...apons-by-2020/






And lasers will be finding their way to warships
before long also, especially for ship defense.

The long sought bottomless magazine. And costing
less than a dollar per shot according to the
article.




Navy Considers Laser Weapons for Carriers


Military.com
Jun 16, 2015 | by Kris Osborn

The Navy may outfit it's new Ford-class aircraft carriers with a wide
range of laser weapons to shoot down incoming missiles and eventually
provide offensive fire power, senior service official said.

With this future in mind, the Ford-class carriers are built with three
times the electrical power generating capacity compared to Nimitz-class
carriers, Moore said.

The USS Ford is able to generate 13,800 volts of electrical power, more
than three times the 4,160 volts that a Nimitz-class carrier generates,
said Rear Adm. Thomas Moore, Program Executive Officer, Carriers.
As the technology matures, Navy leaders anticipate using a number of
lasers to assist existing missiles designed for carrier defense.

"The current technology in directed energy, with the power and cooling
required, means that the installations are big and they are heavy - but
the technology is rapidly advancing. I've seen some concepts that start
to get the sizes down," said Rear Adm. Michael Manazir, Director of Air
Warfare.

While much less expensive than defensive missiles engineered aboard the
Ford-class carriers such as the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile and the
Rolling Airframe Missile, laser technology requires a large amount of
on-board, transportable electrical power.

"There are finite numbers of missiles and finite installations on the
carrier. If you can put a directed energy piece on there with its lower
cost per round, you can see where you can start to reduce the cost
overall and measurably increase the protection of the ship," Manazir
said. "The aircraft carrier is a wonderful platform for the installation
of directed energy -- currently for defensive use and, as technology
gets more advanced, you can look at offensive laser technology."
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The USS Ford is built with four 26-megawatt generators, bringing a total
of 104 megawatts to the ship. This helps support the ship's developing
systems such as its Electro-Magnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS,
and provides power for future systems such as lasers and rail-guns,
Moore added.

The USS Ford also needs sufficient electrical power to support its new
electro-magnetic catapult, dual-band radar and Advanced Arresting Gear,
among other electrical systems.

"Ford is designed with significant electrical margin for the future
because we see more and more electrical systems coming on," Manazir
said. "It is also designed with energy storage capability which takes
the power out of the reactor and stores it at a certain level. Then you
can take from that storage capacity to operate individual systems."
As technology evolves, laser weapons may eventually replace some of the
missile systems on board aircraft carriers.

"Lasers need to get up to about 300 kilowatts to start making them
effective. The higher the power you get the more you can accomplish. I
think there will be a combination of lasers and rail guns in the future.
I do think at some point, lasers could replace some existing missile
systems. Lasers will provide an overall higher rate of annihilation,"
Moore said.

The Ford-class ships are engineered with a redesigned island, slightly
larger deck space and new weapons elevators in order to achieve a
33-percent increase in sortie-generation rate. The new platforms are
built to launch more aircraft and more seamlessly support a high-op tempo.

The new weapons elevators allow for a much more efficient path to move
and re-arm weapons systems for aircraft. The elevators can take weapons
directly from their magazines to just below the flight deck, therefore
greatly improving the sortie-generation rate by making it easier and
faster to re-arm planes, Moore said

The Navy has already deployed one laser system, called the Laser Weapons
System, or LaWS, which has been operational for months.
LaWS uses heat energy from lasers to disable or destroy targets fast,
slow, stationary and moving targets. The system has successfully
incinerated UAVs and other targets in tests shots, and has been
operational aboard an amphibious transport dock in the Persian Gulf, the
USS Ponce.

The scalable weapon is designed to destroy threats for about $59-cents
per shot, an amount that is exponentially lower than the hundreds of
thousands or millions needed to fire an interceptor missile such as the
Standard Missile-2, Navy officials explained.

While at sea, sailors have been using the LaWS for targeting and
training exercises every day and the weapon has even been used to
disable and destroy some targets, service officials said.
Navy sailors and engineers have discovered some unanticipated
intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance value from the laser
weapons system by using its long-range telescope to scan for targets,
Navy officials said.

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2...-carriers.html

Its about time. The technology has been around for years and years

No, it hasn't.

Yes it has. "The first laser was built in 1960 by Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Laboratories" (wikipedia), this makes the technology at least that old..

If the military had placed the majority of its funding into that program versus others, then the technology would be far more advanced by today.