AircraftNews.Com

Buck Rogers is not here yet but a number of significant milestones have been passed in recent months and it seems as if we are moving steadily to the point where robots will fight robots with wonder weapons and humans will watch. Presumably at some stage it will be necessary for the victors to incinerate or otherwise painfully excoriate some of the enemy in order to make the point but it will become progressively easier for risk averse nations, with populations that dislike being sent in to battle to be killed, to assert themselves over less well endowed competitors. The weapons race looks set to recapitulate the evolution of the Combat fighter jet which has now become so expensive even the richest of nations can only afford a small number. War will become more and more expensive so that less and less money is available for taking care of humanity. That figures if you look at recent global behavior.
The most recent example of the advances referred to here is the successful shooting down of 5 UAVs by ground based laser weapons (must have a spiffy euphemism or technical term: these are directed energy weapons) and other workers claim to have passed the so called critical 100 KWatt boundary with conventionally pumped solid state Lasers rather than the more toxic and difficult chemical lasers. Hang on for the ride.
A laser system built for the Air Force shot down five unmanned aircraft during a test in May at the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, Calif.

The Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments — or MATRIX — fired a 2½ kilowatt-class high energy laser that knocked down the aircraft, according to an Air Force Research Laboratory statement.

MATRIX “acquired, tracked” and destroyed the targets at “significant ranges,” the statement said. Scientists and engineers will design the laser system to protect the U.S. from enemy unmanned aircraft.

It was unclear how the laser brought down the aircraft or how big they were.

Boeing Directed Energy Systems built the MATRIX. The defense contractor has also developed the Airborne Laser — a Boeing 747 with a laser mounted on the nose designed to shoot down ballistic missiles.

Boeing also tested its Laser Avenger system at China Lake. The Humvee-mounted directed energy air defense system shot down another unmanned aircraft.

The Air Force Research Lab sponsored the test, which also was attended by Army and Navy officials.

“These tests validate the use of directed energy to negate potential hostile threats against the homeland,” Bill Baker, chief scientist of the Lab’s Directed Energy Directorate,

The 100-kilowatt target

Defense contractor Northrop Grumman has reported that it has fired a solid-state laser beam with a potency of 105.5 kilowatts.

For the ray-gun wing of the military-industrial complex, the 100-kilowatt threshold is a major milestone, marking the entry point to weapons-grade laser weapons. Adding to the appeal is that solid-state lasers are much more compact, and less noxious, than chemical laser systems such as the one in the works for the 747-centric Airborne Laser.

The technical details of Northrop’s achievement break down this way, starting with a modular, “building block” approach that bodes well for scalable systems, the company said:
For building blocks, the company utilizes “laser amplifier chains,” each producing approximately 15kW of power in a high-quality beam. Seven laser chains were combined to produce a single beam of 105.5 kW. The seven-chain JHPSSL laser demonstrator ran for more than five minutes, achieved electro-optical efficiency of 19.3 percent, reaching full power in less than 0.6 seconds, all with beam quality of better than 3.0.

Adding an eighth chain that the system was designed for would increase laser power to 120 kilowatts, Northrop says.

Where this test saw five minutes of continuous operation for the laser, altogether the system has been operated at above 100 kilowatts for a total duration of more than 85 minutes.

The efforts are part of the Pentagon’s Joint High Power Solid State Laser (JHPSSL) program.

Even though 100 kilowatts has long been the “proof of principle” sought for weapons systems, Northrop says that “in fact, many militarily useful effects can be achieved by laser weapons of 25 kW or 50 kW, provided this energy is transmitted with good beam quality, as our system does.”

Of course, this is still a laboratory laser system and not a field-tested, ruggedized product. “It is still a little heavy and a little big,” Dan Wildt, vice president of Northrop’s directed energy systems program, told the LA Times.

That’s probably a significant understatement. Says Noah Shachtman at Wired’s Danger Room blog of the news from Northrop:

Does that mean energy weapons are a done deal? Hardly. There are still all sorts of technical issues–thermal management and miniaturization, to name two–that have to be handled first. Then, the ray gunners have to find the money. The National Academies figure it’ll take another $100 million to get battlefield lasers right.

In a separate post, Shachtman reports on what’s involved in getting specific laser systems ready to go over the next several years.

Earlier this year, Boeing said that it had used a “kilowatt-class” solid-state laser to shoot down a UAV from a ground-based system. The company hopes that the Airborne Laser, meanwhile, will do its first-ever aerial target shoot sometime in 2009.

From http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2009/11/airforce_laser_112109w/