Radar hardware of one design and a good one was developed in the UK.
Western Electric was assigned to take it and make Ship radar and then
Air radar. The design team was in Bell Labs, my dad was on that team.
He later went to Carolina to put it into production. He retired as a
director of R&D in Field Engineering and had a heavy dotted line back
to Bell Labs. He spent his last 6 months in the Labs completing his
design documentation on his last monster Radar.

The US worked on radar at the same time, but didn't have a working model
as clean as the UK. The UK design went to both Naval bodies of the UK
and USA. It was critical for the shipping between the US and the UK.
Later it was shown to be instrumental in many a battle in the Pacific.

The Magnetron tube that was provided was an R&D design by the UK. It put
both of us ahead in shipboard radar to fight planes and subs.

Martin

On 9/30/2015 4:46 PM, wrote:
On Monday, September 28, 2015 at 6:38:53 PM UTC-4, Jim Wilkins wrote:
wrote in message
...
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.