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On Monday, September 28, 2015 at 6:38:53 PM UTC-4, Jim Wilkins wrote:
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On Sunday, September 27, 2015 at 3:37:38 PM UTC-4, Ed Huntress
wrote:
On Sun, 27 Sep 2015 15:15:06 -0400, Joe Gwinn

wrote:

In article , Ed
Huntress
wrote:

On Sun, 27 Sep 2015 11:06:54 -0400, Joe Gwinn

wrote:

In article , Martin Eastburn
wrote:

Well you are looking at baby lasers.

In the 70's - late - I saw a 8 'barrel' cut 1/2" steel plate
like butter.

Lasers are for Engineering and Research are different than
the
table top lasers used to study lenses.

All it has to do on an ICBM or MIRV is to create a bump or
snag.
A high energy pulsed machine gun type would cause massive
friction
burns that melt down by friction any ICBM or MRV.

This isn't new technology. The magic in this stuff is shoot
an ICBM with a shotgun and it kills itself.

Unless one is well-placed over enemy territory, the launch
rocket is
out of reach. At the target end, it's raining reentry
vehicles,
each
of which is equipped with a very good ablation shield to
survive
reentry. It takes a very large laser to drill that shield.

Joe Gwinn

The lasers Martin is talking about were the chemical lasers
that
were
pumped with a chemical reaction, and that could put out a
continuous 1
MW beam. They've been abandoned as weapons for several reasons.
They
just aren't practical.

The laser types being developed now are solid-state, mostly
diode-pumped fiber lasers developed from industrial cutting and
welding lasers.

There are other types of lasers under development that hold
promise
for weapons. Right now, in industry, we're all waiting for
high-power
direct-diode lasers. There are some prototypes working now.
They
could
make extremely compact weapons.

Yes, but megawatts are really not enough - everything is too
critical
to carry off under battlefield conditions. Needs to be tens of
megawatts, and a hundred would make this a duck shoot against all
but
reentry vehicles (which will spin and have mirror finishes by
then).

These issues and stories come up in Aviation Week from time to
time.

Joe Gwinn

Well, how much you need is a matter of what you're trying to do.
Right
now, fiber laser bundles putting out on the order of 30 kW are
able
to
shoot down drones and disable speedboats. They apparently can
shoot
down small rockets, like the ones Hamas and Hezbollah shoot at
Israel.
The Israelis want a bunch of them, fast.

At 100 kW, you have a pretty useful battlefield weapon. They'll
have
that soon. At 1 MW, you're able to burn through some armor.

For the shorter ranges they're working with now, it's more a
matter
of
focus (BPP, if you're into lasers) and tracking. The beam(s) is
focused with lenses; it doesn't depend on the parallel beams
themselves. The tracking must be absolutely amazing to place a
steady
laser spot on a flying drone for a few seconds and shoot it down,
but
that's what the shipboard systems can already do.

Star Wars is still a ways off.

Again, that's because since the Spanish American war and the time of
Nicola Tesla the US military has financially focused in on metal and
chemical fashioning side of the military (that benefitted fossil
fuel
concerns) and relatively nothing went toward military electrophysics
or electromagnetic research and production.

============

How can you use a computer yet be so ignorant? Have you heard of
Radar, a highly theory-dependent military invention of the mid 30's?
We ...

We? Who the hell are you talking about "we". Radar was invented by a
Scot (Robert Alexander Watson-Watt). Honestly, I don't even know if
he ever even visited the United States. Radar like research was going
on in several countries. The US was not a pioneer in this area.

tested torpedos that sensed the target ship's magnetic field in
1928.

The budget devoted toward this field was still practically nothing
relatively speaking.

The Navy developed the electromechanical drive used in modern hybrid
cars a century ago for battleships and submarines.
http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-038.htm

Cell phone technology arose from military research during WW2, as
did
computers themselves.

Cell phones and cars were practically nothing budgetary-wise. And
weaponized versions of this stuff? Practically nothing.

I used and maintained an Army-Air Force ancestor of the Internet in
the early 70's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Digital_Network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automa...ations_Network

Can you understand this description of WW2 tech?

A lot of it wasn't even pioneered in the USA. So maybe militaries of
other nations had higher budgetary devotion, but certainly not here in
the United States.

=============

The Great War had ended all major wars, remember? We wouldn't be
needing a military for more than minor police actions. Pacifists
controlled Depression spending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radar
Actually it was Watson Watt's assistant Arnold Wilkins who invented,
built and demonstrated the first British radar in February of 1935.

The US Navy beat them, although since radar was kept top secret by all
of its nearly simultaneous inventors it wasn't known to be a race.

"In December 1934, the apparatus was used to detect a plane at a
distance of one mile (1.6 km) flying up and down the Potomac. Although
the detection range was small and the indications on the oscilloscope
monitor were almost indistinct, it demonstrated the basic concept of a
pulsed radar system. Based on this, Page, Taylor, and Young are
usually credited with building and demonstrating the world's first
true radar."

The British system transmitted a continuous wave and inferred
direction to the target by measuring the return's phase difference at
two antennas, the same way our ears tell the direction but not
distance of a sound source. A second receiver and antenna pair
elsewhere gave an intersecting vector and crude estimate of range. The
Germans investigated it and concluded it was something other than a
radar, since it didn't work like theirs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission
"...the British disclosed the technical details of the Chain Home
early warning radar stations. The British thought the Americans did
not have anything like this, but found it was virtually identical to
the US Navy's longwave CXAM radar."

The British didn't invent computers all by themselves either.

At Mitre I had a working replica of a ~1932 German microwave aircraft
detection radar on my desk. I haven't found any mention of it online.

US jet engine development began earlier than is generally known, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_J37
"Price started work on his own turbojet design in 1938,..."

-jsw