Zionist Entity Tactical Laser Fizzles

[Steve Schear]

At 03:34 PM 12/7/00 -0800, Eric Cordian wrote:
>It appears that the tactical chemical laser the US has been hoping to
>deploy to protect the Zionist Entity from rockets launched by Hezbollah
>guerrillas in southern Lebanon is, in the words of its developers, "not
>ready for action."
>
>http://www.newsday.com/ap/text/international/ap796.htm
>
>According to the defense department blurb on the system, called THEL
>(http://www.smdc.army.mil/FactSheets/THEL.html), the system employs
>deuterium fluoride as the lasing medium.
>
>Since deuterium is somewhat more expensive to produce than ordinary
>hydrogen, one wonders why the system has been designed to work with
>deuterium.  Is it because the government does not want fuel for it to be
>easily produced, should the design fall into enemy hands.
>
>Or is there some engineering advantage to using deuterium?  Does excited
>deuterium fluoride have some wonderful spectral line in exactly the right
>place, that pedestrian hydrogen fluoride does not?
>
>Any chemical or nuclear engineers here who could answer the question
>of why deuterium is more desirable?

That's exactly it. Deuterium-Flourine (and I think Deuterium-Iodine) have a 
prominent emission line which matches up nicely with CO2.  In practice, the 
DeF/DeI are hypergolically combined in the combustion chamber (that is they 
combust immediately upon contact) producing an impressive power 
output.  Somewhere inside or just outside the nozzle CO2 is injected and 
turbulently mixed.  Two parallel mirrors perpendicular to the exhaust lase 
the pumped up C02 and other (tracking) mirrors direct it to the 
target.  Unlike most other high power lasers these babies are CW, not 
pulsed, and capable of generating multi-megawatt beams. (They work 
exceptionally well in space if you can keep the fuel/oxidizer from leaking 
and make sure the exhaust doesn't dissolve the weapon)

This was a major Naval project when I worked at TRW in the 80s called 
Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL)


See http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/launches/laser_shootdown_000926.html

or search under "TRW chemical laser"

steve
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