navy laser weapon system

[dragon]

After successful testing last year, the Navy is preparing to deploy its first directed energy weapon to the fleet. When it puts to sea this summer, the afloat forward staging base ship USS Ponce will be equipped with the Navy’s Laser Weapon System (LaWS).

LaWS is a system based on a design developed by the Navy Research Lab and engineers at the Naval Sea Systems Command and Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren. Its purpose is not to vaporize enemy ships but to provide a low-cost way for the Navy to defend against drones, small boats, light aircraft, and missiles at ranges of about a mile.

While the Navy will still depend on missiles and guns to defend against bigger targets, the LaWS system is designed to cost about a dollar a shot without the fuss and muss of the depleted uranium bullets spewed by the Navy’s Phalanx Close-In Weapons System (CIWS). It can be used for a “hard” kill on smaller targets (directing enough energy at the target to set it on fire or explode fuel aboard it) or for a “soft” kill by blinding a drone or missile’s imaging sensors.

“The effects are scalable,” Navy Captain Mike Ziv, the Naval Sea Systems Command’s program manager for directed energy and electric weapons, told the Department of Defense’s Armed With Science blog. “In some cases [the effects are] reversible, and in some cases it can be used for destruction.”

In a test last May, an initial prototype of the system used the CIWS’ radar system to target, blind, and then destroy a drone in flight from the deck of a ship. The video below is a bit misleading—it didn't shoot down one of the multi-million dollar carrier-based drones the Navy is testing.

One of the advantages of the laser system we’re using,” Ziv told Armed with Science, “is that it’s based on commercial technologies. It’s fairly efficient compared to other lasers, and because of that, it can be powered on a lot of different platforms, using existing power sources.”

The deployment of LaWS aboard the Ponce is the final step before it moves from prototype to an actual “program of record” weapon system. ‘What we really want to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Ziv said, “is that this system is ready to be operated in theater… by our sailors and is ready to transition to be in broader use throughout the fleets. And I think we’re on track to get that done.”

The LaWS is just the first step down the high-energy weapon path for the Navy. Higher-powered directed weapons systems and rail guns are both under development, and the new Zumwalt-class destroyers being built by the Navy have more than sufficient electrical generation capacity to power much larger directed energy weapons than the LaWS.

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[Themightytom]

[Tribble]

"That's all well and good, but where are the freakin' sharks with freakin' laser beams attached to their freakin' heads?!"

[Guardsman Bass]

Good news, although what I'm ultimately hoping for is a smaller, more compact version that you could mount on vehicles to shoot down in-coming shells and bullets.

[Simon_Jester]

Blackpowder artillery used to be too big and bulky to mount on anything but a ship too; these things take time.

[dragon]

Blackpowder artillery used to be too big and bulky to mount on anything but a ship too; these things take time.

Hell look at the early laser systems such as the Thel and how big it was compared to the one one board the Navy.

But then compared to the Advanced Tactical Laser a 100kilowatt laser with a 20km tactical range. So there's a wide variety of lasers that have a great difference in ranges. However saying 100 kilowatt doesn't really mean much as it's time based as well as energy.

The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) program is a US military program to mount a high energy laser weapon on an aircraft, initially the AC-130 gunship, for use against ground targets in urban or other areas where minimizing collateral damage is important. The laser will be a 100 kilowatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL). It is expected to have a tactical range of approximately twenty kilometers and weigh about 5,000–7,000 kg. This program is distinct from the Airborne Laser, which is a much larger system designed to destroy enemy missiles in the boost phase.
snip
On June 18, 2009 it was announced that the ATL was successfully fired in flight for the first time. The system was fired from a 46th Test Wing NC-130H aircraft while flying over White Sands Missile Range, successfully hitting a target board on the ground.[8]

Aug. 30, 2009 Boeing and the U.S. Air Force "defeated" a ground target from the air with the Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) aircraft.[9]

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[Simon_Jester]

Blackpowder artillery used to be too big and bulky to mount on anything but a ship too; these things take time.

Hell look at the early laser systems such as the Thel and how big it was compared to the one one board the Navy.

But then compared to the Advanced Tactical Laser a 100kilowatt laser with a 20km tactical range. So there's a wide variety of lasers that have a great difference in ranges. However saying 100 kilowatt doesn't really mean much as it's time based as well as energy.

Lasers for airborne use are very different from lasers to be fired from warships. Typically an aircraft's tactical laser travels through thinner air for most of its flight time. At sea level, many laser frequencies are absorbed by haze and spray in the sea air, so ships need different kinds of lasers.

[Sea Skimmer]

Hell look at the early laser systems such as the Thel and how big it was compared to the one one board the Navy.

THEL was also about a megawatt class weapon, LaWS is under a twentieth as powerful using solid state technology. Its rather pointless to compare large chemical lasers that exhaust poison gas like THEL to current work on electrically powered designs anyway. THEL was a technological dead end, usable but not worth the price. The only place chemical lasers made any real sense was ABL, a three megawatt device, because nothing else could possibly do the boost phase intercept role in a satisfactory manner. Then Obama killed it alongside KEI because Russia was so totally our friend.

But then compared to the Advanced Tactical Laser a 100kilowatt laser with a 20km tactical range. So there's a wide variety of lasers that have a great difference in ranges. However saying 100 kilowatt doesn't really mean much as it's time based as well as energy.

Range depends on atmospheric conditions far more then beam power. More beam power really does not equal more range, in fact it can mean dramatically LESS energy on target thanks to thermal blooming. Its going to be very hard to make any laser work destructively at ranges greater then 20-40km at sea level.

Also ATL was cancelled, because filling an entire C-130 with a giant chemical laser was not really appealing for anything, and the use of chemical energy put a very low limit on how long it could fire. They demonstrated it worked, and then shelved it. That's why you aren't going to see anything on it past 2009. Solid state lasers, fiber laser, liquid lasers and several other technologies based on electrical power all came roaring up behind it, and are all going ahead rapidly. Free Electron Lasers remain the holy grail, if also very far away, because they alone among lasers could actually tune the beam frequency in combat. They also require putting a thirty or forty foot particle accelerator onto a mobile platform.

A big reason why the navy is sending this prototype laser to the gulf meanwhile is so it can be tested in the rather extreme dust conditions that regularly occur over the Persian Gulf, something we simply don't get anywhere along the American coastline.