
Fiber Lasers are set to make laser weapons practical - sohkamyung
https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/military/fiber-lasers-mean-ray-guns-are-coming
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gregpilling
I have a 4kw IPG laser. It cuts through 1/4 steel plate with ease, unless
there is a piece of tape or spray paint on the metal. It can't cut that! it
has to do with how the wavelength of the light couples with the material. (I
am not a laser engineer, I am the customer)

The 4kw power supply only is $128,000 if you want a cost reference,(just the
power supply - motion control, cutting head and chiller are extra). It is an 8
module unit of 500 watts each, that can be powered down to 50w each if wanted,
with full frequency and duty cycle control of the beam. It is about
48"x48"x18" and plugs into a 460v 30A 3Ph circuit. There is a chiller the size
of a refrigerator to keep it cool.

100kw like in the article would cost roughly $3.2M for the light source only.

There were 20 kw lasers mounted to 7 axis ABB robot arms when I visited the
IPG factory in November, being used for welding. The fiber optic cable was the
size of a garden hose and terminated at the end of the robot arm in a tool
changer mount. It could tool change from cutting laser head to welding head.

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tpurves
This reminds me of all I could think about watching the new star wars films.
Why don’t all the storm troopers get to have the shiny mirrored suits. Those
pesky rebels and their lasers blasters would just bounce off. check mate
empire.

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rasz
This bothered you? and not WWII style bombing run using inexplicably slow and
unmaneuverable crafts? or space ships slowing down after fuel runs out?!?!?!
:o how about small unmanned shuttle hitting lightspeed into the destroyer? too
obvious I guess.

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jliptzin
Star Wars is not sci fi. It’s set in space and in a different time period, but
has little to do with science, and much to do with fiction.

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gricardo99
>in the far future

Ehm...

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...."

Couldn’t resist ;)

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jliptzin
Ah you're right, updated. But whatever, point still stands, haha.

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chris_va
My read is that this will be great for commercial applications (e.g. welding,
lighting), but a weapon that doesn't work in a smokey/foggy environment is
going to be fairly easy to circumvent. Environments where something is being
hit with a high power laser tend to end up being smokey/foggy.

That won't make it useless, but it will definitely reduce utility and
adoption. 100kW really is not that much, unless you can focus it to a fairly
small diameter, which just is not possible at long distances.

My personal favorite for a "ray gun", and far more difficult to make work, is
the Laser-Induced Plasma Channel.

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cctt23
What we really need is an energetically advantageous way to produce high
energy neutral particle beams. That would start to look more like the ray guns
of science fiction than lasers ever will. It’s not just the weather either,
when you hit a target that has a bit of appropriate ablative armor, you’ll be
dealing with another source of bloom.

LIPC tech is good too, and might be closer than you’d think. You can exploit
the interaction of ultrashort laser pulses to create and modulate plasma, and
then do neat things like send a bunch of volts down the channel.

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gnode
Something like a Godiva device (pulsed nuclear reactor)?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godiva_device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godiva_device)

They have a risk of creating a small nuclear explosion though.

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Steel_Phoenix
I just spent two years experimenting with laser ablation of various metals
with a high powered fiber laser that can concentrate its output into
picosecond pulses (MOPA). I do think that something like silver plating would
make a target vastly harder to destroy. That said, it's one more thing that
needs to be added to a weapon that likely also needs to be hard to lock onto
with conventional countermeasures, survive high speeds in atmosphere, handle
high heat of engines and launch systems, etc. Rain might largely dissipate the
laser over any distance. The wavelength of these lasers tends to be in the
infrared. Having a second laser of a different wavelength would drastically
reduce the number of materials that could be used to reflect it. Use of some
kind of flak to dirty up the target could help a lot. I've found that
something as simple as some pen marks on mirrored silver can make it easy to
ablate. The real advantage of this tech is that it's light speed and very
accurate. It could slice up a swarm of drones in a moment, or be aimed into a
jet engine to avoid reflective coatings.

