Laser weapons have a serious shortcoming, in the minds of some Pentagon thinkers. No, it’s not the fact that it takes giant vats of chemicals or a gazillion watts of power to get the beam machines to work. Or that a fair-sized rainstorm pretty much renders them useless. It’s that lasers can only zap as far as the eye can see. The beams don’t curve, so ray guns can’t reach over the horizon.
The Defense Department’s Office of Force Transformation wants to change that, however, with a world-wide ring of giant mirrors, that would bounce laser light to wherever the Pentagon saw fit.
The transformation shop has been talking about this Tactical Relay Mirror System, or TRMS, for several years. Now, they may be ready to start some early-stage testing, Inside Defense reports.
Some of the work that were doing on this is very advanced, and [has] come along very well, Col. Craig Hughes said. And certainly the test of the laboratory-sized aerospace relay mirror come this spring will be a significant development for us.
Maybe the mirrors would be connected to a set of giant blimps, some have suggested. Maybe they’d be strapped onto robotic planes. But, strangely, Inside Defense notes, Hughes and his fellow mirror men seem to be tying their program to the star-crossed Airborne Laser, or ABL. That’s the 747, modified for ray gunning, that’s been sinking rather rapidly in the military’s estimation. Flight tests for the thing are now six years behind schedule, and the project was recently demoted down to a technology demonstrator,
If you put [a mirror] on an airship right above ABL, you instantly double the range of ABL and eventually maybe these things can go into space.
Considering that the ABL is the only part of this little scenario that’s anything more than a PowerPoint slide, however, I guess Hughes and Co. don’t really have a choice. Keep on blasting, boys.
This should have been part of the black project that will never reach public eyes.
Best part? Where Hughes says, “Our key of course is managing expectations, we certainly don’t want to get to the point where we’re promising more than we can deliver.” That would be a nice change of pace from the way missile defense has been handled to date.
Hey cool! Just like in C&C Generals! Particle beam for the win. :/
A global eavesdropping system? Windows reflect lasers and act as ear drums, but the angle would be wrong from space. Maybe you could overcome that by spending a gazillion dollars? I have no idea.
if we can see this whats hush hush?!
This has got to be the dumbest article and weapon system in existence.
So…if you can bounce a laser off of a mirror, what’s to prevent the missile from being coated with a mirror surface? $50 of silver coating to defeat this pork barrel monstrosity.
Damn people are stupid.
Seriously, we have spent how many billions of dollars on a weapon that can be stopped by a simple mirror? And of course those billions went to creating the super laser defense industry. Good luck getting these a-holes to stop bothering with a useless weapon, that would mean the guys making money off of its construction wouldn’t be making that money. Do you think they’ll contact their favorite lobbyist on K-Street, who will craft a neat-o PR campaign to justify throwing more money at them? Gotta love the United States of Military Industrialism.