ARMY FOCUSING ON “EASY” LASER WEAPONS

In the world of laser guns and death rays, there’s hard to pull off. And then’s really, really hard to do.
The Army has decided to con­cen­trate on devel­op­ing some of the eas­ier “directed energy” weapons. The idea is to prove to a skep­ti­cal mil­i­tary com­mu­nity that lasers can, in fact, be used to blow stuff up — and not just on Babylon 5.
“Several sig­nif­i­cant DE sys­tems already are vying for Army atten­tion and fund­ing,” Aerospace Daily reports, “but each faces tech­no­log­i­cal hur­dles.“
While Sparta Inc.‘s Zeus, a Humvee-​​mounted laser sys­tem, has destroyed unex­ploded ord­nance in Afghanistan, it still has sig­nif­i­cant lim­i­ta­tions, includ­ing its reliance on other forces to detect ord­nance…
The Army is expected later this year to award a con­tract to Northrop Grumman Corp. to build a pro­to­type of the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser. But while a fixed-​​site demon­stra­tor has suc­cess­fully shot down artillery shells and Katyusha rock­ets, the size of the chem­i­cal laser has to be reduced sig­nif­i­cantly to make it mobile, which is con­sid­ered a key require­ment for bat­tle­field use.
The Army has expressed inter­est in the Solid State Heat Capacity Laser as a poten­tial weapon on ground vehi­cles, believ­ing it ulti­mately would have advan­tages over chem­i­cal lasers, includ­ing requir­ing a smaller logis­tics bur­den. However, the tech­nol­ogy for elec­tri­cally dri­ven, solid-​​state lasers is con­sid­ered even less mature than that of chem­i­cal lasers. 

April 21st, 2004 | Lasers and Ray Guns | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.