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pasbesoin
On the power end, some years ago I noticed that every time there was an
announcement on supposedly significant progress in ultra-capacitors, said line
of inquiry seemed to "disappear".

Probably not, but I started to wonder whether military/security agencies were
moving in and sitting on these developments, in lieu of having an effective
defense against weapons powered by them. Not just large-scale weapons, but
anti-personnel weapons.

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api
Are they small enough to mount on sharks?

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pbhjpbhj
You just need to breed bigger sharks.

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fludlight
I recall reading a thread here or on reddit about a prosumer laser pointer
(the kind that people misuse against airplanes) being shined at a glass table
and the reflections temporarily blinding everyone in the room. This seems like
an military application worth exploring.

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Tossrock
Blinding laser weapons are banned from use by most UN members due to the 1995
Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons. Although I guess it's only for
"permanently" blinding weapons, so temporary blinding (ala a flashbang) might
be permissible?

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cm2187
I think the Skripal assassination attempt in London proves that it's not
because biological weapons are banned that they aren't developed. And if
Russia does it, I doubt the US is sitting idle.

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truculation
_> By comparison, a laser shot from a fiber-laser weapon would cost only $1 in
diesel fuel_

Ugh, what a dirty power source for a shiny ray gun! I hope diesel will be
phased out soon.

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bhhaskin
It's not going away anytime soon. Especially since jet fuel is pretty much
just another form of diesel.

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truculation
Sigh. I want every large marine vessel to have one of these installed:

[https://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-
fusion.ht...](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html)

Well, OK, not precisely one of these because it doesn't work yet. But
something similar.

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bhhaskin
It would be fantastic if we had a reliable viable way to convert large marine
vessels to clean electric, but there also a ton of other applications for
diesel such as portable generators, stoves, lamps, heaters that would be hard
press to switch to electric.

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sexy_seedbox
Coming Soon: DJI will be mounting these on their drones.

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ExcelSaga
Fiber lasers are part of the solution, but blooming in air, and from target
ablation is still a problem. What we really need for “ray guns” are phased
array lasers and/or FEL’s. Just pumping more energy through conventional
optics will make the problems I mentioned worse, not better.

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jessaustin
ISTM "target ablation" might be the purpose of a ray gun? It sounds painful,
anyway.

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matte_black
I’m having a hard time imagining what this kind of damage would be like. What
would happen for instance if it were fired at a person’s head?

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cctt23
Blindness, 2nd and then 3rd degree burns. Think of it more like a heat ray,
and you get the idea. Human heads don’t have the option of countermeasures
though, such as ablative costing which dramatically increase blooming, while
insulating the target. You need more than 100kw to either punch through that,
or take advantage of non-linear effects.

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pvaldes
80's tecno-fashion and glitterball stuff, here we go again!. Weeee!!

Honest question. Would a jacket with embedded small mirrors make our children
invisible to police helicopter scanners and safe against ray guns?

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John_KZ
>A clever configuration of industrial lasers is set to finally make laser
weapons practical

Finally? Really? Why is this a good thing? Because star wars manchildren want
to roleplay? We're looking at terrible burns and very high chances of being
blinded. These weapons should be banned from use on humans.

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fiblye
The first use that came to mind for me was easily deployed and reusable
missile defense systems. Not every country can spend billions on disposable
anti-ballistic missiles, but lasers could eventually become affordable for
most countries.

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John_KZ
Lasers can never replace anti-missile systems completely, simply because fog
or rain will stop them. Also they're completely incapable of taking on reentry
vehicles. Other energy weapons might do the trick, but they're not even in
protytpe phase yet (as far as we know).

The only thing lasers can do is provide low cost per shot for assymetrical
warfare defence/offence. They also have other niche applications (ie sensor
blinding/soft kill defense) and of course they can easily make warfare an even
worse hell, with the next semi-symmetrical war leaving millions blind and
hundreds of thousands rotting away from skin infections.

