NAVY PLANS DISPOSABLE RAY GUNS

American war­ships could be armed with dis­pos­able laser weapons within five years, if a plan by U.S. Navy sci­en­tists works as promised.
Michael Wardlaw, with the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division, has pro­posed that the Navy use a bat­tery of solid-​​state, one-​​shot-​​only lasers to zap enemy boats and defend against mis­sile attacks. This Expendable Modular High Energy Laser (EMHEL), Jane’s Defence Weekly reports, would use a brick of 120, meter-​​long laser mod­ules that could fire indi­vid­u­ally or in one giant pulse.
“Each indi­vid­ual mod­ule would con­tain a single-​​shot laser capa­ble of fir­ing 10 kilo­joules of energy at peak power in a sin­gle burst,” Jane’s notes. “With such a sys­tem, Wardlaw said, ‘you can drill through 6in [15cm] of steel in under a sec­ond.’” (empha­sis mine)

Wardlaw noted that, given proper fund­ing, he “could envi­sion hav­ing mod­ules avail­able within a year and sys­tems avail­able in prob­a­bly five” years. The EMHEL could be ready so soon, he explained, because work on the con­cept has already been con­ducted and because “it’s more a new way of think­ing about the prob­lem than it is a tech­no­log­i­cal chal­lenge.“
By drop­ping the require­ment for the laser to have to sur­vive for mul­ti­ple shots and instead being expend­able, Wardlaw said, the cost of each can be reduced dra­mat­i­cally. And by hav­ing small mod­ules that can be mass-​​produced, economies of scale can be achieved dur­ing pro­duc­tion, reduc­ing costs still further. 

July 7th, 2003 | Lasers and Ray Guns | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.